Navigating Relationships

"'Cause I've learned to slam on the brake

Before I even turn the key

Before I make the mistake

Before I lead with the worst of me

I never let them see the worst of me

'Cause what if everyone saw?

What if everyone knew?

Would they like what they saw?

Or would they hate it too?

Will I just keep on running away from what's true?

All I ever do is run

So how do I step in

Step into the sun?

~Dear Evan Hansen

I'm supposed to be writing my paper and studying for finals, and a huge presentation I have, but since I can't focus on that right now, I'm doing this!

I've been spending a bit more time lately focusing on my inner stability. That means taking my therapist's advice, letting my psychiatrist's words and truths sink in, bringing myself back to the present moment and the truth before panicking, and using meditation for a class assignment I have. I've never leaned this much into my psychiatric treatment, because right now, I'm ready to not be controlled by the outside world and the voices in my head. I'm ready to not be controlled by other people and their emotions, who not only don't deserve to control me, but shouldn't be given that power and responsibility, it's not fair to either party. While we are responsible to each other, I also am responsible for my own peace. 

I have the ability to believe the best in order to make life easier, to focus on facts and truth, and I also have the ability to believe the worst. No matter what I believe, the reality doesn't change. Only my emotional state and stress. So, right now, I'm working on the best. My mom helped me come to this conclusion.

Here's a little bit about my history: 

I have never had a conflict in a relationship in my life, where the relationship hasn't ended. When I said this to my new therapist, she said:

"I hate the use of the word never, in most situations. But I actually believe that this might be true for you in this situation, and I'm really happy that you're getting this chance." And she is correct.

So, the idea that something comes after a conflict besides having something important to you disappearing - sometimes, life as you knew it and most of what was important to you, is a completely foreign concept to me. 

From high school best friends, to my long time therapist, to one of my closest supports, to my lifetime community, to my lifetime best friend, to some of the closest adults in my life who helped raise me and whose kids were like siblings to me- I've lost many intimate relationships from conflict. 

To be honest, my closest relationships right now are pretty new, I don't have much left of my past outside of family. I have new friends, my doctors, and a completely different life, here in the same town I grew up in. It's crazy to me how that could happen. Really, out of all the things I ever could have imagined for life, this was 150% not it. I'm not complaining, and I don't think it's for the worse, I actually have a great world around me, I'm just interested in this outcome. 

I don't know who can relate, and it may be escalated with some of the things I battle, but hopefully most can agree that being misunderstood in conflict is a really difficult place to be. It can make us feel desperate and like we don't matter. It's hard to explain what happens in certain situations. 

Have any of you ever been skiing? Or rollerblading? Or even biking? 

For me, when my core values are being threatened, and I become misunderstood, it can lead me to one of those times that you get completely out of control. 

You are going straight down a hill and you can't get yourself to stop. You are going way too fast down, picking up speed, you can't remember how to slow down or make it stop because it is too fast and you can't think - the only outcome that can happen is a crash (this may or may not happen to me alot …:)). Inevitably, you are going to knock people down while you're going, and anticipating the impending fall. Unpreventable. 

You watch it all in front of you and you know what's happening. You lack control and you can't stop. And you watch your life crumble before your eyes before, during, and after. All so fast.

It is the most miserable experience for you and everyone you crash into. But for you, it feels worse at the most internal level because it's who you are, and you have no idea how to not be this way. What you battle every day is something that causes relationships to crash and burn. It's difficult to explain how helpless that is and how hopeless it feels if you have not experienced it. 

So, a few weeks ago, I thought I was reliving the worst part of life again. Loss of what was most important to you, because of your inability to have control, because of something inside of you, your design. And you have no control over the outcome and having what means the most to you being taken away. Not that we can't grow and change, but there is something inherent to us that makes these intensities natural.   

They say time heals. I guess it makes things more bearable, more tolerable, in the immediate present. How much does it heal us? We carry the wounds from past relationships, wounds that leave scars that don't disappear. And these wounds intensify each future scenario, further solidify the truth of what the voices say to you, making it more difficult to overcome each next conflict. While at the same time equipping you for it. 

