Burning Concern Finding Out What’S Said Behind Your Back Can Be Enraging Or Humiliating

Are your ears burning?

You’re not alone. Chances are, people are talking about you.

After all, discussing the quirks and foibles of those who aren’t present is one of America’s favorite pastimes.

And you might as well face it. Sooner or later, people are going to get around to talking about you.

Odds are, you’ll never hear about what was said. Things uttered behind our backs tend to exist in a parallel universe of out-of-bounds information.

But every once in a while, we get reports on things said about us but not to us. And sometimes that can fry a few emotional fuses.

That’s because learning of criticism offered behind your back can sting more than something said to your face, said Paul Domitor, a clinical psychologist in Spokane.

“You don’t have the direct experience. You don’t hear the person’s words. You don’t see their face. You don’t hear their tone. You don’t observe their body language.”

You just know that guy in accounting said you’re a lying rat who shouldn’t be trusted around small children.

Or something like that.

Reactions can range from feeling a red-hot urge to go get in that person’s face to silently suffering a sense of humiliation.

Not everything whispered behind our backs is mean, of course. But the nature of gossip is such that, if you don’t have anything nice to say, there’s still plenty to talk about.

At a time when many social observers fret about the erosion of manners, the act of discussing people who aren’t around to defend themselves is so pervasive that it’s widely considered normal discourse.

“It’s very prevalent,” said Michael Stebbins, director of the Gonzaga Institute of Ethics.

He doesn’t advocate a total ban.

“That’s probably asking a lot of people, and it probably would dry up a lot of conversations,” he says.

He does, however, recommend asking a couple of questions before talking about someone who isn’t present: “What’s our intention in talking about this person?”

And, “What would the person think about this conversation if they knew it was going on?”

The implications of the answers are clear and say a lot about individual perspectives on respect and trust.

Now it’s probably worth noting that some discussions of personalities are undertaken for entertainment value and aren’t truly malicious. Talking behind someone’s back isn’t necessarily backstabbing.

Saying, “Have you noticed that weird snorting sound Bob makes when he laughs?” has a different weight than “Bob is the worst manager in our company.”

And some say you don’t need a finely tuned moral compass to know the difference.

“I think you can tell,” said the Rev. Tom Ledbetter, interim pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church on Spokane’s North Side.

Granted, a lot of the things said behind our backs are trivial.

“She never shuts up.”

“He thinks of himself as the funniest guy he ever met.”

“What would make someone wear that?”

Still, viewing this as essentially a matter of etiquette understates the real dynamics at work, said Domitor.

In his view, it’s all tied in with how we manage aggression.

Stebbins added this: “I think a lot of conversations where we’re talking about other people end up being about defining in groups and out groups.”

It’s a behavior found in virtually every demographic category.

But we’re kidding ourselves if we believe everyone views this in a nonjudgmental way, said Sue Campbell Clark, a member of the University of Idaho business faculty specializing in organizational behavior and human resources management.

“When we say stuff that we wouldn’t say directly to the person, usually we do it to confide in another,” she said. “We think that we’re making them feel that we’re really letting them in on something. But often it just makes them distrust us.”

You know. “If she said that about him, what’s to keep her from saying something nasty about me?”

For the person who was the subject of the bash-fest, hearing what was said after the fact can be stunning.

Among those most apt to be floored by learning of criticism offered out of their earshot are people who are themselves highly critical of others, said Domitor, the psychologist.

It’s probably worth examining the possible agenda of the person who relayed that information. But if you just heard that one of your classmates had said your breath smells like death on toast, it can be hard to shrug off.

So how do you respond?

Well, you can launch your own attack campaign, bad-mouthing your detractor behind his or her back.

You can simply tell yourself that the person in question is a no-character coward unworthy of your concern. Or you can engage in a little thing students of human behavior like to call confronting the one who dissed you.

That has one big upside.

Domitor put it like this: “It’s only when we have direct communication that our brains get the opportunity to take in the amount of information that dimensionalizes what the message was, and this in turn tends to mute our emotions.”

Unless, of course, the person in question really does hate your guts and is more than willing to say that to your face.

But then at least you’ll know what you’re dealing with, Domitor added.

Sometimes that’s half the battle.