Mallory Smith: Being Forced to Listen

I am a very opinionated person. I often clash with other opinionated people, especially when their opinions tend to oppose my own. I didn’t think this would be a challenge for me when I started working as a phone operator at a crisis hotline, but it became a prevalent issue as time went on. During our extensive training, we were told that we were not allowed to express our opinions or beliefs towards callers. Another thing they trained us on was knowing when to hang up on callers. It’s not entirely uncommon for callers to get angry at phone operators and berate them for whatever reason. So, if we were being constantly insulted by callers, even after we had warned them about their behavior, we were allowed to hang up on them. 

Every week we got a call from the same guy and for the sake of his privacy, I’m going to call him Travis. Travis called all the time even though he was never really in any kind of crisis. He would call just to talk about whatever was on his mind, which was usually a lot. His tendency to ramble on about nothing of apparent importance was one of the reasons that a lot of the other phone operators didn’t like talking to him. But the biggest reason they didn’t like to talk with him was because of how rude and offensive he would be to whomever he was talking to. He tended to call people names, cuss them out, and do whatever he could to get under their skin. He enjoyed getting a rise out of the people he spoke with and I think he called so much because he was looking for entertainment.

I was trained to not express my own beliefs while talking with callers or expressing my own personal opinions on the things that they say, and that’s exactly what I did. Travis would insult me by saying that I wouldn’t be able to understand his complex thoughts because women can’t think as deeply as men can. He also told me that all women, including myself, are liars and cannot be trusted with anything. Instead of telling Travis how I felt about the way he insulted me, I just let him keep talking. On slower days when we didn’t have many callers, I would even sometimes encourage him to continue expressing his thoughts. I think a lot of the phone operators tended to hang up on him after he started cussing them out and insulting them. I probably confused him when he realized that there wasn’t much he could say that would make me hang up on him. Because I didn’t hang up on him though, I heard a lot of what he had to say and I learned a lot about him, his views, and his life.

Instead of being offended by the things he said, I took note and paid careful attention to what he would tell me. Through time, I realized that he talked down about women so much because he had a really bad relationship with his mother and had also recently gone through a really bad breakup. He also easily got really defensive over his thoughts and spoke so highly of his own intelligence because was insecure that he never finished high school.

After I was able to connect that he was being so hurtful because of his own insecurities, it became even easier to deflect his personal attacks. To some extent, I even enjoyed talking with him. He always managed to say the most outlandish things and I thought it was so entertaining. The other people working at the call center were perplexed by my enjoyment of our conversations. They didn’t understand how I put up with his constant berating and I just told them about how it’s gotten to the point where it didn’t even phase me anymore. My job at the crisis hotline was extremely stressful and emotionally draining, so I began to appreciate the ability these unusual conversations had to ease some of the stress that I had. Even if he was insulting, he did have a good sense of humor and a lot of very unconventional views of politics and religion that I found entertaining.

These are all things I never would have learned about him if happened to just be someone I met on the street. But because I spoke with him in an environment where I was expected to continue talking with him and refrain from inserting my opinion into the conversation, I was able to learn a lot about him. Under other circumstances, I definitely would have constantly interrupted him and argued with him, but because of my job I was able to develop a better understanding of him and it really changed my perspective on talking with people who share similar views to his.

I am still a very opinionated person and I do continue to openly express my opinions with others. But now, when I meet other vocally opinionated people I take more things into consideration. If I happen to disagree with someone in a class discussion, I’m not going to automatically assume that our disagreements constitute a reason to dislike this person. There are still things I can find in them that make them an enjoyable person. I don’t judge people based on their opinions and I continue to look for the other parts of people that make them enjoyable to talk to, like their sense of humor or their interesting takes on abstract thinking. Because of this new perspective on communicating with others, I have never been more thankful for someone as insulting as Travis.

Mallory Smith is a psychology major who did their break away at Mental Health America Greenville in 2019. They will be graduating in spring of 2021 and begin their enrollment in Winthrop University’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling Master’s program the following summer.