Swallowing the Conflict to “Keep the Peace.”

Conflict is messy.  Not many of us are skilled at it.  Sometimes, it is tempting to try bypass it altogether to “keep the peace.”  I’m not talking about choosing a battle because a particular issue is not a big deal.  I’m talking about when someone crosses a line and you feel violated but decide to swallow these feelings to “keep the peace.”  The problem with this strategy is that there is no peace; instead the conflict is now stuck inside you while the person who crossed the line has no idea of its existence.  For a one-time interaction, there might not be any repercussions, but if this dynamic occurs in an ongoing relationship, something will blow up further down the line.

This issue is ripe for me because I want to teach my children how to speak up for themselves, and the best way to do so is to lead by example.  What makes this tricky is that I prefer to swallow my feelings rather than engage in conflicts with people if I suspect that I will be met with anger.  This is especially true if I suspect that the person I am setting a boundary with is emotionally unstable.  In other words, if someone crosses a line with me and I think that they are going to flip out if I tell them so, I am tempted to swallow my feelings and hope that it doesn’t happen again.  Unfortunately, the “ignore it and maybe it will go away” approach is ineffective.  When violating a boundary, a boundary-challenged person interprets silence as permission.  Over time, that permission becomes license.  Speaking up about it gets far more complicated the longer you wait.  It gets even messier than if you’d spoken up in the first place, but it has to be done if you want to break out of the dynamic.

I have had some recent experience with this very topic, in which I became engaged in a messy conflict with our neighbor over the boundary between our properties.  (I could not come up with a better metaphor for boundary issues if I tried).  Because we had a complicated boundary issue in the past in which this person was using our property over well past the line (and making the assumption that it was hers), we now have stakes that clearly delineate the property line, so that there is no confusion about where it resides.   I noticed that she’d planted something on our side of the line.  Not far on it, but enough to be an issue, especially considering the history.  I dreaded bringing this up with her.  I noticed myself trying to make concessions to her so that she wouldn’t get mad.  I noticed myself feeling as if I had to apologize for bringing it up.  I decided to be direct, and was met with exactly the rage I’d feared.  She yelled, cussed and hurled accusations before storming off and yelling “Fuck you, I’m done with you!!!!!” Even so, the boundary is now known and back to where it belongs.

Surprisingly, I feel more peaceful now that I didn’t swallow my feelings to “keep the peace.”  The rage that I’d been so afraid of came out from under the surface.  If I had swallowed the conflict,  all of my anger and fear of her rage would have churned inside of me as long as I allowed the boundary to be violated.  Instead, things feel clear and clean, regardless of the messy route I took.   I feel peace knowing what the conflict looks like rather than fear of what it might be, should I speak up.  Given the choice between being hated or occupying space, I choose to occupy.  It turns out that the person most affected by hatred is the person doing the hating.

Why Do We Share What We Share on the Internet?

I have the Internet on my mind lately, and today I am thinking about how much of our lives we share with the public via social media and blogging. I often struggle with how much to share about my life and my children, and how much to keep private. Today I read a blog post by a woman who had read her five year old daughter’s diary, felt moved by its contents and then shared them online by publishing photos of her words on an extremely popular “news” website. I will not link to this particular blog because I feel strongly that this should not have been made public, and is a pretty clear example of egregious over sharing.

Egregiousness aside, this article did make me think about just what might have inspired this mother to share her daughter’s most private thoughts with everyone in the world.  My guess is that she felt incredibly moved by what she found in her daughter’s diary, perhaps relieved that it was full of positivity, and deeply touched by the fact that her daughter is so adorable.  These are all understandable feelings, and she apparently could not contain them, so shared them with the world.

Many of us feel big feelings that are hard to contain, feelings that are very difficult to sit with, to hold, to feel. So we give them away in the form of sharing.  In the age of social media, we can share things before we even get a chance to feel them. Some feelings need our containment, need some time alone with us before we give them to the world, and some things just need to stay with us without ever being shared. It is hard to know which ones to contain and which ones to share because strong feelings move us. Anything that moves us, by definition, makes it hard for us to sit still, but sitting still with the most moving emotions can be an incredible, life-affirming experience.

Perhaps if the diary-sharing woman could have sat with her big feelings about her daughter, kept them to herself, she could have enjoyed them without anyone’s opinions intruding. Instead, she shared them in an article and the comment section is full of reactions (mine included) and many of them are not positive. She posted her own rather defensive comment about it all. Sharing her feelings online changed her experience of them completely. Now, instead of getting to feel the bliss she feels about her daughter’s sweetness (and hopefully some guilt about invading her privacy), she has hundreds of comments that she is defending herself against.

While she may be fine with this and feel that she did the right thing, I am guessing that many of us would not. I often wonder how many felt experiences I miss out on when I rush to Facebook about them. I have been noticing the moments that I automatically want to share, and instead of sharing them, allowing myself to sit with them for a bit. Yesterday, my daughter was being ridiculously cute on a walk of ours and I noticed myself composing my Facebook status about things she was saying and doing. I paused and realized that, of all the people who should hear about how cute my daughter was being, the number one person was…my daughter. Every time I noticed myself Facebooking about her cuteness in my mind, I told her how cute she was being. I enjoyed our private little moments so much more than I would have had I shared them with the bigger world. I still plan on sharing the adorable and less adorable moments on Facebook, but I am planning on letting myself have a bit more alone time with them first.

Cyber Judging, Cyber Guilting: How Is it Helpful?

This morning on my Facebook feed, I saw a link judging a woman’s parenting out of context.  It was a link to a blog post about a mom on her iPhone written as if it were a letter to her, explaining all that she was missing out on while ignoring her three kids at the playground.  My very first reaction was anger at yet another person judging parents out of context and drawing conclusions about the rest of their lives, then sharing it with the cyber world.  My next reaction was amazement that this mom in question got all three of her kids TO the playground, since I have such trouble getting my two children out of the house on many days.  Next, I had questions for the writer: “If you are at the playground, are you there with your kids, and if so, what about them are you ignoring as you write this judgmental blog entry in your head?”  or, alternatively: “If you are at the playground with no children, is there something in your life you are not attending to while you sit and judge this woman?  If not, then why not go up to her and tell her why you are so upset by her behavior, or give her kids the attention you feel they are missing?”

I spent a lot of this morning feeling bothered by this blog post and had to sort through many feelings and questions.  I was initially tempted to write a snarky Facebook post about people who judge others in this way; I wanted to judge the judger for judging.  Something about that did not feel quite right, so I let myself think about this some more and I arrived at the crux of what bothers me when I see posts like today’s.  This person observed a mother at a playground out of the context of the rest of her reality and came to a conclusion about what the rest of her life looks like.  (I know that I hear the phrase “Mommy watch this!” about 300 times a day, and I can tell you, I do not watch every time).  Next, she writes a public letter to everyone who reads her blog, but never says anything to the woman she is judging so harshly, nor does she go up to the children and give them the attention she feels that they deserve so much.  This does nothing to change this supposedly iPhone addicted mother’s life, or her children’s lives, but it does give people who feel the way the writer feels a sense of justification for their own judgments, and it does give people who talk on their phones while with their children a sense that they are being judged by nameless, perhaps countless, others when they are out in public.

There is an ironic dynamic that happens when someone complains on Facebook or on a blog that someone “out there in the world” has not been present enough in the world because they are too engaged in cyberspace.  This complaint is often followed by vociferous agreement in the form of comments that castigate this person who is not there to participate in the discussion.  Commenters often provide examples of other people they’ve drawn conclusions about based on some other out-of-context observation, and the judging provides either bonding when there is agreement or sniping when there isn’t.  The irony is that most of the people who are having this conversation with each other are focusing a lot of energy judging people who are not even there while “talking” to people who are not even there, about a person who once was there, about not being present!

