One of the things that I have been reflecting on this week is how we cope, or sometimes don't cope, with misunderstandings.
Misunderstandings happen to us all of the time, and of course can be big or small. They happen when someone changes plans on us at the last minute. They happen when we send someone a text or leave them a voicemail, and that person doesn't answer right away. They happen when we feel like the one who is always contributing, but never getting back from a relationship. Sadly, they sometimes mean the end of particular relationships and just as importantly, they can have us doing crazy things. Have you ever had the experience of power-walking down the street, having a furious conversation in your own head with partner, best friend or work colleague, about something which has happened between you? Suddenly you've found your words and you're using the ones you wish you'd had at the time. The problem can be, that that person is just not on the same page, and may not know how upset you are.
My point here then is that while all of these situations can feel very hurtful at the time and should never be minimized, sometimes we can blow things from bad to worse with our reactions. Often we either don't use our words to express how we are feeling, or we go to that place where we make stuff up about what happened, to try to get the story straight in our heads and make it fit in a way which makes sense to us. When that person doesn't answer a text, they don't care, can become our explanation. It may or may not be true, but the problem here is that we have decided that we know the truth.
Recently as an example of this, I was chatting to a client.
"My Dad is 90 Louise!" she told me. "He was an awful Father. He never played with us girls, he always favored my brother ... and now when I call him, he tells me he loves me?" Well I think there is a couple of points to make from this example. Firstly, my client has decided, undoubtedly with some very good reasons, that her Father's actions meant that he didn't love her at all. Understandably, she is hurt by this. What she needs to find out from him is — is her assumption correct? Is there any truth in him telling her that he loves her? A part of her problem then becomes, that she wants to go over with him all the things that he did wrong and to have him acknowledge her hurt, and give her an explanation which she can understand. She is so focused on the explanation that she has already given herself for his actions in the past however, that she's actually not prepared to ask the questions that she needs answers to, or to listen to what he has to say. Instead, she presents him with a list of wrongdoing, and as someone who struggles to acknowledge his faults, he ends their calls.
So of course my main point here is that if we want to clear a misunderstanding, we need to be able to acknowledge how it has made us feel, and that we too are not perfect. We might easily be making assumptions which are incorrect. We then need to be able to listen to what is being said to us and to try our best to respond to that, with an open heart. None of these things are easy to do, but sometimes they can save situations from escalating, or relationships from breaking. As a good friend of mine says, there is no truth — we have our take on a situation, and that's our side of the story. Other people have their side of the story — the truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle.
So as you move around in your everyday life, try to be aware of how, when something irks you, you can move into that phase of making up reasoning for what others do without checking. Then, if you get the opportunity stop yourself, and ask the person what they were meaning instead.