We All Deal With Baggage
No matter how much personal growth & consciousness work we do.
“I’m not yelling!” he yelled at me as I fled out the door into the cool night once again to seek a few deep breaths.
We were fighting about his confusion about how I really feel about sex and even more about our dual needs for validation.
Two very important topics that swim to the surface so often, begging to be addressed and nurtured.
We struggle to know HOW to do this.
Just because we might know what needs to change doesn’t mean we know how to change it. I learned this from my very wise teacher HeatherAsh, along with a powerful tool called the Warrior Heart Practice that she taught me.
Subconscious Bugbears
These glitches relentlessly haunt our relationship, just like every other pair of people who have tried to make it work together over time.
The nasty shadow bits of ourselves seem determined to emerge from the subconscious depths of our beings.
We all have them. And honestly, I feel like it is in the most conscious relationships in my life that these bits of my programming hurt the most.
But why?
Evolved Doesn’t Mean Perfected
I chose a fucking awesome human being as my partner. I love the man to pieces. He’s done more work on himself than many men twice his age.
And I’ll be honest, sometimes we fight like cats and dogs. Maybe only 2% of the total time we spend together, but still…
It’s more than frustrating. It hurts.
Maybe it’s because we don’t really fight about money, or trust, or jealousy? Maybe it’s because we’ve both graduated from these (relatively) simpler forms of dysfunction to now be challenged to take on and begin to heal the deeper, intergenerational shadows of pain.
Maybe I’m fooling myself. I don’t know.
Why Can’t You Hear Me?
The thing that I can’t find my way around right now is the frustration born of not being heard!
This is what I know. We are both guilty of (a) caring about each other so much that we bring significant emotion into our miscommunications, and (b) bringing with us the baggage that any human who grew up on this planet has.
It’s a good problem, I guess. But it’s still a problem. Big problem.
And let me tell you, it does no good for the blood pressure and nervous system issues I’ve been dealing with since starting to bear children.
Why can’t we just listen to each other better?
Why does it feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall when we get into these difficult conversations?
How is it that can I say the same thing, as calmly as I can, 50 different ways, and still not be heard sometimes?
How does he not understand that yelling at me and oozing his frustration all over me are some of my biggest triggers? I mean, I keep telling him.
How is it possible that I don’t understand what he is saying either? I don’t get it.
Why are there all these pesky underpinnings to our relationship that start to come apart at the most terrible times?
Fucking baggage. That’s why!
Everyone has it…
Even the most ‘woke’ among us is carrying a shit-ton of unconscious programming, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Why? Well for one, most of us had pretty awful models to follow.
Secondly, the more study and personal growth we do, the more likely we are to make the error of thinking we are RIGHT about ourselves, AND about others, and how we choose to relate.
I don’t think there is actually a RIGHT way to do a relationship. Really, there are probably more realistically GOOD ways (and BAD) to relate.
And just because we might know ourselves a little more than the average bear, it doesn’t mean we understand others.
Nor does it mean we have the skill or willingness to step into another’s perspective enough to break the stalemate of anger and frustration that so often covers our hurts and confusions.
I’m No Expert!
As I sit here writing another late night blog to get the emotions out of my body and onto the page.
But I do recognize that in order for us to get anywhere close to a better place, every single fucking one of us needs to be able to take a good long look at ourselves in the mirror. We all need to be open to exploring new methods of relating, communicating, and loving. At least if we care about making the relationship work.
So I’m doing my damndest to learn what I need to learn in order to get better at shedding my own baggage and packing a new and better carry-on for life.
This podcast with Shane Parrish interviewing Sheila Heen is awesome. She teaches negotiation at Harvard Law school. Her husband teaches it at M.I.T. The podcast is all about skills to use in difficult conversations.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall during their arguments with each other or their kids.
