He`s the aural assailant who traps you near the party punchbowl. Or the vassal of verbosity you avoid at the office. Or the conversational cretin who sits near you on the plane, bending your ear at 38,000 feet.
You`d love to tell them all to shut up. But such directness has yet to find its way into the Communication Age. So instead you wait it out as the interminable talker drones on.
And on.
Soon your brain takes a trip to Bali and your vocabulary skids into listless Uh-huhs, Oh-yeahs, Reallys and Hmms.
And by the time all`s done-and said-you realize you never got to mingle at the party, make that important phone call to a prized client or read the best-seller you`d hoped to finish during your flight.
You have become yet another victim of one of the millions of problem talkers in America.
But help is on its way for both talkers and besieged listeners. Psychologists now are taking a more serious look at excessive talking and the impact of speech patterns.
”It`s just now becoming a legitimate area of psychology and sociology,” says Dr. Gerald Goodman, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA.
”People are screwing up their lives because they don`t pay enough attention to the way they talk. They destroy serenity.”
Crowing with chatter
While excessive talkers can be described in acerbic tones, Goodman groups them gently under the rubric ”conversation crowders” in his just-released paperback.
Co-authored with Glenn Esterly, ”The Talk Book: The Intimate Science of Communicating in Close Relationships” (Ballantine, $4.95) provides a detailed and practical guide to understanding the nuances of talking. Goodman calls it a ”road map” for navigating the hairpin curves of conversation.
”Chronic crowders are compulsive stealers of conversational space,” he writes, adding they take premature turns in most conversations and ”knock the pins out from others” whenever they want attention.
Crowders not only detract from conversation, but in extreme cases can ruin marriages and alienate friends. It`s the less dramatic cases, however, that are grating ears coast to coast:
– Like the California insurance agent who dares not go near the coffee urn at the same time as a jabbering colleague. The entire office has dubbed him ”Cliffy” behind his back-a reference to a character in television`s
”Cheers.”
– Or the Connecticut office manager who has stopped greeting a friend with ”How you doing?” because of the verbal outpouring that always ensued.
For all their aggravating traits, crowders are essentially sympathetic characters, pyschologists say.
Hogging conversation is ”rarely done with forethought or malice,”
Goodman writes. ”Typically, chronic crowders aren`t calculating people; they aren`t trying to be rude; most honestly don`t realize they`re cutting off others.”
Boring? Really?
Interminable talkers are ”totally unconcious of the boring impact they have on others,” says Stephen Bank, an adjunct professor of psychology at Wesleyan University.
To combat the problem, Bank began conducting nationwide seminars on the Art of Listening-a quality often linked to nonstop gabbing.
”The compulsive talker seems insensitive to the cues of listening,”
said Bank, whose clients include sales representatives, educators and even physicians. ”Corporate managers frequently report chronic talkers as a problem.”
Bank attributes much of the problem to the fast-paced world in which we live. People don`t have time for blowhards.
”We want fast food, sound bites and the bottom line first,” he says.
Chronic talking is a mostly male domain. Experts cite studies showing men are much more likely to butt into conversations and dictate pace, context and topic.
For those reasons, among others, the all-women student body of Mills College successfully fought the admission of men into their California school this year.
Why the babble?
Regardless of gender, spotting the compulsive talker is easy. Knowing why they do it is more difficult.
Some talkers gush endlessly because they feel sheer quantity of speech is synonymous with quality, Bank explains.
”They don`t feel like they`re being taken seriously,” he says. ”It often reflects an underlying insecurity from not having been listened to when they were younger.”
Still others use a wall of words to hide their fear of abandonment and emotional contact.
”It`ll drive you crazy,” says Bank.
Repetitious war stories and nostalgic recollections by the elderly are not always signs of senility; often they are desperate attempts to ”connect” with others. They want to be known as they were, not as they are.
Whatever the underlying reasons, excessive talkers are viewed too negatively by society, experts say. Such attitudes often stem from a listener`s frustration with the talker, who appears self-centered.
The dilemma of the vexed listener is that the rabid talker is often too nice to shun, but too boring to befriend.
But enough about you . . .
One friendly Florida restaurant owner, for example, has a reputation for descending on his regular customers. On one occassion he asked a couple what was new in their lives. When the pair said they were getting married, moving verseas and embarking on new careers, his only response was ”that`s nice.”
He immediately moved on to a half-hour monologue about the latest city sewer referendum-his own pet project.
”He probably was overwhelmed with his own feelings,” explains Dr. Bonnie Jacobson, director of the New York Institute for Psychological Change. ”Maybe jealously or inadequacy.”
Jacobson, who has devised a recovery plan for chronic talkers, says they must first recognize they have a problem.
After that, she advises they isolate the anxiety that`s driving the talk, put those anxieties aside and try to click into the other person`s thinking. From there, the talker can develop empathy and build a bridge to real dialogue.
Support groups for problem talkers have even formed, including one in Los Angeles for motor mouths and another for slow talkers who can`t get a word in edgewise.
For something so basic, the mechanics of talking are deceptively complex. And experts say compulsive talkers are too quickly dismissed by society as colossal bores. But keeping mum only makes blabbermouths feel shut out and disconnected.
”One of the worst things a person can do is remain silent,” says Bank.
”It`s more destructive and can make things worse. Remember, interrupting compulsive talkers is not rude; it`s helping them.”
