Maybe Not Doing Something is the Answer
There have been times in my life when I’ve felt completely disconnected from someone I was actively conversing with.
It’s as if we weren’t seeing eye to eye, and no matter how much pressure I exerted, they seemed to shimmy away from the core of the conversation, refusing to find any common ground. My anxiety would grow because I could never understand how my intentions and actions were so misaligned with theirs.
I worked hard to meet their needs, only to be met with hostility, disregard, or outright dismissal. It felt like the harder I worked to keep or strengthen the connection, the worse they recieved my actions. It was a challenging time in my life, one where I gave too much ownership of relationships to others because I truly felt that by being easy-going, go-with-the-flow was the only way to ensure sustainable success in keeping the relationship.
It felt like my needs and theirs were ranked on entirely different scales. Time after time, I found myself trying to explain or understand, only to feel worse afterward. It became clear: we don’t need to explain ourselves or our actions to everyone for any old reason. We need to dig deep and understand where our need to…
