Subcultures are known for behaviors that seem, to people not immersed in them, to be strange, nonsensical, and even mildly threatening. Members of a subculture often have their own ways of communicating with other members, with specific baseline assumptions and subtext that don’t translate outside that particular subculture, or, in some cases, even to other members of the subculture in a different region.
Small social circles have this same problem. If you spend all your time talking to just a few people, you build baseline assumptions that apply to those people, but are less likely to apply outside that group. You make unconscious assumptions that affect what you say and how you say it.
And if most of your discussion of a certain type is with just one person – relationship discussions, for example, you are not prepared for having those same discussions with another person and getting the same results. I used to talk about how much I’d learned about how to discuss feelings and needs, and how good I felt like I was at it, based on my successful and productive discussions. It was painful watching other people struggle through the communication issues I had overcome.
Then I realized that I was only great at having those discussions with one person, as soon as I tried to apply those same techniques to someone with a wildly different discussion style. That new person drove me nuts. It seemed like they didn’t understand anything I said. I felt like I was constantly re-explaining things to them because I wasn’t getting the “right” responses indicating understanding so we could move the discussion forward. Even what I thought should be simple discussions turned into arguments.
Finally, they said something to me that made me realize that what I was doing just wasn’t working for them.
So I had to adapt and learn a new communication style. And I had to do it again with the next person. And the next. Then I starting dating someone I’d been friends with for years, and I had to learn how to adapt the communication style we’d settled into to be able to discuss the more delicate things one has to discuss in a more emotionally intimate relationship. I’m still working on that, months later.
Along with communication, subcultures often develop some ways of handling certain interactions and social situations that are functional within the subculture, but range from inappropriate to completely destructive outside the subculture. These are based on the same sort of baseline assumptions as the communication styles — that this person is like us in this way, and is going to act or react in a predictable way.
This happens with small social circles as well, and, to a larger degree, within long-term intimate relationships. Then we get into a different intimate relationship, we behave in a way that seems appropriate or has a predictable reaction from the other person, we don’t get the reaction we expect, and we’re left confused and lost about what just happened. Or we hear or observe something, make an assumption about what’s going on, and react in the way we’re used to, and things derail from there.
Make those expected behaviors codependent, and those reactions trauma responses, and there’s a whole lot of pain to go around.