This is a trap in the world of social media that we all can fall into: we are out in the real world and we see someone doing something we don’t like (or maybe something we do like).  Instead of engaging with that world by talking to that person, how often do we think, “I’m going to Facebook/blog/tweet/etc about that.”?  Thinking that thought still takes us away from the present moment, just as much as picking up the phone and tapping away at the keys.  What if the writer of the judgmental letter had not been composing her blog entry in her head but had instead decided to be present at the playground, to be more curious about who this family was rather than ready to write her conclusions about them to the people who were not there to begin with?  She might have written a much different blog entry, one where we might actually get to hear this woman’s story.  It might be cheering, funny, heartbreaking, inspiring, who knows?  Not us, because we did not get to meet her and hear her story.

If we notice when we are cyber-judging while preparing a script for whichever form of social media we plan to use to share the judgment, we have an opportunity to instead become present in the moment and time that we are in.  It could be that there are feelings we need to address in ourselves that are rising up, or it could be that we are missing out on a chance to meet a real person who is sitting right there next to us.  Either way, I am going to try an experiment.  I plan on noticing when I am Facebooking in my head and then I plan on pausing, noticing just who it is I am talking to in my head, and then trying to notice who or what is actually there in front of me, and what is needed from me in the real world, or what I need from the real world.  Maybe after attending to the present I will have something even more interesting to share later, or maybe nothing needs to be said.  Either way,  I look forward to learning something new.

For more posts like this, go here.

Having an Impact

When I was in my twenties and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I spent some time volunteering with and shadowing people who were doing what I thought I might want to do. One person in particular made a huge impact on me with one very short part of a conversation we had while I was shadowing her as she did her work. This woman did HIV prevention outreach in the town we lived in. Every day, she would come to the homeless, visiting everyone from teen runaways to prostitutes, offering them education, condoms, clean needles, and most importantly, her attention. She witnessed and listened to them with complete amd respectful attention. She greeted every single person with respect, kindness and love.

When I asked her what led her to choose this line of work, her answer moved me in a way that I have never forgotten. She told me that because her son committed suicide when he was a teenager, she wanted to do her very best to try help others from making the same choice. She felt strongly that if her son had been received in the world with more positivity and reflection from others, he might not have killed himself. She said that she wanted to offer despairing people an experience of kindness and positivity in the hopes that she might have the kind of impact she wishes her son could have had. She wanted her impact to lessen their despair, and she decided to devote her entire life to this.

This woman is on my mind especially now as we are all reeling from the killings in Connecticut. Everyone wants to know how to fix this problem and everyone has a theory. And this is a very complicated problem with many facets, so probably a combination of all the theories could help us flesh out these facets. Today, my mind is on the boys who commit these atrocities. They seem to be boys who don’t feel that they can have an impact until they kill, and then their impact is huge, and becomes huger when their names are splashed all over the news. Whatever misery they were feeling inside is now on the faces of everyone they impacted. I have met boys who remind me of the ones who end up killing. They carry themselves in a manner that seems to send a message: “I am repulsive, don’t look at me. I am invisible, don’t look at me.” I often react unconsciously but obediently to the message. I feel repulsion, I look away. I quietly wonder if they are secretly planning a massacre.

I cannot claim that I am able to change the life of a future killer by changing my reaction to people who remind me of one. I do want to learn how not to shrink away from people in despair and this is a huge and difficult task. I get grumpy, I get busy, and I am scared of the boys in our town who resemble the boys who kill children. I am not about to run up to them and embrace them, but I am going to attempt to disobey the message of anyone whose body says, “Avert your eyes! I am disgusting.” I want to try and see if I can look them in the eyes with respect and kindness. What might change for someone in such despair if they were greeted with respect and kindness by everyone they met? What might change for the person who feels invisible if they become visible? What might I discover if I look a scared and scary person in the eyes rather then cringe and look away? What if everyone did this? Would it have an impact powerful enough to change a person’s life before it is too late?

