How to talk about the war on Ukraine and other horrible things with sensitivity – The Boston Globe

So lets talk. About talking about it.

Ive written before about Susan Silk and Barry Goldens Comfort In/Dump Out Ring Theory. Imagine a series of concentric circles, and in the bulls-eye is Person X, the person to whom the Bad Thing is happening. The handful of people closest to X are the next ring, then Xs slightly larger circle of friends and colleagues, more peripheral folk, and so on. One cancer patient in the bulls-eye might have half a dozen rings of suffering around them. A bulls-eye like the Russian invasion of Ukraine has many, many, many rings around it.

Those closer to the bulls-eye receive our comfort and support; those further out are who we complain to or ask for help from. There are also people who are in the same ring, or in identical bulls-eyes of their own the family of the cancer patient, or other cancer patients so Im adding Commiserate With to the original two categories. People in the commiseration zone speak a language of gallows humor, inside references, and a lot of we talk.

Ring Theory isnt a top-down etiquette rule like forks on the left. Ring Theory gives words and imagery to a preexisting moral intuition, as the Golden Rule does. If a person demands comfort from their sick spouse, or claims kinship with some suffering not their own, it feels wrong. And social media can make it very easy to unwittingly do these kinds of things. In particular, it can be easy to talk like youre among the most affected in the commiseration zone, often out of a well-meaning attempt at solidarity, with people who very much do not believe you are. This is part of why even people who are in full agreement on all issues are fighting on the social media platforms.

Theres no simple set of etiquette rules to solve this. A knee-jerk get off the platforms isnt the fix, though its a good idea to get off whichever ones are your personal psychic sand traps and get off all of them regularly, whether thats a weekly 24-hour sabbath or a daily log off at 8 rule. Social media is the imperfect infrastructure we use to support too many real-life relationships, and better maintaining relationships is a necessity, not a luxury.

Shared experiences really matter. Ive got a tight group of high school friends from Kansas who share the same vivid memories of 1983s The Day After, and how the fact that the TV movie about nuclear war was filmed just down the road in Lawrence only made it harder to watch. And Im tight with a few cousins from Missouri, who grew up the same as I did hearing stories of our great-grandmother who came to this country illegally from Ukraine. Ukraine is the sun and my ring is the orbit of Pluto. But the hurt still carries far from the center. Ive found my commiseration zone.

For whatever you are suffering, I hope you find your own.

Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a writer with a PhD in psychology.

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How to talk about the war on Ukraine and other horrible things with sensitivity - The Boston Globe