Pop-Up Workshop 1: On Thin Ice

You have a few choices and it depends on your capacity. Are you able to tolerate their behavior? Are you willing to take the risk of sharing the impact that they have on you? Are you able to lean into the difficult conversation of owning your part in creating that dynamic, where you too are a problem solver?

Those things are some of the choice points you have, but it all depends on your relationship, your history, what your capacity is and what their capacity is, right? We can't force someone to magically meet us where we are, if they're not ready and not willing to confront these aspects of themselves, right?

I'll just use my mom as an example. She is absolutely resistant to feedback and loves going on tangents whenever I share anything with her. I'll talk about something and she'll pick one word and then just create a whole story about that word. That was not even the point of what I was sharing, and I can be annoyed at her forever, or I can slowly set boundaries with her and say, "right now I'm not feeling supported by the way that you're listening. I know how much you care about me and know this is not easy, but I just have to share with you that this doesn't help me. And if you actually want to help me, I just need you to try repeating back what you heard..

Let's just start there, mom, you know. Like, like I, being a teacher of this material and still working on this stuff, I don't magically have it all figured out, but like I too have to take step, step by step and guide someone there while managing my own frustration, and irritation, but at the same time. It's like playing hard mode in a video game. That's a really tall order to ask of yourself right now, but you should just start with, what do you have capacity for, and what are you willing to risk to either strengthen this relationship or just to keep it where it is?

The specific principle we'll talk about is congruence versus being collected. Sounds like you optimize for being calm and having it together. It's very clear something is leaking out and it's having an adverse impact. And so there's actually a lot of power, and skill that's required to actually lean into the anger and the frustration and put it on the table.

The more you try to hide it, the more it leaks out. It's kind of like walking around with three weeks of rotten eggs in your backpack, and then people have this reaction when they look at you. And you're like, why? Why is everyone just staying away from me? Your anger is leaking. Your unprocessed emotion is leaking. So it's about instead of hiding it, which is what we are taught to do, actually bringing it up in a skillful way.

What's really important to emphasize is that there's no one size fits all. We can learn all these tactics, but you going to have to try something different with each person. It's almost asking, what's the best wine in the world? What's the point of this question? Because everyone has different tastes and some people don't even drink, so what feels like de-escalation for one person

can feel like rapid escalation for someone else. And our job is to in the real-time have active conversations that both reveal and gather more information. We're operating mostly on assumptions, and we're kind of walking around landmines that keep exploding, and we wonder what's going on versus like, "Oh, this just happened for you. It brings this up in me... And when I share that, I wonder if it has this impact on you, and so on and so forth." And it sounds almost ridiculous to people who've never done that and don't communicate like that, but like only in that meta and like meta meta does conflict no longer feel like conflict. It just feels like a very slow conversation.

There's two dynamics at play here: one is there's an assumption around display rules, so when your partner sees you processing without strong emotion, there's an assumption or meaning attached to perceiving that as no longer authentic. That's just an interpretation that's going to be very interesting to unpack what that means, where it comes from, and the validity of that interpretation because that would then put a break on your ability to do that, which should still be available on the table, so that's one.

The second dynamic that I observed in what you share is that there's a willingness to be in it together, but what's your capacity to be in it together? Right? Like appetite and digestion are two separate things. And so you can want to do that, but you might not be able to. So what's really important is in these moments, it's a test of your ability to share the care, right? You can be like, "I need to space because I want to be in this difficult conversation with you, but I can't. And the only way I can do that is have a take some space, so I want to be in this hard conversation with you because I love you or whatever it is you share. That way, it's not that I need to distance myself and process alone, which sounds like a potential pinch point for your partner.

So it's like, if you want to co-regulate, do you have the capacity to co-regulate? And if you need to take space away, can you share the care first? So the care will go out the window. When both of you are hurt, this is natural right? How can you be like, "Oh, you're hurting me, but I still love you."

Like, it's really hard. It's really hard to not say, like "what the fuck?" when your hand hits the stove that's hot, right? So it takes more effort to lean into that really challenging, vulnerable space of saying like, even when I'm hurting, I still remember the trust that we've built, et cetera.

The easiest clue is if they ask, is for you to brainstorm, or "Can you help me with something?" Or like, "What are your thoughts around this? Is usually a clearer invitation for advice. And even then, you want to double check. A lot of what we're teaching comes from a culture of consent at every level. Do you need this right now? Do you want this right now?

Is this helpful, is this not helpful? Some people might feel like, oh, what a handicap, like stop sensoring me.  That kind of person, I don't want to deal with. And that's okay for me. But for the person who wants to bring in care into their communication, this is just the work of being in relationship with humans.

Outside of that, it really is just asking. So even the language of like what clues means you are looking for clues instead of just asking. And of course, like there are relationships where like, asking feels really weird, like I imagine that's my mom, like, "Mom, do you want me to listen right now?

Or give you some suggestions? She would be alarmed or skeptical even of that kind of reaction. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with I am going to just listen in this way, mom. And we can get used to it and like find a way to make it feel good for both of us.