Feeling AT People rather than Feeling

I am struggling to find the right adjective to describe how I feel about the shooting that happened today at an elementary school in Connecticut. Horrified. Perplexed. Horrified. Deeply saddened. In disbelief. Horrified. Enraged. Disgusted. I am mostly horrified, and I am deeply saddened. I cannot even begin to understand how this could happen, why this could happen, and how someone could do this. I feel helpless, and I am enraged.

I want to be angry AT someone, I want it to be their fault and I want them to stop whatever they are doing so this doesn’t happen again. I see that I am not alone in this. When a person decides to kill others, we all are tempted to direct our anger at someone. People angry with the killer call him a coward. People angry about gun control or lack thereof start out being angry with politicians, but generally end up feeling angry with anyone from the opposite point of view. Personally, my anger gets directed at the people responsible for the media coverage. None of this helps. It just spreads the anger. We are not truly being with or feeling our anger when we immediately jump to blame someone else. It may feel satisfying and it may even make us feel like we are more in control of the situation. If we know who is at fault, we can fix the problem, and that will take care of our feelings of helplessness. If there is someone at fault, we can punish them, and that will make us stop feeling angry, right?

I cannot pretend that I know the answer of how you deal with something like this. I can only try to put myself in the shoes of the people who are suffering the most and imagine, as painful as it is, how I might feel if this happened to me. I would likely feel angered by people using my tragedy as an opportunity to snipe at one another about their pet issue. I would deeply desire that someone bravely attempt to try to understand how I might be feeling. And that is the word I keep rubbing up against today: feeling. Can we all pause today to feel? Can we turn off the news for a moment? Feelings cannot be felt under a barrage of numbers, tallies, and commentary. The killer likely felt some kind of rage he could not contain and he probably wanted to direct it at as many people as possible. We can pay respect to his victims by doing the absolute opposite thing. Let’s not play “hot potato” with our anger and blame, and let’s try to wrap our hearts around these feelings, with love for the people who are too hurt right now to feel what just happened to them. Let’s all hold those who have lost so much today, tight, in our hearts, allowing our emotions to be the fuel for the compassion that is so very much needed right now.

Please feel free to use the comment section if you wish to discuss your feelings.  I do monitor, so I protect this space from trolls and people who cannot discuss with respect.

Learning from our “Failures”

The other day, I ended a frustrating long term relationship with my raspberry patch. For about eight years, I tried many things to make the patch bear fruit. Every year, it would flower abundantly, bees would pollinate the flowers, and then the flowers would shrivel up and die. Every year, I would get my hopes up as the flowers began to bloom, only to have those hopes dashed about a month later.  At my lowest point I almost believed that, while everyone else in the neighborhood could grow raspberries, I clearly was cursed and could not.  I learned quite a bit from this experience about what to do and what not to do with raspberry plants. This year, I finally dug out all the old bushes. I started a new patch with new plants in new, gorgeous soil in a sunny new location. The mistakes I made in the eight year relationship with the old patch of raspberries has given me a wealth of information to apply to the new relationship I am beginning with this patch of different raspberries. I feel much more competent than I did eight years ago, and I am confident that this time around, I will enjoy successful harvests.

While the eight years I spent on the old raspberry patch were rather frustrating, I would not call the experiment a failure or even a waste of time. I know so much more now than I did going into it. I have no doubt in my mind that it was time to end the relationship because I tried so many different things to make it work, to no avail. I know now what raspberries need to thrive: good soil, plenty of water, space between plants, proper pruning, and ample sunlight. I know that I can provide these things in the new relationship, and I am committed to giving it my all. I met a hardier strain of raspberries than the previous one, and planted them the other day.

