approval and its costs

Dear Reader,

A husband in one of my couples sessions asked his wife where she wanted to go for their anniversary, and she couldn’t come up with an answer. After a long pause, she said she was so used to thinking about what other people would like that she wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore.

Most of us adjust a little for the people around us, and a lot of that is just being considerate. Some of us have done it for so long that it comes naturally. We can usually tell what will make everyone comfortable, and we go along with it without much thought. People tend to appreciate that, since it makes us easy to be around, and it feels good to be liked for it.

The trouble is what happens over time. When we keep setting our own preferences aside, they get harder to find. It’s a bit like a path in the yard that nobody walks on anymore. The grass slowly grows back, and after a while you can’t quite tell where it used to be. That’s what she was describing. She still cared, but it had been a long time since she’d answered that kind of question honestly, and she’d lost track of what she liked.

What surprised her was how her husband felt about it. She thought he liked how easygoing she was. Instead he told her he had stopped asking what she wanted years ago, because she almost always said “whatever you want.” He said that somewhere along the way, he had started to miss her.

I’d like to think the things we each enjoy were given to us for a reason, and that they’re part of what makes us who we are. It might be worth checking in with them now and then, even if it just means that the next time someone asks where you want to eat, you have an answer.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

what you’re afraid people will see

Dear Reader,

Before people come over, a lot of us do a quick cleanup. Whatever doesn’t have a place gets put in one room, and the door gets closed before anyone arrives. It’s a small thing, but I’ve noticed how rushed it can feel, as if it really matters that nobody sees the mess.

I think many of us do something similar with ourselves. We tidy up the parts people can see and keep the rest out of view. In my work, what people keep hidden usually turns out to be pretty ordinary. Often it’s just that they’re more worried or more tired than they let anyone know.

Keeping it hidden does work, in a way. People see the tidy version of us, and that’s what they respond to. There’s a cost to that, though. When someone tells you they don’t know how you do it all, they mean it kindly, but they’re talking about the version you let them see. Part of you thinks they’d feel differently if they knew the rest, so the kindness doesn’t quite reach you. Over time that can leave us feeling lonely, even around people who care about us. And the strange part is that the closer someone is to us, the harder we often work to keep that door closed. Hiding protects us, and it also keeps us from being loved in the places where we need it most.

There’s a hope that goes back a long way, the hope of being fully known and loved anyway. Most of us have had a taste of it, maybe when someone saw a part of us we usually keep hidden and didn’t seem to mind. Those moments are often simpler than we expect, and sometimes the other person just says, me too.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

the rules you live by

Dear Reader,

When I have to turn down an invitation, I rarely just say no. I'll write the text a couple of times, looking for a reason that sounds solid enough, something that makes it clear I had no real choice in the matter. I'll usually add more detail than anyone asked for, and by the time I hit send the message has gotten a good deal longer than it needed to be.

I have a friend who does none of this. Someone asks if he can make it to something and he says he can't, but thank you for thinking of him, and that's the end of it. For a long time it bothered me more than I could explain. It seemed abrupt, almost rude, though nobody he said it to ever seemed to mind.

It took me a while to see that the problem was mine. Somewhere along the way I picked up a rule that if I was going to let someone down, I needed a good reason for it, and just saying ‘no’ never felt like enough. I'd been following that rule for decades without ever putting it into words, and watching him skip it so easily was the first time I really noticed it. 

That's how a lot of these rules come into view, I think. From the inside they feel like common sense, so we rarely catch them directly. Where they tend to show up is in a small flash of irritation when someone else gets away with something we'd never allow ourselves. Most of the beliefs we've been looking at over these past few weeks reach our actual days this way, as quiet rules about what we're allowed to do and what we have to earn first.

I don't think the answer is to start breaking all of them. Plenty of the rules we carry are good ones, like keeping our word and treating people gently, and they are worth learning. The ones worth a second look tend to be the ones built on fear, rules that ask us to keep earning something that was already given freely.

If I'm honest, part of what bothered me about my friend was that I wanted the same ease she had in letting a simple answer stand. There's an old teaching about letting your yes be yes and your no be no, and I'd always taken it as a lesson in honesty. Lately it reads to me as a kind of relief too. A plain answer, given kindly, may not need nearly as much defending as I've been giving it.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

what you were taught to want

Dear Reader,

When I ask people what they want out of the next few years, the answers tend to come quickly and sound a lot like each other, usually some version of moving up at work or a bigger house. When I ask about the best ordinary day they've had recently, the answers slow down and get oddly specific. Someone talks about a Saturday morning when nobody needed anything from them and they sat outside with their coffee until it went cold. Someone else describes an afternoon spent fixing a fence with their brother.

The two lists rarely seem to have much to do with each other. I used to think that was simply the difference between goals and pleasures, and maybe some of it is. But I've come to suspect that the first list was largely handed to us, and the second is closer to what we actually want, and that somewhere along the way we learned to treat the second one as too small to count.

Part of what makes the taught wants so persuasive is that they're easy to announce. Other people understand them immediately and can be glad for you. The things we genuinely want often feel too small or too particular to bother telling anyone about, and it's hard to imagine someone congratulating you on a slow Saturday morning.

There's often a bit of embarrassment in how people admit to them, too. They'll describe the slow Saturday morning and then add something like, I know that's not much, as though they've confessed to a lack of ambition. That little apology is worth paying attention to. It suggests we learned early which wants were respectable, and the ones that didn't qualify got moved quietly to the side.

I don't think the answer is to throw out the bigger goals. Some of them are genuinely ours, and many were handed to us by people who loved us and wanted good things for us. It might just be worth giving the smaller list a little more standing than we usually do, since it may be the more honest record of what we've wanted all along.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

the voice inside your head

Dear Reader,

A woman I worked with kept describing what she called her inner critic, and she talked about it the way you'd talk about weather. It was just there, a condition of being her. So one day I asked her to say out loud what it actually said, in the exact words.

She had trouble with it. Not because she couldn't remember, but because saying it in a room with another person made it sound different than it did in her head. Eventually she got through it: that she was pathetic, that everyone could tell, that she needed to get it together. Then she stopped and said, quietly, that she sounded like her mother.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where it would be easy to make the whole thing about her mother, and that's often not how it works. The voice isn't usually a recording of one person. It tends to be assembled from several, over years, and by the time we're adults it's been running so long in our own voice that the sources have mostly blurred together.

What struck me about that session was something else. She'd been carrying those sentences for thirty-some years and had rarely, if ever, said them aloud. They'd mostly existed inside her head, where there's nobody to hear them and little reason for them to sound like anything in particular. Saying them in a room changed what they were. She could hear the cruelty in them, which had been harder to catch from the inside, where they mostly just sounded like the truth.

That's the part I'd sit with this week. Whatever the commentary is in your head, it may not have had to survive being spoken. It might not have been heard by anyone who could have said, wait, that's not fair. A lot of it has been running in a closed room for years without much to answer it, and that's probably some of why it still sounds so convincing.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive