Circular or Linear?

"Have you ever been in a conversation and felt like you’ve just been hit by a train?  Or, that the person you are talking to is from another planet, and there might be unicorns and endless time there?  These are extreme cases, but I do sometimes find myself in a discussion where I feel that there are assumptions being made that I don’t agree with or even understand.  It makes it hard to join the discussion.


The root of this disconnect may be that a circular thinker is meeting a linear thinker and they’re not recognizing their difference.  Each of these modes has a set of operating conditions that are intuitively being applied.  When this profound point is not recognized, and people are in different modes, the conversation can go off the rails very quickly."  - Kim Hudson

This difference isn't something that my attention has been drawn to before, but I reckon it explains why S and I sometimes look at each other in shock and amazement when we're talking.  We've both said that the other can stop us dead in our tracks, so the 'being hit by a train' analogy makes perfect sense to me.  However, I'm not sure it will help us deal with the problem which, let's face it, has been going on for a good while now.