As I dug up the old raspberry patch, I felt a weight lifting: I did not have to struggle with this frustrating, unfruitful experiment any more. I also felt a sense of excitement at the prospect of applying my knowledge from years of work and research to the new patch. This reminded me of lessons learned from past relationships and projects that had also not come to the fruition I’d hoped for, but led me to my current relationships, career, and projects that I am passionate about. The so-called “failures” of my past gave me quite detailed instructions for the relationships, career choices and projects of my future. I rely on this information far more than anything else.

If you are reaching a similar conclusion about the unfruitfulness of a relationship, a line of work, or a project you’ve devoted time to, you might be tempted to chuck the whole thing and regard it as a failure, or wasted time. Before you do so, pause and look at what you have learned. What do you know now about yourself in relationship, career or hobby? What is it that you need to change about how you do things so that your future experiences will bear fruit? If you come away from any experience with knowledge, then you have not failed and you have not wasted your time or your effort.

More posts you might find interesting:

Gratitude for the Heartbreaks and Mistakes

Everybody Makes Mistakes!!

Ending a Relationship by Using the Silent Treatment

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to look at the key phrases people use to find this website. A surprising amount of searches follow some form of “Should I break up using the Silent Treatment?”  It is as if the searcher is hoping that if they ignore their partner, the relationship will magically go away.  Being the person to end a relationship is hard for a number of reasons, so it is understandable that one would want to skip the hard part and have things be done.

There are multiple problems with using the silent treatment instead of communicating the end of the relationship.  The biggest issue is that you haven’t stated that the relationship is over: all you have done is withdrawn communication.  As far as your partner is concerned, you are still together but now you are giving him or her the Silent Treatment.  Another issue is that, instead of your partner cooperating with this unspoken breakup by disappearing from your life, they are more likely to increase their attention as they attempt to find out why you have suddenly withdrawn into silence.  You can expect to get many phone calls, emails, and texts asking you what is going on.  If you outlast your partner’s curiosity, and successfully get them to disappear from your life by steadfastly ignoring them, you still have one last issue to deal with.  You left a relationship completely unresolved.  This is a problem because unresolved relationships are chock full of issues that will follow you into the next relationship you have.  You can trade this partner for another, but you remain the same person with the same emotional issues, so if you believe that you’ve gotten out of dealing with those issues by leaving a relationship in this manner, you will be unhappy to find them all over again in the next relationship.

If you are tempted to leave a relationship by using the Silent Treatment, there are other options that will be more satisfying for you in the long run.  The first thing to do is spend a little time looking inside and asking yourself what it is you want to avoid by not breaking up in person.  Are you afraid of expressing your anger directly and do you want to punish your partner?  Are you worried that your partner will be angry with you for breaking up?  Is some part of you afraid that you don’t have permission to break up and that your partner won’t let you do so?  Are you afraid that wanting to break up makes you a bad person somehow?  Are you not sure you really want to break up, and are you hoping that the decision will be made for you based on your partner’s reaction to the Silent Treatment?  Does some part of you want to move on but not really let your partner do so?  Really explore here to discover just what it is you are afraid of, and find a way to address your fears first.

After you have addressed your fears, if you feel certain that you want to break up, you will need to gather the courage to tell your partner that you are ending the relationship.  It won’t be easy, nor is your partner likely to thank you for it, so it helps to know for yourself what the benefits are to a truthful breakup rather than a sneaky one.  The biggest benefit is that there is no guesswork on either side: your partner is not guessing about why you’ve gone silent, and you aren’t guessing how he or she feels, or when they are going to contact you or stop contacting you, and you know that the relationship is indeed over.  There are other possibilities that could come with a well-communicated break up.  You might get an opportunity to air your grievances and possibly receive validation and an apology.  You might receive some feedback, however uncomfortable, about how you contributed to the relationship dynamic that caused the breakup.  This gives you the chance to change things for a future relationship.  At the very least, you had the courage to be truthful to yourself and your partner about the end of your relationship.  Ending a relationship in this courageous and truthful manner makes things clear and uncomplicated, and a clear ending opens you up to forward motion and growth.

