If You Don't Mean It Forever

I am going to preface this the same way I always preface my writing of this type:

I am not a relationship or communication specialist, I am simply a person who communicates, and has put a lot of work into my communication style. I am also an avid observer of human behavior, and I have collected a series of observations when communicating with people who have not put the work into modify their social condition and those who have.

I hate to say that this particular thing has been a motif in my life, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t. How many arguments have I had where the person I was fighting with about whatever, instantly went for the jugular and gutted me with words, and then when I am too broken to continue the conversation or argument, walked away. Only to then come back later and tell me they didn’t really mean it. As though that some how unruins my life?

I was guilty of this for a really long time. To get out of an uncomfortable situation, conversation, or argument, I would get extremely petty and mean. I have always been uncannily good at picking out people’s insecurities, and before I understood how toxic and abusive that actually is, I wielded that weapon expertly. It was very effective, but I found that the people I argued with quickly disengaged from me, and never came back. For a long time, I blamed them for abandoning me, completely failing to see how I pushed them out by critically wounding them anytime they leveled, often legitimate, criticism at me. I was doing the social equivalent of shooting my relationships in the face because they told me I was stepping on their feet.

I repeated this behavior for years without ever really understanding the kind of damage I was doing, and what kind of toxic person I was, and how that idea of me was being spread. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I ran into one of those people that this scenario had played through, and we got to talking. I remember this so clearly it feels like yesterday. I asked her why she basically abandoned me, and she looked at me like I just asked her the way to the nearest time machine. I expressed my genuine curiosity, and she got really serious and said, “Are you fucking kidding me? I didn’t abandon you, I had to get away from you, so I didn’t kill myself.” I was so taken aback; I had no idea how to respond. She went on to tell me the same story I had been playing out in my head, but it didn’t sound the same at all.

In my memory I remember our relationship being pretty good, but that she was naggy and nitpicky, and she always wanted to pick a fight, and was kind of a wet blanket. And that one day she just stopped showing up to things, and the next thing I knew she had moved out of state. She didn’t even say goodbye. Our arguments didn’t even really factor into my recollection, but to her they were central. As I listened to her recounting of this story, I realized that anytime she had come to me with a legitimate feeling or concern about my behavior, which was often centric to my drinking and use of party prescriptions, or my inability to just be still and silent, I gutted her emotionally. She would come to me with concern, and I would eviscerate her to avoid the situation completely. Her father had died during the beginning of our relationship, and I would bring up how she never got to say goodbye to him. I used her father dying as a weapon against her. I was appalled with myself, still am actually.

This kind of petty, emotionally driven retaliation, and reaction to criticism is infantile, wrong, and immensely harmful. If your aim is just to hurt the person speaking to you, it is imperative that you realize that reaction is inappropriate. You aren’t being painted as the villain; you are in fact the bad guy in this situation. Combatting this behavior is a long and difficult road, and while I have put a lot of work into it, I am not perfect. I still get the urge to rip out the throat of someone who is being hurtful to me, or someone who is criticizing me no matter how legitimate that criticism is. A lot of that stems from my inherent issues with being perceived as less than perfect. I have done a lot of work with my own vulnerability and allowing myself to show all the ways in which I am less than perfect. So I am going to share with you the 5 questions I ask myself before responding in an escalated situation. No further explanation just the questions

1. Does what I am about to say matter in the context of this conversation?

2. Will I regret saying this in an hour? A week? A year?

3. Will I feel shame about saying or doing this when I am held accountable for it later?

4. Am I about to say/do this to make them feel pain or discomfort?

5. Is this reaction relative to the severity of the conversation?