Sharing the resource. I know I’m not the only one who needs it. 😉
Skills vs Willingness
I think a lot of the discontent that stems from deep disagreements in relationship in the conscious community comes not from a dearth of skill development, but rather from our lack of willingness to look at OURSELVES in the mirror to see what is going awry. It’s so easy to project the wrong of life onto someone else’s choices and habits. It’s much harder to accept the ways our own patterning is making it worse.
And I think part of the imbalance between people is partly due to social conditioning.
Women especially are taught to care more about what others think. And men are taught to care less.
On the Self-Valuation of Our Own Perspectives
Case in point, it was MUCH more difficult to find an image of a man looking at himself in a mirror than it was to find a woman doing this.
Hmm…
This post on Instagram the other day caught my eye. It’s so true!
While Dr. Lindsay was addressing the issue of the differences in how we are taught to judge our appearance based on our gender, I think this actually goes much deeper.
I’m not saying men can’t self reflect, or examine their own baggage. Don’t come at me y’all!
I see plenty of healthy self-reflection about life from evolved men going on around this platform. I see you!
But this is not the norm. You know this.
Like John DeVore who decided he wanted to bake more cupcakes!
But I do know that men seem much more likely to get stuck in their own perspectives. They have been TAUGHT this way by generations of men. It’s leadership on a good day, and domination-mind on a bad day.
And EQUALLY CULPABLY, women are much more likely to have a lack of clarity about the way they do things, and why than men. I know I do. Again, we were taught to take our cues from a desire for external validation.
I also think this visual/emotional thing between the genders has something to do with it.
All of these things muddy the waters and flow of relationship tremendously.
So What Can We Do?
Patience, kindness, empathy, solid listening, a willingness to be vulnerable, and more patience. These are not new answers, nor are they easy to enact.
And also, men need to be able to take it, and women need to be able to give it.
It’s an acknowledgment of our primal (even biological) differences, and also of our evolved equalities.
If we want our relationships to work, they are key.
One Clue At a Time
You know it’s a good relationship when you can recognize a fight as an “opportunity for growth” as Brené Brown puts it — even while in the midst of the fight.
Where did this particular standoff end? Happily, it ended with us sharing newly unearthed clues, and an agreement for the next iteration of how we want to relate with each other.
Personally, I ended up cracking through an under layer of rock within myself to discover that sometimes, I really do want validation of my ways and my being from my partner.
I want him to be willing to celebrate the things about me that aren’t necessarily in his wheelhouse of strengths.
Like writing and podcasting, and thinking about culture as a means of growing and evolving myself.
And building things — like shelves, and lofts, and earthbag structures.
I want to be proud of these things, not on the defense all the time.
He, in turn, surprised me by asking not for more sex, but to turn my attention so that my passions align better with his.
He told me he feels left out trying to make our home and land into a peaceful haven of gardens and beauty all by himself. Why don’t I build him something? Why does he feel like the only one working towards goals we both SAY we share.
I had no idea! I told him that if I knew he wanted me to build him stuff, maybe I’d be more likely to do that if he wasn’t projecting a sense of dismissal all over my passions. I didn’t KNOW he would like an earthbag greenhouse! I didn’t know he felt left out by my spending time designing things for myself, and not for us.
I’m so glad he finally told me!
Meanwhile, I told him he’d do me a solid by maybe reading some of what I write or produce. I just want him to appreciate me, and be proud of me. And I want to FEEL all these things, not just believe them in my head.
Being Catalysts for Change
I firmly believe that we are doing this work together, not only for the health and sanity of our own relationship but also for the shift in mindset that we are ALL going through in this time of change.
Some people march and protest. That’s cool. Some people agitate for positive change within their workplace. That’s cool too.
Some of us write about the better world we wish to see.
I’m looking at you John Gorman, Epiphany Jordan, Bella LaVey, Tim Denning, Jessica Valenti, HeatherAsh Amara, Jessica WildFire, and absolutely Shannon Ashley who inspired my courage to be vulnerable, my tone, and the freedom to swear in this post.
Let’s all of us keep working on it. It’s time to learn how to do this better. Agree?
Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.