Relationships.
You can’t live with them.
You can’t live without them.
Our relationships with each other are the sources of our greatest joys and our deepest pains. They are the places where we learn the most difficult lessons we will ever learn and those are the lessons about ourselves. Sometimes our relationships find us in therapy.
If you Google, “when was therapy invented?”, you’ll see that we started trying to figure each other out about 3,500 years ago in ancient Greece. Along the way we found The Gods, God, witches, and eventually thanks to a dude named Freud, we now have something called “psychotherapy”. We’ve been at this a while, but we have a ways to go. Some of us have a looooong way to go.
But here’s kind of the weird part of all of this awareness evolution: we don’t really screw up the advanced stuff in our relationships, we screw up the basics. And we screw them up because we usually aren’t willing to be open or to change before we should, only after the pain finds us. Pain isn’t just a teacher, pain is a changer. And the pain we feel in our relationships with each other can be brutal.
Of all of the mistakes we make in dealing with each other, one of the biggest is how we assign “this means that”. Those three words may just be the most important three words in any business, marriage, or friends with benefits relationship you will ever find yourself in. They’re so important that you should stop right now get a sticky note and a Sharpee, write them down, and post on the fridge, the bathroom mirror, and maybe your person’s forehead.
Does, “this mean that?”
When was the last time was you had a spat, disagreement, argument, or sadly, a breakup? You probably have a feeling and a memory that triggers it right now. When return to revisit that moment in your right mind, and you’re honest with yourself, there’s probably a 100% probability that the entire thing was based on one of you screwing up “this means that”. The receiver was in a weird space and didn’t receive it as the sender intended. There was a slight of hand in the delivery that was a mistake.
And then there’s just our emotional intelligence. Some of us are overly sensitive. Some of us are a-holes. Some of us are just nincompoops. But if you can return in an honest moment and review the blowups in your past, you’ll probably be amazed at how much of it had to do with improperly assigning “this means that”.
That’s all for today. This is probably the best advice you’ll get all week. It might save your relationship, and it might make you a million bucks. You’re welcome.
Good luck and have a good week.
Joe Still
2023.12.10
Cite
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
– Thomas Merton