When you are usually the one who causes the majority of the problem, very often the responsibility for the whole situation gets placed onto you. This is the worst thing about being a patient, being younger, not being the one in charge, is that you're almost ALWAYS considered the one wrong. And yet somehow even being the one in the lesser position, you are the one who is supposed to take all of the responsibility for everything that went wrong. I can't tell you how often I've been told:

"You don't take enough responsibility" after having spent the majority of the conversation I just had explaining everything I did wrong (quoting things they told me I did wrong to be validating), explaining how it's affecting me to the point of being sick and trying to figure out what else I can do to make it right and the things I've been doing to make it right, and then ENDING my time talking by briefly expressing how what happened also impacted me and what would be helpful for me moving forward. Everything I say at the beginning is negated, because I advocate for my needs to be met, and hope for another person to see where they can lessen the punishment I'm feeling, and maybe even take a little responsibility for how I got to the place that I got to. When I was already feeling the weight of the world in responsibility, hearing those words crush me to a point of helplessness.

And maybe how I got to where I got to makes sense. How most people get to where they get when they make harmful decisions makes sense. Otherwise, most people wouldn't do harmful things. 

In some situations, maybe I wasn't even in the wrong, it's just different than what the person in power thinks, and so that person is unwilling to believe that your advocating for something different for yourself or a group isn't just rebellious and argumentative. 

It makes me believe that everything wrong that ever happens is because I get myself into these situations. That I am wrong. That I got myself here. But from what? Advocating for myself? Trying to be heard when no one understands? What is it that makes it go wrong? What is my mental illness, and what is people just assuming I'm mentally ill and the only problem?

There is a lot of damage and danger from a single story.  I feel often a victim of others looking at a single story. This is the patient, this is the younger one, this is the one in less power, (even sometimes: this is the woman) so she has to be wrong, because that is the single story of those identities. 

People also unfairly put so much responsibility on themselves to be perfect and in turn have a lot of shame if something goes wrong, because they believe they were doing their best, and because they were doing their best, you were in the wrong for not responding the right way, and it couldn't be their fault because they were doing their best. 

That's not fair to any of us, because it dehumanizes us both. It puts too much pressure on each party involved. In reality, both parties were doing their best to survive the scenario. So were we both in the wrong? Yes and no. We did what we could with our resources and capabilities in high emotionally intense situations. And, we both failed each other. Judging it, shaming and blaming, does absolutely nothing for us except pull us further apart and create more tension. We need to each take responsibility, and also have empathy. Empathy is experiencing what the other person experienced. We can do that by either having gone through it before, letting yourself walk through mentally what they went through whether they describe it to you or you imagine it and truly try and feel what they felt, OR, we can literally just remember what our experience was, and imagine that they may have had a similar one. Empathy is ESSENTIAL. We cannot survive relationships without empathy. Empathy is everything. 

Let's take a step back here. I HATE people evaluating me during my times of being out of control. In fact, the people who love me actually know that it's not me. These people I had conflict with, have never in the past evaluated me when I spiral. They know I hate it about myself and that it's just not who I am. They see past it into the person they know and love. That has always meant the world to me, and helped me believe someone could see past the worst of me. So I need to step back for a second and think about what I am doing. 

If my biggest fear is being evaluated based on my worst, should I be evaluating someone else's character and the meaning of the words they say during their highest emotional states? Is that fair? 

What is my single story? Am I dehumanizing them, expecting them to be perfect? I don't like the single story when I'm dehumanized into always being wrong. So now do I get to say they hate me, are horrible people, and meant all the emotionally charged things they say, when they have loved me, I have always considered them some of the greatest, most well intentioned and goodhearted people I know, and have said completely opposite and loving things over the last many years that I've known them? What am I evaluating here? Is that fair? 

Where are they coming from? What's MY single story? This is about internal reflection, not speculation. Navigating relationships starts from within. 

Friends - right now, as I mentioned before, for the first time in my life, I have the opportunity and blessing to navigate an important relationship getting to move forward after a conflict. 2 important relationships. So here is what I'm learning. 

I am navigating other people's emotions. I am surfing their emotional waves. I am not dealing with black and white truths and perfect human beings. I am working with someone just like me, 

And I know how up and down I can get, eSPECIALLY when something so startlingly negatively impactful happens with a close relationship. 