Other posts you might find interesting:

“Handling” Conflict by Ignoring the Problem

Finding the Courage to Leave a Relationship

Communicating About Taking Space in a Relationship: An Alternative to the Silent Treatment

Being Truthful in Relationship Means Sometimes Saying Things People Don’t Want to Hear

The Joy of Facing a Fear

My daughter is learning how to pedal bike, which means she is also learning quite a bit about facing her fears. Recently, she learned to pedal small distances without me holding her bike. This increased rather than decreased her fear of falling. For a while, the better she got, the more scared she was. The other day, she broke through her fear and pedaled further than ever without any help. I could tell that she understood biking in a new way because she had a smile on her face as she chugged along.

On the day of her breakthrough, she was adamant that she did not want to bike because she was afraid she would fall. For her, the fear of falling was much more about fear of the unknown pain she might endure. She finally agreed to bike after I talked to her at great length about what it is like to fall from a bike, complete with examples of past bike falls I’ve had, and a comical demonstration of me flying off of her little bike and not getting seriously hurt. Having a bit of a picture, she agreed to bike, and for the first time, she had fun riding without my help.

She talked later about how she “faced her feels.” If she hadn’t faced her fears (or feels), she would not have discovered the joy of pedaling on her own. If she’d decided to stop biking altogether right then and there, she would have missed out on what could be a long relationship with her bike, one that could take her on many adventures. Yesterday, she had one of those adventures. She fell and got her first “bike boo-boo” and she is quite proud of it. Today she did a happy wiggle-dance while showing her teacher her band-aid and telling her a rather embellished tale of flipping over her handlebars and flying through the air and getting a boo-boo.

The tale is epic because the feelings are epic. Her worst fear about biking was realized, and nothing horrible happened, AND she got a cool band-aid that she wears like a badge of courage. The scary unknown is a little more known and turns out not to be so scary after all, and she’s feeling the exhilaration that comes from being released from the captivity of fear.

As adults, it can be much harder to face the fear that comes from doing something new and unfamiliar, especially if life has been fairly predictable for a long time.  It helps to remember the payoff that comes from facing our fears. There may be pain involved, just as my daughter learned from falling yesterday, but then we are free because the fear no longer is keeping us from moving forward. Think of a fear you want to face, and let the adventure begin. You can practice your proud happy dance right now.

More posts you may find interesting:

Crashing into Trash Cans

Scapegoating Others for Our Emotional Situations

Yesterday, my daughter was in a terrible mood.  She didn’t eat enough, and she skipped her nap.  The littlest things would trigger the biggest tantrums.  Whoever happened to step on the landmine of her bad mood was the person she thought was causing the bad mood.  For a three-year-old, this makes perfect sense.  Screaming from being too hungry and tired is too abstract of a concept.  A more concrete concept is: you did something I didn’t like and now I am screaming at you, therefore it is your fault I am screaming.  We repeated this pattern throughout the day.  One of us would do something that our daughter thought we should know she didn’t like, and she’d scream.  I told her it isn’t okay to scream at people just because you don’t like what they are doing, and  that the reason she was doing so is that she didn’t get enough sleep.  She’d respond by saying, “No, that person did this thing and that’s why I’m mad.”  She really wanted me to accept that holding the door for her when she wanted to hold it herself merited a screaming tantrum.  I wanted her to understand that she wouldn’t be having screaming tantrums if she just ate some food and got more sleep.

