What does "It's what they're not saying" mean?

Post Reply New Topic

Well, that's for you to decide.

Personally I'm more than happy to call "them" "morons" because they can't be bothered to use the right language for the right situation, and I make no apologies for it.

Maybe I should be more clear: I read and understood your response; I was not asking for you to change your opinion or agree with me. I appreciate that you acknowledged my point.

I was and am asking you to use respectful language, and to consider the impact your words have on others.

My words can only have an impact if somebody somehow feels the words apply to themselves since I have not named any specific target of my scorn.

It is ironic that you bemoan "breakdowns in communication" and state "it's important that we make sure we are understood and understand each other" when you are in effect suggesting to the OP that he consider the person he spoke to called him out as a liar when in all probability he didn't do so, whilst also suggesting I directed my comments at NT's when I didn't. If one were to practise what one preached then neither comment could be considered helpful.

Last edited by nemorosa on 12 Jul 2011, 8:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Body language may be a part of it, but not always. It doesn't always have to be a lie, or a conscious "spin" on the truth. "What he's not saying" means that the listener is using some other source to supplement the information he's being told, and that the situation is not going to play out the way the speaker believes (or wants you to believe). That information may be coming from the listener's experience or wisdom, not necessarily from the messenger himself.

Let's say your parents mentioned they invested your sister's university fund into lottery tickets or cold fusion. While your parents may believe that they're going to be rich beyond their wildest dreams, what "they're not telling you" is that it's a really bad idea, and that your sister will probably have to work an extra job and settle for community college her first two years.

It's similar to "reading between the lines". You don't have to be an expert at reading people to know that sometimes they can be horribly misinformed or naive, or that their big plans are going to go horribly wrong. Sometimes experience, and knowing other people who have made the same mistake, is all you need to know to understand "what he's not saying."

And, if the speaker and the listener are both aware of "what he isn't saying" then you have "an elephant in the room".

Does the statement mean there's something I should have said? Is there an obligation I wasn't aware of?

No, the statement is as is, however the meaning is not.
You need only to mentally fill in the missing meaning, the hidden meaning “of what has not been said”; to make sense of what has been said, in context to make the whole statement meaningful.
A couple of weekends ago, my boss asked me to finish a report and have it on his desk Monday first thing (this was Friday) He didn’t mean literally “on his desk” he meant in his email in tray by Sunday evening so He could make a few notes and then pass it on to his boss as all his own work first thing Monday. The unspoken reading between the lines is, as I have said elsewhere, a sub-textual fact of life for every NT

I don't understand. What I said did not require extra info to make sense, it was complete in itself. There wasn't a hidden or 'missing' meaning, as far as I was concerned, or at least I wasn't aware of one at the time. If there was, I would've stated it explicitely. No "reading between the lines" was required. That's why I didn't understand what I was doing wrong: he seemed to have a checklist of questions, and expected me to know and provide the answers when I didn't even know what his questions were. How am I supposed to answer a question when I don't even know what the question is and the person refuses to tell me? Am I still looking at the statement the wrong way?

He must have thought you were not telling him the whole truth, concealing something, giving a positive gloss on a bad message or something of the kind. It's not your fault that he's read it all wrong. People assign negative motivation all the time when none is intended, perhaps because that's how they would behave themselves, but I'm just speculating. Many people are unused to being given simple and direct answers so to them there MUST be something more.

I've been in this situation before and there really is nothing you can do when they refuse to tell you what the problem is. They now see you as an opponent who is playing with them. They think you really know the answer so to persist in asking them is to them just playing more games and they don't want to go along with that.

No, you're looking at it like an aspie, figuring that anything important to either party in the conversation would be explicitly verbalized. Most NTs react to more factors than what's said, among them body language as they understand it. The roots of such reactions are usually so subconscious that they aren't aware of what caused how they saw something. For the other person in your conversation, the idea that you might not immediately know his line of thought might not make immediate sense to him, unless you were being deliberately evasive or subtly challenging him on a nonverbal level. (I'm using "he" and "him"for simplicity, not knowing the other's gender.) I doubt you were trying to evade or challenge. Without access to and understanding of your "say it all verbally" viewpoint, though, he might not have had a frame of reference to deal with it in a way that you might have hoped.

You didn't do anything wrong: the conversation just developed a mismatch. That's just part of having psychological wiring different from the norm for most people. For you, questioning that mismatch was a search for information, with no value judgments attached. For him, what you asked might have seemed like an attack on something so fundamental to his view of the world that he has never had to look at it or describe it before. He might have seen what you intended as an innocent quest for information as full of value judgments, both of his viewpoint and of him.

