The psychiatrist who banned indirect questions from his own chaotic house

"Do you have ten dollars?" It sounds like an ordinary question. Someone needs money, someone might have money, why not just ask? But inside the house at 67 Perry Street, where Augusten Burroughs spent much of his adolescence living with his mother's psychiatrist, Dr. Finch had a name for exactly this kind of question, and he despised it.

He called it being a "mothermind." A mothermind was somebody who managed you, cornered you, or extracted things from you without ever coming out and saying what they wanted. If you needed ten dollars, Finch insisted, the honest version was "May I have ten dollars," or "I need ten dollars." The version that hid behind a question, "Do you have ten dollars?", put the other person in an impossible spot. Say yes, and you've basically agreed to hand it over. Say no, and you look stingy over a sum you may not even want to give. Either way, you never actually got asked. You got managed.

Everyone in that house lived in terror of being caught doing this, and Agnes, Finch's wife, was accused of it constantly, alongside far stranger household crimes. But underneath the shouting was something genuinely useful: a distinction between a request, which can be refused, and a maneuver, which can't.

Burroughs never presents this as advice he followed cleanly, and the house itself was hardly a model of healthy communication in most other respects. But the idea holds up outside the wreckage it came from. Most people don't lie to get what they want. They ask sideways, hoping the shape of the question does the work an honest request would have to do. Learning to spot that habit in your own mouth before it comes out has nothing to do with anyone's mental illness and everything to do with how honestly you're willing to ask for things.

Start today by listening to your own questions before you ask them, and whenever you catch yourself building in an escape hatch, like asking "you're not busy tonight, are you," stop and say plainly what you actually want. Give the other person room to say no, because if any answer but yes would make you angry, you were never really asking. When someone corners you with one of these sideways questions, answer only what was literally asked and let the silence do the rest. Do this enough times and you'll notice how much lighter it feels to ask for something outright, even when the answer turns out to be no.