We ended the day at an impasse, but the whole situation made me think about how, as adults, we sometimes mirror this same behavior.  Sometimes we just want something to be someone else’s fault.  In the short term, it feels satisfying to have a villain to blame.  In the long term, there’s no real way to fix things if our emotional state is someone else’s fault and responsibility.  I will share a personal example.  I was once in a relationship with an emotionally distant man who was never going to be able to give me the committed relationship I wanted.  He provided me with multiple opportunities to feel horribly wronged, and I got a sense of satisfaction from complaining about him to my friends.  This went on for quite some time, until a very wise friend pointed out that this particular man was very predictable in his behavior and she wanted to know why I continued to see him, knowing just what I could expect from him.  I had no answer to this question.  I could no longer blame him for my unhappiness.  I realized that the fix was my responsibility, not his.  The relationship did not last much longer after that moment.

When I stopped blaming someone else for my unhappiness, I was able to see what was truly making me unhappy, which turned out to have nothing to do with any relationship.  I was deeply unsatisfied with many things in my life that needed changing, but it had been much easier to find a scapegoat.  Easier, that is, until I discovered that having a scapegoat meant nothing ever changing.  Dating a scapegoat meant dating a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.  Discovering that the problem was within myself to fix was terrifying and wildly exhilarating, and most importantly freeing.  I am hoping that one day I can teach my daughter in very small ways that she is free when she stops blaming others for what she can fix herself.  I’m starting with these smaller causes of her emotional state in the hopes that she can apply this lesson to the bigger things later.

Learning to Use Words

My daughter recently turned three, and this is an age of great leaps in communication skills for her and her friends. When she started going to school in January, she experienced conflict with other classmates that sometimes turned physical, with her on the receiving end of pushes, head-bonks, bites, etc. The first time this happened, her teacher told me that the child who hurt my daughter did so because she didn’t have the words yet to express frustration, so acted physically instead. This struck me deeply, and helped me to understand so much about toddler behavior. There are many ways that toddlers act out when they don’t know how to use their words yet. They scream, push, grab, and/or bite until they learn to use words to express the intense feelings they are having, or to ask for what they want. It’s normal, and completely understandable even if it is incredibly annoying to us as adults.

At three, my daughter and her friends are going through an exciting transition. They are all learning (in increments, of course) how to use their words rather than act like wild animals to express frustration or desire. The other day in class, I was moved and impressed to witness a classmate asking my daughter if she could hug her, AND accepting her answer of “No.” In the past she would run up to her and grab her, which didn’t go over very well. Yesterday, I accidentally bumped my daughter’s head with something I was carrying. She started to have a screaming tantrum, but then was able to calm down and say to me that she was mad that I had walked too close to her and bumped her head. I thanked her for telling me, apologized, and said that her words helped me to know what I did to hurt her, and showed me how to avoid hurting her in the future. If she had just screamed, I wouldn’t have this knowledge, and the likelihood of it happening again was greater than it was now.

As adults, there are ways in which we still haven’t learned to use our words to express our feelings or to ask for what we want. While most of us have learned not to bite, scream, push, or grab, we’ve developed more “civilized” ways to bypass the use of language that authentically communicates our feelings or desire. We may not scream like wild animals anymore, but we may angrily berate our partners without giving them a chance to respond. We may not bite, but instead rely on vindictive behavior such as the silent treatment or flirtation with someone else to purposely hurt our partner’s feelings. Instead of grabbing, we might just take something we want without asking first, because it is easier to apologize later than it is to ask permission.

All of us have reached adulthood with some gaps in our emotional education, and when we behave like toddlers, it only means that we have something to learn. It is scary to learn to use words for the things that we’re afraid to express. It is difficult to change a lifelong habit, but it is worth the effort. For my daughter, learning to use words enables her to address specific things that hurt her and upset her, and this reduces the odds of her experiencing future pain. Words do the same thing for the adult who relies on pain-inflicting behavior rather than expressing their feelings. The child who asks for a hug might not get one at first, but is also not going to be met with the screams and pushes that come when she grabs and tackles the person she wants to hug. When we learn to use our words rather than rely on animal behavior, our relationships lose a lot of painful drama and chaotic noise. This clears the way for exciting communication and deep enjoyment of each other.

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