Quick background: I live in a house with my sibling and their parents. My sibling is not legally or biologically related to me, but they ARE my sibling. My sibling’s parents are not my parents, but we are collectively a ‘family,’ in many senses of the word. I call my sibling’s parents “the Elders of Plumley” as Plumley is the name of our house, they are the oldest members of our household, and they are sources of great wisdom. I myself am in my late teens (no longer in high school.) My sibling is in their mid teens (still in high school.) All of us in the household are various hues of neurodivergent. (I have ADHD and my autistic friends are all convinced that I’m also autistic; my sibling is a fellow ADHDer and may or may not be autistic; Elders are ADHD and ??? (cluster of traits that are definitely something but remain undiagnosed) respectively.
Main thing: So, I have this communication issue with my younger sibling. (They’re in their mid teens, I’m a few years older than them.) Sometimes I’ll be trying to tell them something, or ask a question, and they won’t respond; if I say their name a few times, they get frustrated with me (or, they make a noise that sounds frustrated, I’ll admit that I don’t know exactly what all their noises mean.) This isn’t as much of a problem for me as it is for their parents. The elders of plumley have trouble communicating with them, and it has been known to cause arguments/distress. My sibling responds to them in ways that are harder to decipher, and they tend to make more irritated noises. (Or maybe they just get interpreted as irritation more often. I’m not sure.)
My sibling has previously described processing/registering that someone is talking to them, but not feeling the need to respond. I’ve asked about how we could maybe work out a means of more regularly communicating the fact that they’re listening and similar, but they kinda just shrugged at me and made a confused noise. And to be honest, I feel quite similarly about the whole thing too! So, I turn to you lovely internet folks. Do you have any strategies for this kind of thing? Are there things I should be doing on my end to make communication easier? Are there alternate ways of saying “I’m listening” that aren’t just saying the words?
Linguistics has the term backchanneling to describe verbal ways in which a listener can engage with a speaker to signal that they are listening. The most common affirmations that fall into this category are sounds like “mhm”, “uhuh”, or simple affirming words like “yes” or “I see”. But there’s a whole slew of ways you can signal this which are more complicated, such as rhetorical questions such as “really?” in response to content that is surprising or repeating some of the content back at the speaker like “he did not!”
If you’re looking to step your response game up, there’s a concept known as “active listening” which incorporates some of the ideas of backchanneling into more complex ideas as well as taking some of the more well studied psychology of intimacy and relationships. It’s a framework or structure for listening to somebody and to show that you are listening by synthesizing and repeating some of the information back at the speaker. As an aside this helps to reduce any issues with comprehension or miscommunication as the act of synthesizing and repeating the data back at the speaker using different words can often trigger the speaker to clarify in ways they may have failed to do or highlight that you understood something differently than they expected the information they presented to be parsed.
My go-to is saying something like “oh, like related term?” Or whatever, and then I get the bonus of a confirmation that I actually am understanding what they are saying.