He is making me so furious! She is making me feel so disappointed! Soooo frustrated!
Must get away from that person! If only they would change! How could they possibly….I mean…. fer gawd sakes what are they thinking!?! DANG IT!
How many times in your life have you had this kind of feeling course through your veins? Or been saying these kinds of words out loud!
You may even KNOW that you are shooting thoughts at that person like bombs, and you know you can’t do anything about their behavior…and yet still the gut reaction is THEY SHOULD BE DIFFERENT.
Then, I would be happier. And by the way, it would be easier if THEY changed. Because…I have no idea how to stop reacting.
Yup. THEY are MAKING me CRAZY.
As humans throughout history have studied psychology, spirituality and relationships …all angles of examining humanity and our behaviors and experiences… there is a common set of ideas all the greatest writers and philosophers seem to grapple with:
If I am here with you, how am I actually influenced by you? What does my family, my childhood, my city, my country, my environment have to do with this thing that is ME?
Then where do you stop and I begin and how do I operate, separately from your responses?
This is like the whole soup of it all, the organism, the hive, how we interact, how we are affected by others.
Who are you, and who am I, and what is going on here when we communicate?
This is a big humongous question.
Dependency or Independency. How are we dependent on each other? What do we rely on from others? How do I get what I need and want here?
If someone else threatens my happiness (or appears to) or seems to not be giving me what I believe I need and want…then what do I say, think, or feel?
Unfortunately, all the reacting, physically and emotionally, can start to feel incredibly dependent…almost out-of-control dependent. Like someone can do something any minute that is my particular trigger and I’ll have a heart attack about it. No steady peace.
For example, once I was on a date quite a few years ago, after divorce.
We went to a very exquisite and fancy restaurant with an amazing view. The man I was with received a phone call mid-meal and left to take it outside.
I waited and looked around at the place. After twenty minutes, I did The Work. Did he leave? What’s going on? I have to know. I am trapped. There’s nothing else I can do. I stood up to go and a waiter stopped me and I realized the establishment felt worried about our table being completely abandoned with no bill paid.
I returned to the table. I knew I was not trapped, I knew this moment could be exciting! I had just questioned my stressful thinking in this “waiting” moment.
A great writer and therapist for couples in the past several decades (his books were introduced to me in graduate school) David Schnarch talks about the most fun, exciting and healthy dynamics between humans is the road to differentiation.
Carl Jung talks about something very similar and calls it “individuation”.
As you become more individual and unique, you discover your own path in life, you don’t lose yourself. In Schnarch’s words, you “hold on to yourself” in the middle of any relationship.
Independence….the sense that I love following my own authority, me knowing what I want and need and then going to get it, being self-reliant, being OK where I am and psyched that I’m continuing along an expansive path somehow.
Then Boom. Something BAD is happening around here. It looks chaotic, or scary, or weird, or like I’m being abandoned, or like I’m sitting in a restaurant all alone WAITING. And it’s someone else’s fault.
I suddenly realized…although I had been watching them for almost 30 minutes, that there was a large table of 8 people right near me, with two empty chairs because two people had left temporarily. (I had lots of time to hear their conversations so I knew the two people were returning at some point).
Uncharacteristically, I got up and went over to their table and said “May I join you?”
The whole table was delighted and welcomed me in. They were the family of the restaurant owners. The two people away from the table were getting a tour of the grounds. This restaurant had been here for 100 years.
It was so much fun, I hardly noticed when my date returned from his one-hour business phone call. In fact, I didn’t want him to come back yet.
No one “made” me feel bad in that waiting moment….except me. Until I questioned my thinking and it opened up a world of options that I couldn’t see before.
WOW. If we don’t think that someone’s behavior, or any situation, is MAKING us feel bad and there’s no way out….
What else could be possible?
If you really, really are not stuck….if you really are not 100% trapped….what could happen today?
Love, Grace
P.S. Only ONE spot left to do The Work for a day in Seattle. Come join us in this amazing process of identifying your painful thinking, and questioning it! Write grace@workwithgrace.com to reserve your spot.
Turning Relationship Hell To Heaven In-Person Intensive Seattle 12/1 10 am – 6 pm.