A Vocabulary of Feelings
Sonny Black, Pistone’s capo, once asked Donnie not to share everything with Lefty. He remembered that Lefty had helped him out in prison. The explanation took two sentences: Lefty was a great guy, Sonny said, but he had an explosive temper and liked to make a tragedy out of everything.
Sonny never read any psychologists. But he did what every sensible boss does. He knew what his man felt and how quickly he flared up. And he decided, on that knowledge, what to tell him and what not to.
For that you need words. A man who has “good”, “bad” and “drives me mad” to cover everything is like a painter with three tins of paint. He’ll paint a wall. Not a portrait.
The Scorched Collar
Once a young presser scorched the collar of a regular client’s shirt, a lawyer from the seafront. The shift supervisor started dressing her down right there at the press, in front of everyone. The girl went white and fled to the back room. The Don happened to be doing his morning round. He stood a while, listened, and called the girl over.
He didn’t scold her. He told her to buy an identical shirt at the laundry’s expense, iron it herself and take it to the lawyer along with the scorched one. She took it. For many years afterwards the lawyer kept bringing his shirts and asking whether “the one who brought me the new one” was still there.
Afterwards the Don explained the difference to the shift supervisor. You shamed her. What you should have done was let her feel guilty.
That’s not a play on words. The American psychologist June Tangney spent many years studying how shame differs from guilt. Shame hits the whole person: “I’m bad.” Guilt hits the act: “I did something bad.” The ashamed want to hide, to vanish, and sometimes to snap back. The guilty want to put it right. The girl at the press was being shamed, and she ran to the back room. With the shirt in her hands, she was on her way to put it right.
Afraid Without Knowing of What
The second distinction is simpler, and any doctor knows it. Fear knows its object: a dog, the tax office, the sack. Anxiety has no object. It waits for who knows what, and so it never ends.
When the strike started at the port, the restaurants began calling us three times a day. What about the oil? When will it come? What if it doesn’t? There was no point reassuring them. The Don had a one-line note delivered to every kitchen: three weeks’ worth of oil in the warehouse. And a figure for how much each of them would get per week. The calls stopped within two days. The strike went on for another two weeks.
He didn’t promise everything would be all right. He gave the anxiety an object. An object can be measured, and then anxiety turns into ordinary fear, which you can live with.
There was another side to it. The cooks feared losing their oil far more than they enjoyed getting it. Kahneman and Tversky showed this in experiments. Offer a man a coin toss. Tails, he pays a hundred. Heads, he gets more. Most people won’t accept until the winnings grow to about two hundred. A loss weighs almost twice as much as a find.
Saying It Out Loud
Words cure anxiety. That’s been tested in the laboratory too. In 2007 Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues showed people in a scanner angry and frightened faces. When a person matched a word to the face—“anger”, “fear”—the amygdala went quiet. That’s the part of the brain that responds first to a threat. Simply naming a feeling cools it a little.
Hence an old habit of the Don’s. To an angry supplier he didn’t say “calm down”, he said, “You’re angry, and in your place I’d be angry too.” First the man is taken aback. Then he breathes out.
The Answer Comes After
Mike Dash cites a portrait of the “true mafioso” left by a nineteenth-century writer. As Dash renders it, the man speaks with restraint, listens with the same restraint and shows great humility; if anyone offends him in front of others, he doesn’t answer on the spot, but kills him later.
A grim recipe. But look at the mechanics. The man who flares up at once shows you where to hurt him. The man who keeps silent makes the other one guess. Diego Gambetta, who looked at the Sicilian Mafia through an economist’s eyes, writes about almost the same thing. Where everyone is on guard, people catch every sign, and a raised eyebrow frightens more than any threat. The force of a sign depends not on how loud it is, but on the state of mind of the one who catches it.
From that “later” I recommend you take only one thing: the conversation the next morning. An answer put off until morning is almost always the wiser one.
The Bottom Line
Honest work with the vocabulary looks like this. If someone made a mistake, give him guilt and a way to put it right, not shame in front of witnesses. If he’s anxious, give him a figure instead of comfort. If he’s angry, name his anger out loud. And keep in your head which of your people flare up and which smoulder, the way Sonny did.
And now how it’s done to you. You’re shamed in front of everyone, so that you hide instead of arguing. You’re slipped an anxiety with no object, and then sold the cure for it. You’re told not “you’ll gain” but “you’ll lose”, because they know how much a loss weighs. When you hear that, name to yourself exactly what has just been woken in you. A feeling that’s been named grows weaker. And whoever was rushing you will be plain to see.