One of the MOST important things I was told by my psychiatrist that if she told me years ago I never would have been able to listen because it would've set my voices off so loudly because of how much of a loser I would have felt like: 

Another person's emotional state does not dictate your personal security in yourself and your worthiness on the planet. One (or 2) person's emotions should not have that much power over your life. 

The trick for getting past this hang up of thinking black and white "if she/he hates me/would say that, nothing is okay and I'll never be loved" : 

Think about this person, and check the facts. How have they treated you over all of the years that you've known them? What do their consistent actions say about how they actually feel about you, and whether or not they would stick around? What have they said in the past that you have believed was true? In a non emotional state, how often have they indicated otherwise than their consistent love and support? This likely will tell you if you are evaluating them based on their emotions vs. the truth. 

After that, think about all of the relationships you have that are going well. Are any of them going well? Do you have support? Will these great things hold you over, while this one relationship that is going to return to normal gets resolved in its conflict? Knowing it will be okay, because I know I am navigating a relationship that is going to remain consistent in my life, allows me to move forward in this way. 

Am I trying to accept worst case scenarios that I'm making up in my head? Of course I make up these scenarios because of my past, but this time, it's different. And this post is not about navigating the worst. I've posted about that before. This post is about the hope of navigating a future with important relationships, and how to not let desperation take over.

I may have feared more that the relationship would change in an intolerable way, than I feared that it would end. But I wasn't remembering that I am a part of the relationship. This means that we both need to get our needs met, and so we will, since we both want the relationship. The fact of that reality is that the relationship isn't changing, which was my fear; but we will internally look at what we can do to foster an improved dynamic. That is completely tolerable. Because what happened didn't work for either of us. But the worst thing we can do is scratch everything and assume that we weren't already all growing. Setbacks and conflicts happen in our closest relationships. Saying that nothing was working and there was no improvement or change is black and white and can either end the relationship or set it back further than it had to be.  

A second powerful piece of advice I would not have been able to take from my psychiatrist if she told me years ago, is to think about how I can make it blow over sooner. What do we each need for this to blow over sooner, and what can I do about that? 

I can give space. This can sometimes be scary but it's fair because I need that same space, to come back to an internal sureness of myself and peace. Space doesn't indicate an end or change. It gives us an opportunity to do internal reflection instead of exacerbating our emotions. 

I can choose to not ask for reassurance that everything is going to be okay from the people who are still feeling emotional. I can wait for them to be ready to give reassurance again. That feels autonomous to them, and will feel more genuine and not desperate to me. It also gives me security in the future that things can be okay without needing to ask. And, knowing that I am okay regardless.

I can avoid doing the things that had upset them last time. Even if it might be hard and that might just be what they need and not meet what I feel like I need. Maybe there can be a future conversation about that, but for now, I will be okay. 

There are things I need from them, but I need to spend the time I have in this space, finding a peace that will keep me okay, even if I can't get that need met in this relationship. I can meet my own needs where others fall short. Maybe some of these needs will get met sometimes from them and then not other times, and what a blessing that people care enough to try even when it's not their strength. And maybe in the future, I can even advocate a little bit more once these things blow over. 

I want to end with this excerpt from a Taylor Swift song (SURPRISE!)

"I blew things out of proportion, now you're blue

Put you in jail for something you didn't do

I pinned your hands behind your back, oh

Thought I had reason to attack, but no

Fighting with a true love is boxing with no gloves

Chemistry 'til it blows up, 'til there's no us

Why'd I have to break what I love so much?

I need to say

...it's not what I meant

Sorry that I hurt you

I don't wanna do, I don't wanna do this to you

I don't wanna lose, I don't wanna lose this with you"

Blowing things out of proportion and putting someone In jail for something they didn't do - we all made mistakes in the situation, but we can't call our people evil, they don't deserve jail for having good intentions. We're boxing with no gloves. We have nothing real to hit each other with. And in the end, we don't want to lose the beauty that's been built in the relationship. So, what can we do to navigate where we are now? Let's assume the best, and in assuming the best, we can move forward with security and trust, that things will be okay, we are okay regardless, we have the security within ourselves that we can handle what's next.