You know what is extra dumb? What no one of us wants to feel ever? What is super inconvenient and awful and confusing? I’ll tell you what; mad, sad or not glad feelings around someone we love and appreciate, who means the world to us. Someone we deem an amazing human, a member of our core family or circle of care. A bestie.
Such painfully conflicting feelings arise in many forms but basically come down to two sides of one spectrum of ick. You harmed me or you think I harmed you.
It’s one thing to be hurt by someone out there in the wild world, outside of our circle. A hater on media. A judgy coworker. A superior that reads us wrong. It’s one thing to be hurt or accused by a toxic person. Still not fun. Still throws us. Not how we want to spend an afternoon.
But today I want to talk about the super confusing and often scary or disarming feeling of being let down by or accused of harm by someone close to us, when we can’t see what they see, or they can’t see how we are hurting, or some messy tangled up yarn ball of all of the above.
How do we navigate it? What is the best practice? Do we speak up? Do we let it go? What is healthy? How do we have a voice without causing more harm, or unnecessary conflict? Are we in danger of failing to stand up for ourselves? I am suggesting a few simple steps that will get us back to harmony with less suffering.
When you are hurting or accused of hurting a friend:
- Widen your lens. Try flipping your perspective, for example. If you have been accused of letting down your friend, review a time when you were the accuser, or the aggrieved. Remembering what it’s like to be on the other side of a disconnect can soften our view. So can viewing our current hot topic through the lens of old resolved or forgotten matters, that no longer seem important or harmful. When we remember that our relationship has survived these kinds of conflicts before, it’s easier to shift from perceived harm to simple misunderstanding, and to feel less reactive.
- Allow for differences. Understand that it is impossible to look from different lenses, different eyes, different lives and not misunderstand or confuse a loved one’s intentions, or for them to confuse yours, sometimes!. It will happen. You may hear about it or not. It may be fleeting. The lens of love may take over and the fear disappear. But you can’t avoid it, because we are seeing from different histories, we are wired differently and we attach different meaning to events, words, choices, and ideas. Which means that we will see “flaws” in the people we love and care about the most. The way they try to help won’t be what we need at the time. It may be too much or too little or make us feel incapable. Then we seem ungrateful for something we didn’t ask for in the first place, even if we are grateful for the intention behind it. Our bestie will feel hurt or confused and we will feel hurt and confused. Not because anyone intended harm. It won’t even be a ball dropping culpable affair. It will happen, innocent of wrongdoing. So we can breathe out. Differences when understood as such, are much less painful to negotiate.
- Give Grace. If we love a person and are loved by them and they are one of our close circle, grace is a solution. Grace is about choosing to define and navigate the relationship by all of the good we love and appreciate, not by the uncertainty. Not by the mistakes, or the differentials. We don’t have to give power to the fault lines or the ego stories. There is no way for a human being to be moving along a path of sorting out their own luggage, trying to make the best choices for their health, navigating the flying shit that the world is fond of throwing at us (duck! there’s a china bowl coming for your head, or a bill, or a health problem), being a superstar at sharing their super powers with the world, loving their various peeps in their circle of care, giving the right amount of support to everyone around them, going to the gym and sweeping the floor, healing deep wounds and also being dialed into the shifting perspectives of everyone around them in perfect sync. When a story of loss presents itself, look for the answer in the ever reaching demands of the world. Have a wide berth of compassion for the challenges of seeing our way through a day. Attempt a sense of humor if you can. With our attention spans so overloaded it’s sometimes a holy miracle that we can show up for each other at all.
- Freaky Friday. Remember that film, book, story? Where the mom and daughter have a big fight and then there’s a magic fortune cookie and they wake up in one another’s bodies and lives? It’s a pretty funny, clever portrayal of perspective and how it messes with us and how to outsmart it. You’ll never be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes in quite the same way, but it helps to try. I listened to a dad talking about his daughter recently. She was afraid to go into a mall because of her anxiety. “But she has no problem going out to the bar” he said, as if the mall was a fake out, the anxiety was a card to play to get out of a boring chore. Yet anyone who is close enough to this issue knows that a fear disorder doesn’t work logically. We also know that it’s easier to work through fear when there is a reward on the other end, but that doesn’t make the fear less real. This dad didn’t understand, and he had a fear of his own, which was letting his daughter play him, or not growing her up to be healthy and strong. If he could spend an hour inside of her life and mind, he would know doubt be the hero and champion of her cause. A genius of compassion. When my fear is glancing off of your fear, it’s time to eat cookies, invoke magic and bonk heads until we snap out of it.
- When do you speak up? Those of us who have had a minute to work on our emotional health probably have some chops or best practices around speaking up and sharing feelings. Or we operate with a general sense that it isn’t good to keep it all bottled up all of the time. And this is true. I for one am a fan of checking in with our inner self or inner child before we speak up. If we are feeling scared, lonely, tired, sad…if we have needs that aren’t being met, everything we see happening outside of us will appear through our unmet need. When we answer this need first, we often stop seeing conflict outside of ourselves. But when it does persist? Well it depends on the friendship or the relationship. It’s always best to own our own feelings if we are sharing them, and to ask for what we need rather than throwing judgment. Example “I feel really lonely when I don’t hear from you for a few (weeks, months, decades). I’m trying to sort that out for myself. I’m not saying it’s your fault but it would really mean a lot if you could try to call more often.” But don’t assume you always have to hash it out. Sometimes the healthier option is to let it go or find a work around. It’s okay to decide what feels healthiest for you.
- When do you break up? Save break ups for when you have become such different people that you no longer have a healthy way to come together or connect. I’m talking break ups with your core peeps, not with the coffee acquaintance who hits on your partner. When space or communication or forgiveness won’t bring meaning back to a core relationship, when you have tried the things but you cannot thrive inside of the relationship, that is when it makes sense to step away. It doesn’t have to be about fault. The metric can simply be irreconcilable differences. And remember our capacity changes. Our capacity to see and understand, to show up for ourselves or for another. Sometimes some space is enough to regroup and come back with fresh Freaky Friday eyes. To find the love and build on it once more, and leave the disconnects in the dust.
- Beware of defending yourself. I mean you’re gonna probably do it in your head. At least replay your version of what went down one or two or three hundred times. But what happens when you defend yourself is that you give power to the “less than”. They are afraid you don’t love them or didn’t care enough or didn’t treat them right, or should have done or said a thing. When you pile on defenses you enter into why you are right and they are wrong territory, and two perceived wrongs don’t make a right. You are welcome for that cliché. I have more. Mole hills become mountains. A stitch in time saves nine cats. But seriously you can’t prove your worth by trying to prove your worth. Try instead being brave enough to decide who you are proud to be, how you want to show up in your relationships and take action from there.
- Last but not least. Your core peeps are the good guys in your movie of life. You know what isn’t going to get us to the happy ending or even the satisfying one? The good guys fighting the good guys. And if we want to be super deep and spiritual about it, if we want to be extra curricular with our best practices, we extend the grace and choose the love until the yarn knot of humanity untangles, and we all become the good guys. Ya, I dream big. But in the mean time, today, when we’re trying to make it through our to do list, when we’re feeling our feelings and eating our Wheaties and crushing it at something we should, would want to or are expected to crush, let’s take a hot minute to practice trusting the love and respect we have for one another, all of the value we know is there, and relax enough to let it expand a little and then some more, until there’s no room left for anything less.
Love, Erin