The Explaining: The Pattern of Pre-Justifying Yourself
The Pattern
You have been explaining yourself for a very long time. Justifying your choices to people who did not ask for the justification but whose implied judgment you were anticipating. Contextualizing your needs before you stated them, so that the needs arrived pre-packaged in the reasoning that made them acceptable. The explaining is not dishonesty. It is the behavior of someone who has internalized the belief that their unmediated self is too much to present without the buffer of the explanation, that the choices they make, taken on their own, will be found wanting. But the explaining prevents something: the experience of being received as you actually are, because what arrives is not you but you-plus-explanation, you-pre-managed-for-their-comfort.
Origins & Context
The compulsive explaining pattern sits at the intersection of attachment theory and the development of what Pete Walker calls the fawn response. Walker, building on Bowlby's and Ainsworth's attachment research, describes fawning as the fourth survival response alongside fight, flight, and freeze: the appeasement strategy developed by children who learned that proactively managing the caregiver's emotional state was the most reliable route to safety. Over-explaining is a core component of fawning: by providing the reasoning before the response can arrive, the person attempts to preempt disapproval. Sue Johnson's emotionally focused therapy research identifies what she calls negative interaction cycles, in which one partner's over-explaining and pre-justification maintains the dynamic they are trying to avoid by signaling low self-worth and inviting correction. Harriet Lerner, in The Dance of Anger, describes over-functioning in relationships, which includes excessive explanation, as a learned behavior that develops when authentic need expression has historically been met with criticism or withdrawal. John Gottman's research on contempt in relationships found that the behavior most predictive of relationship dissolution is not conflict but the implied message that one person is beneath consideration, which the explaining pattern is often a response to having absorbed.
What arrives is not you. It is you-plus-explanation, you pre-managed for their comfort.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
The explaining shows up as the sentence that is twice as long as the information it contains. As the text message you sent and then immediately followed with a longer one providing context for the first one. As the need that arrived in a subordinate clause. As the preference that was qualified before you were finished stating it. It shows up in professional settings as the over-documented decision, the work that comes packaged in its own defense before anyone has asked for one. It shows up in relationships as the story you told about why you feel what you feel before anyone questioned whether you were allowed to feel it. The explaining shows up most clearly in what it protects against: the moment of presenting yourself without the buffer and waiting, in the discomfort of that pause, to see whether the unmediated version is received. Most people who explain compulsively have never had that experience. They step in before the moment arrives. Learning to stop explaining does not mean learning to be abrupt or withholding. It means learning to state the actual thing, and then stop, and let it land.
Named in the Literature As
Named in the literature as: Over-justification (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) -- the compulsive provision of reasons for ordinary choices or preferences as though continuous justification is required to maintain belonging.
Fawn response (Pete Walker) -- the appeasing behavior pattern, including excessive explaining, that attempts to prevent conflict by preemptively managing the other person's response.
Related entries: Self-Abandonment, People-Pleasing, The Reflexive Yes, The Training Grounds.
Nikita's Note
I explain everything. I have been explaining everything since I was very young, since I learned that presenting a raw need or preference without the casing of justification produced a response I did not want. The explaining became so automatic that I could not always tell where the actual thing ended and the packaging began. The practice of stopping the explanation, of saying the thing plainly and waiting in the silence after it, is one of the most uncomfortable things I have learned to do. What I have found is that most people receive the unmediated version much more generously than the explained one, that the explained version actually signals something about how I perceive myself in relation to them, and that signal is not the one I want to be sending.
From the work
What arrives is not you. It is you-plus-explanation, you pre-managed for their comfort.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.