Gunhild Archer, counselor

I want to share an interesting perspective shift I had earlier. I had had a conversation with a man I have been wanting to get to know. My impression was that the desire to connect was mutual. We had just agreed to move the conversation to a different platform, which to me meant we were taking the conversation a step further. I felt like it was an opening for more closeness. Yet, a few messages into the conversation and his replies were brief as fuck. It felt like he was trying to kill the conversation. No questions for me to answer. No real follow-up on the things I had shared in my previous message. In fact, the way he answered made me feel like I would be hostile if I kept engaging.

I have always had a hard time when someone’s words differ from their actions. My baseline reaction has been to take the entire weight of the conversation on me. This time I didn’t. I paused. I wanted to ask him what was going on given his abruptness, that was the only kind of engagement I felt was in integrity, but in fear of being told “it’s nothing, we’re good”, I held back.

The frustration from his lack of coherency remained the following day. I wanted to be in connection with him, but I didn’t want to chase him. No matter how reasonable whatever his reasons were for being abrupt, I wanted him to be the one communicating it. I had made it clear that I wanted to get to know him, to me it’s explicit that that includes the “why” behind him closing down.

I kept pondering whether or not I wanted to reach out and ask if we could talk about what happened, if doing so was me taking responsibility that wasn’t mine to take, if I should wait (possibly forever) for him to bring it up (which felt like NOT taking responsibility, neither for my own well-being OR for the relationship itself)… I was playing out possible conversations in my head, trying to figure out what I could express and how to express it. All of a sudden it dawned on me how manipulative I was. Every conversation I had imagined had one thing in common: I was trying to make HIM see what HE did wrong and how HE hadn’t shown up. I was expecting, demanding, him to fit into my perception of how a relationship should be.

Within a split second, my perspective flipped.

It was not about how a relationship SHOULD be. It was about how I wanted MY relationships to be. ME.

I felt that it was ME who should communicate what I wanted. In fact, it didn’t even have the quality of a “should”… The feeling was more like “I GET TO communicate, it’s ok that I want things the way I do; I’m allowed to”.

When I communicate what I want, I have been used to being met with dismissiveness. Because I couldn’t survive without my parents when I was a kid, I learned that, when met with dismissiveness there are no options. I either accept that I won’t get what I put forth or I get rejected (which reads: I either reject myself and get accepted by them, or I stand by my myself and get rejected by them). Neither feels ok. Naturally it brought up feelings of hostility, aggressiveness, and dissatisfaction. It made me resist my parents and the situation itself (although I did my best to quash the resistance).

The flip in perspective could only appear as a result of a sufficient number of experiences of the opposite. I know there are people out there who want to receive my feedback, because I have experienced it. I know there are people out there who will want to help me feel ok, because I have experienced it.

I don’t know if I’m able to convey this in a way that makes sense, but the experiences I had in recent years brought me out of powerlessness, futility, determinism. I have always believed that I have to go along when my feedback is dismissed, there is simply no choice, but that was the reality back when. It is not my reality as per now.

I think my parents shared my sense of powerlessness and futility when it came to being considered. I think they didn’t know that they could have themselves and let me be me too. If they did, they would have known how to accommodate me.