finding the sweet spot between collapse and rigidity
Transcript of this video:
One of the challenges of living in uncertain times is
how we manage to respond to each other,
when we are experiencing strong emotions like anxiety
or perhaps even despair or anger.
And I think back to when I was a young adult,
about my parents’ responses when I was distressed…
which were typified by two experiences, one with my mother,
when I was feeling like I was falling behind my peers
and not keeping up with them,
and was frustrated by my failure to achieve my ambitions.
I remember her saying to me, “Oh, if you hope for the moon,
you’ll break your heart.”
Which was a very disheartening thing to hear.
And my father’s response, which was equally unhelpful,
was at the other extreme of that really.
I remember him sitting on the end of my bed once
and saying to me, “Sometimes you just have
to grit your teeth,” which at least was congruent
’cause he literally did grit his teeth as he said it to me.
And I suppose what my mother’s
response exemplifies is a kind of way of collapsing in response
to strong emotion from another.
And my dad’s response at
the other extreme was just rigid, an attempt
to shut it out completely, which again, wasn’t helpful
to him or me, it didn’t allow any relationship to form.
And my friend Rebecca sometimes uses the metaphor
of a sea sponge to hint at least
at a different way of responding.
If you think about how a sea sponge responds to water,
it absorbs it, allows it to pass through
and still retains its structure.
And that’s a bit of a clue as to what I think
as human beings we are looking for from each other
when we’re experiencing these strong,
supposedly negative emotions, the capacity to
be a bit porous.
Or another way to think about it is
to use my the term my friend Jordan Soliday uses:
a non-anxious presence.
Can we be a non-anxious
or a grounded presence for each other
when we’re under stress in these ways where we’re able
to respond to the feeling without shutting it out
or running away from it?
And these are some of the ideas that he
and I will be exploring in our Unhurried practice group.
And if you’re interested in that,
I’ll pop a link in the comments,
or at the end of the video and
do let me know if you’re interested.
Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
