This is a post from a blog I wrote a couple of years ago. I've moved it here as the old blog's been shut down now, and it needs a home somewhere! Meeting at the Well proper started in March 2011.
My ex is getting married. This is absolutely fine, I'm happy for him, we're still good friends. But I spoke to him today, and he told me that he'd decided not to invite me to the wedding, as he thought it might be a bit odd for his fiance.
I understand, of course I do. But that doesn't mean it didn't upset me.
My sister happened to be online, so I told her the news. 'Well,' she said, 'it's understandable.'
'Of course it is,' I replied, 'but I'm still upset.'
She pressed on, arguing his case. It didn't need arguing – I understand it. And I pressed back, trying to get her to understand why I was upset.
'Ross invited Rachel to his wedding,' I pouted. (Holy fuck, I thought, Did I seriously just reference Friends to validate my argument?)
'It's really not the same thing,' she said.
'Why?'
'Because this isn't a soap opera.'
By now I was getting really quite annoyed. 'No,' I said, 'it's worse. It's like if Amanda didn't invite me to her wedding.'
'Woah,' she said, 'I'm stepping away from the angry sister!'
So we went our separate ways, each significantly more annoyed and upset than we were beforehand.
I called a close friend, then, and told him. 'Hm,' he said, 'I guess that's understandable.' My brain started gearing up for battle. 'But still,' he went on, 'it must be upsetting.'
'Yes,' I replied, 'it's like if one of you lot didn't invite me to your wedding.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'That sucks.'
And with that, I was fine. I'd been heard. That was all I needed; someone to acknowledge that it sucked. No more upset, no more cross. All was well.
The pressure's off
I noticed these exchanges because I've just finished reading How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, as recommended by the lovely Havi. It was very quick. I read it on the plane.
It really is a great book. I highly recommend it for anyone who interacts with humans in any capacity.
The authors observe that when someone is feeling some strong emotion – pain, fear, anger, whatever – a lot of the time, all they really need is for someone to acknowledge that. To simply name that feeling. 'You must be really angry.' 'It's disappointing when things don't go as planned.' 'Sounds like you're really frustrated.'
This is really a revolutionary idea for me. Being a sensitive flower, I find it hard to be around people in pain. I tend to want to fix things. I tend to want to engage with the problem intellectually, offer advice, reason, something that will 'help'.
I can now see that, most of the time, it's not helpful. Advice can irritate and patronise. Reason, as I discovered with my sister, can just make us more and more annoyed and upset as we fight to get our pain recognised.
This idea is actually liberating. Turns out, there is no pressure to 'fix' anything. I don't have to take responsibility for the other person's emotional state. It's enough for me to recognise it. Revolutionary.
The evil of leading questions
There's all kinds of useful stuff in the book. (And cute little cartoons.) Another piece of advice for parents which I particularly liked is 'Don't ask too many questions.'
I loathed my parents' questions. Still do. The more they ask, the less I want to tell them. It creates a really primal reaction in me.
The most evil kind of question, in my opinion, is the leading question. And the very worst of these is 'Did you have fun?'
A friend threw a party for me recently. Later he asked, 'Did you have fun at the party?' I wanted to yell, 'No, it sucked!' And maybe slam the door.
It didn't suck, of course, and I did have fun, though not in a simple 'That was a blast!' kind of way – parties are never simple for me, too many issues. But the fact that he had put that label in the question made it really difficult for me to answer, let alone to answer shortly.
If he'd asked, 'How was the party?', and I didn't want to talk about it, I could just say something short and neutral – 'It was good' – and change the subject.
But 'Did you have fun?' Horrible to answer.
You can't say 'No', obviously, and that in itself creates resentment – that your words have been dictated for you.
But for me to say 'Yes' didn't feel truthful either. And I didn't want to go into a long exposition about my issues with parties and how I enjoyed it mostly but it wasn't easy for me, either. It really didn't feel appropriate for me to burden someone who just threw a party for me with my many issues with social interaction. So I had to say yes. I was put in a situation where I had to agree with a statement that I didn't fully agree with (that option being less evil than the other), which made me feel resentful.
What especially made me feel resentful in this case was that the fact that the question was phrased in this way made me feel as though what my friend was interested in was validation, rather than hearing my thoughts or feelings. It felt like fishing. It felt like he was using me as a praise piñata.
I suspect I react more strongly than most people to this stuff – when I talk about how I feel about it, people sometimes think I'm being a bit crazy.
But if you think about kids in this context it doesn't seem so crazy any more.
We want kids to have a healthy relationship with their emotions, right? We don't want them to judge themselves negatively for feeling unhappy?
'Did you have fun?' makes a kid feel she has a responsibility to have fun. That if she feels something else, she's failed in some way. That other feelings are not acceptable. 'Did you have fun?' tells a kid what she 'ought' to be feeling. It makes her feel that her real feelings doesn't matter, that she's just there to smile and be pretty so that other people don't feel uncomfortable. (I'm going to stop here before I go off on a long rant about it, but I think it's appalling that little girls are told that they're pretty when they smile and ugly when they don't, or told that they 'should smile more'.)
To answer 'No' to 'Did you have fun?' makes a very strong statement – probably stronger than a kid wants to make. 'No' is going to be followed by concerned exclamations – 'Why not? What went wrong?' – or angry ones – 'Don't be so rude,' 'You're in a bad mood,' 'I only asked!' 'No' creates a big fuss. 'No' is not a socially acceptable answer to this question. And if you want to hear about a kid's actual experience, limiting their available answers makes it pretty difficult for them to tell you.