Doing better

I’m angry, but you’d never know it. 

I’m curled up in a blanket on the couch in my studio. It’s warm. The sun is streaming in through the window. I’m not yelling or crying or even cursing under my breath. My face isn’t red, my heart isn’t pounding. The only thing you might notice if you were here is a rather intense look on my face as I triage the many, many thoughts swirling around my mind.

Impressive, right? I mean, this is some super-human anger management I’ve got going on here. But I’m not super-human. I’ve got a few things working in my favour.

First, there’s no one around to talk to, which is helpful. Sorting through angry thoughts in my mind is challenging enough. Once I say them out loud they gain momentum and become much harder to wrangle.

Second, I have the apartment to myself which gives me space to let my guard down and reboot my system. Like restarting my computer when the screen freezes and I get that little rainbow circle of death.

Third, I’ve done this before. I’ve done this a lot. 

I’m a girl with big feelings, which is a lovely quality, but somewhere between my last break up with my first husband and my first break up with my current husband, I started to wonder if my big feelings might be causing some trouble in my relationships. Specifically, when it came to disagreements. I decided I wanted to do better.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

There’s no shortage of rhetoric out there about what we can do to treat each other better. About empathy and anger management and being present for each other. It all sounds lovely, but they tend to leave out the details about what exactly those things involve and how long they take to master.

When I decided I wanted to do better on the being-a-good-partner front, I wasn’t too far into the self-help books and TED Talks and online courses before I realized, there’s a reason they leave out the details: 

Treating each other better is hard work. 

Allow me to give you an insider's perspective. 

The first thing they tell you is to try to notice when you’re about to react to your feelings when they come up and pause. Just pause, you know, just put a little space between the feeling and the reaction. Just pause - pfft. It’s like trying to stop a train by sheer force of will. 

Our reactions are habitual as in, they happen without us even thinking about it. Stopping the Carolyn train took a lot of effort and analysis, asking questions like What happened just before I reacted? What did it feel like in my body when it was happening? It's taken a helluva lot of practice to be able to even sometimes catch that moment before I'd react. 

When I do, I have a choice: I can either continue the way I usually would, or I can do something different. 

A deceptively simple choice. Here’s why: reacting the way you always do feels good. It feels right. Doing something different feels downright counter intuitive. 

But I started actively choosing to do the thing that felt wrong in every way in the name of treating people better. My reward? Sitting with a hot, heavy lump in my chest that wouldn’t shut up about how it’s right and it deserves to be spoken. In our house, we affectionately refer to this feeling as “eating it.” 

Eating it is not about silencing yourself.

It’s not about being submissive or making yourself small. It’s recognizing that in this moment, your feelings are hijacking your body and saying to them I see you, I know you’re trying to take care of me, but you’re not calling the shots here. I actually find it pretty empowering.

But it does tend to kick my defensive/sad/scared/angry thoughts into overdrive.

There are days that the best I can do at this point is leave the room and reboot, like I did in the scene I described earlier. Other days, when I have it in me, I stay, listen and learn on my cues - things I've learned I can do to help override my system and bring my prefrontal cortex back online, i.e. calm the eff down. Things like, be curious, ask a question.

Don’t be fooled, this isn’t straight forward either. The first time I thought be curious the question I went with was Have you considered that maybe you’re wrong? 

What?! It’s a question.

These days when something's not making sense to me, I try to stick to clarifying questions like What do you mean when you say X? Tell me more about Y, I don’t think I’m getting it yet.

Put simply, I assume there’s something I don’t know.

I haven’t nailed this part, not by a long shot, but the times that I’ve managed to get it right have taught me a few things. One, I’m wrong a lot (I don't love it). Two, I make a lot of assumptions. 

Which brings me to three and folks, this is the good stuff. The point of going to all this trouble, the answer to the question Why bother?  Three, I find that when I ask questions, when I stop assuming I have all the answers and start wondering what I might not know, my arguments turn into – are you ready? – conversations. 

Explorations, even. We talk about how we're both feeling. What we're going through. Where things went sideways and what was at the heart of our frustration. I'm not making this up, this isn't a newsletter romcom. The more I do this, the deeper, more connected, and dare I say, more joyful my relationships become. 

I'm saying, learning to treat each other better is worth the effort. 

But it does take more time than they'd have you believe. So I hope that if you find yourself in a situation like, oh I don’t know, maybe a global pandemic of some kind which has you feeling a tad more anxious than usual, you'll cut yourself a little slack if you're not treating everyone as well as you like.

When someone does something that rubs you the wrong way, and you feel that familiar rush of feelings, that moment isn’t your moment to get it right. It’s your opportunity to practice.

You'll get there. In the meantime, maybe read a few articles about how to apologize effectively.