Learning that other people quite often don't share your viewpoint is a tough lesson at times. Learning to question one's own motivations or bases for reaction constructively is even tougher. In extreme instances, some people never learn that other people can think quite differently from them and not be either crazy or deliberately contrary. Most folks aren't that bad off. I doubt that the other person in your conversation was. He might well have been surprised by a way of relating to the world they hadn't encountered before, if it had somehow been presented to him in a way that didn't threaten him somehow. Figuring that kind of solution out can be a really difficult, ongoing process. I find that patience and perseverance in finding out just what went wrong helps in such situation, along with looking for a solution that has all concerned coming out ahead.

You have no way of knowing unless the other person tells you, and if they think you are deliberately misleading them, they are unlikely to tell you. This is why it's not a bad idea to offer some kind of explanation for your difference, it may open the door for more open discussion of the problem.

Atwood talks a lot about using phrases like "I'm the kind of person who..." in these situations, and I think it's a good idea. Before I knew I was somewhere on the spectrum, this is how I would deal with communication problems.

You don't have to do anything wrong for the listener or receiver to believe you're not sending an entire message. You can be straightforward and believe everything you say, and the listener is using some other "source" to come to a different conclusion than what you intended. That source can be a history of other people who have said similar things, it could be that he knows something about the situation you're unaware of, it could be misreading of physical cues, it could be a problem with emotional/semantic loading of the message by the receiver, or it could be that the person you're telling is just extremely paranoid.

All the phrase does is let you know that there's a mismatch between what you said and what the listener believes about what you said (or what you should have said). If the listener refuses to elaborate, or clarify what they believe, then they've contributed nothing positive by saying it. Since the listener offered no explanation after you called him on it, your obligation to clarify your message further is finished.

I think the phrase "it's what he's not telling us" is a good one, it's a pretty good illustration of the Rashomon effect. You can deliver news to 20 different people and those 20 people may be taking away a completely different message (or reaching several different conclusions) than the one you intended. We want people to understand us 100%, but communication theory tells us that this is impossible between any two people, so we have to have faith that most of our intended message was conveyed. There's a difference between rattling off "facts" and telling the "truth": facts are objective, truth is subjective. Lying is a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, while truth can range from being an accurate interpretation of facts, an honest interpretation of some subjective (emotional) state, or an unintentional misrepresentation of what someone has observed.

When people say stuff like that, it is confusing! My guess is he needs more information? If someone said that to me I would ask them what they mean right after they say it. Probably would get a "nevermind," and a quick shake of the head in response but it's worth a chance. Maybe you will get lucky and he will actually say more, himself, lol.

OH, re-reading this - it just occurred to me what it might be about!

Did other people work on the project with you? Was one of them this other person, or a colleague or friend of his? He may be expecting acknowledgement of the work of the other people who were involved in the project. Does that sound like a possibility?

Sadly, no. I wasn't the only one working on it, we never communicated on the phone or in person, and neither I nor my colleague knew this chap in person. His objection was to what I had written - an update of the project's progress. There was no body language or tone of voice getting in the way. It was clear he didn't trust me, though.


Thank you for your explanation (and that goes for everyone else here, too). I understand now what the phrase means. However, what is his motive? Perhaps if I used nemorosa's CEO example from page 1 it would be easier for me to illustrate my confusion.


In this scenario, I would ask the CEO what our job prospects were, how the running of the company would change and what the new job conditions were likely to be. What the guy I'm talking about would do is to tell the CEO that he isn't giving the full story and then when the CEO asks for clarification, he then leaves the room in disgust. With me, the CEO gets the chance (although he may not take it) to clarify the position and address my concerns. With the other chap, the CEO is left with an unhappy employee who refuses to tell him what the problem is. It's all very well him telling the CEO that he's doing a bad job, but how is the CEO supposed to fix the problem if the employee refuses to give details? In my view it is poor, circular, and self-defeating reasoning. He is sabotaging every way in which he could get the information he thinks he is missing and, presumably, wants.

I am aware that this post is coming across as a rant, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it. My apologies.

You're right, it is often self-defeating, but we are dealing with people who are emotional, who have pre-conceived notions and who will refuse to engage because they believe the other party will only continue to be dishonest with them.

In my example, the employees may not bother to question the CEO because they only expect to be given yet more spin or evasion. Perhaps the CEO won't give them an opportunity to ask questions. Perhaps the employees already have such a negative view of the CEO that they have already fabricated their own answers, whether that ties in with reality or not. The point is, this is an emotional reaction and not an intellectual one. This is all down to a breakdown of trust and failure of communication.

I'm sorry that it's not possible to give you answers to why relations have broken down with your colleague and why they refuse to engage. Like someone said in an earlier comment it could be something as simple as a piece of information this person wrongly assumed you would know about and when you didn't mention it he then wrongly assumed your were trying to conceal something, hence the breakdown in trust.

That's okay. "Because they are irrational" is an acceptable answer. Thanks everyone for your help!