10 Feb Courageous Conversations
I’m learning, now that I’m older, how to have hard conversations with others without cringing in shame or getting so rattled that I lose my frame of reference.
I was thinking of this as I talked with my friend and colleague, Patricia Geller who I see for consultation as she’s a gifted attachment therapist. Patricia was telling me a story of how she spoke up to someone she had known for 20 some odd years letting him know she had been hurt by something that had happened between them.
I actually sat there with my jaw open. Wow. “You said that? That is so mature!” In her delightful way, Patricia raised her arms in triumph. “I was pretty proud of myself,” she said. So she should be. So should we all be when we take kinds of leaps into relationship.
Keeping Secrets Doesn’t Work
Patricia continued on to say that, “By keeping hurts secret, you actually damage the relationship and create distance. The hurt remains part of a wall you build and you either literally move away from the relationship or the bad feeling is always in the room with you. We can do damage to relationships by withholding, even when we think we are protecting the other person. A problem couples’ therapists make is focusing on the hurtful things that have been said instead of the honest and possibly hurtful things kept secret to protect the partner. They grow and can turn poisonous and may or may not even be true.”
I’ve been mulling our conversation over. How many conversations do I run away from? How many emails do I write, re-write, re-write the re-write, then write the re-written rewrite all over again? I can fall into a trap of trying to “do it right” making sure I don’t hurt anyone’s feelings, making sure I protect against any possible wrath, discomfort, distress coming my way.
I see these patterns I have of trying so hard to make sure everyone is taken care of, that no one gets hurt. Problem is, at times I’m the one who gets hurt.
There are times, as in Leonard Cohen’s words, when “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets through” when we have the courage to take the next step, whatever it might be.
Those steps take courage.
The feminist theologian, Mary Daly says courage is a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.
Sounds easy, right? Okay, I’ll be courageous. I’ll say what I have to say. Yet somehow we don’t. We stop. We back down. Why do we do that? Most of us stop ourselves from saying what we want/need to say because we’re afraid. Here are some of the basic fears, maybe you’ll relate:
- someone will be mad at us
- someone will pull away from us
- we’ll get confused and lose ourselves
- we’ll feel stupid – we’ll become ashamed of ourselves
Those patterns stop us from interacting and being connected. We use our fears to build walls instead of having the kinds of courageous conversations that build bridges and bring us the connections we deeply long for.
The big leap into the unknown often is how to take the risk to be vulnerable, to live from our tender hearts without falling apart.
Success Story for Alice
One of my coaching clients told me about how she did this to amazing success. Alice (not her real name) and her husband had been struggling and not communicating. My client had a terrible upbringing as so many people have had. She never learned how to interact. Instead her body would “react.” Her reaction cycle was invariably to lash out in anger. We’d been working on this over time and she’d transformed much of her reaction cycle.
What was under all that anger, though, was her need, her hope, her wish for connection, for love. One day as we talked about how hurt she got when her husband walked away I asked her why she didn’t just tell her how much she loved him, how important he was to her, and how hard it was for her when he disappeared.
The next time I heard from Alice was when she missed one of our scheduled sessions. She couldn’t be there she told me with a soft, luscious glee because she and her husband had a wonderfully intimate time together. I was glad our session was pre-empted!
A Personal Example That Happened As I Was Writing This Article
[As these things go, I had written this blog, ready to post it and a personal situation opened in my life where I saw the miracle of staying soft, open, and loving. This post is getting a bit long so I wrote it up as a separate blog post.]
That’s what’s possible when we enter conversations from the tenderness of our hearts.
The caveat I offer is to first have the courage to protect your own heart
If someone is not emotionally safe it’s not a good idea to bare our soul to them. Alice’s husband obviously wanted the same connection. He didn’t use Alice’s vulnerability against her, he didn’t shame her or humiliate her.
There will come a time when you are strong enough, connected enough to yourself that you could have a courageous conversation with someone who means a lot to you, or who has hurt you and be able to speak to them without losing yourself by lashing out or falling into a shame cycle. Till that time, practice with people you can take baby steps with first.