Sharing a truth we think will be displeasing, inconvenient, or disappointing brings anxiety, guilt, and even fear. If it’s not absolutely necessary, we often don’t share it at all. But sometimes, we have to say something someone doesn’t want to hear.

To manage this conflict, we develop all sorts of strategies, the most common of which is to apologize for who we are and how we feel. We apologize in a thousand different ways… for having an experience that’s not OK for someone else. While apologizing, we often throw ourselves under the bus and criticize ourselves as a gift to the disappointed listener. We blame ourselves and feel guilty—for not being able to offer a more likable truth and likable us.

So, too, we justify our experience and explain, usually in multiple ways, why it makes sense for us to feel the way we do. We twist ourselves into all sorts of distorted shapes and perform high-level mental gymnastics to convince the other person that our truth is valid, understandable, and shouldn’t make us unlikable. And therefore, why they should give us permission to own it.

If apologizing and justifying don’t assure/save our likability, we move on to other strategies, attempting to explain why our truth should be OK for the other person. Not just why we’re justified in feeling the way we do, but why wanting what we want is actually a good thing and will work for the other—not just us (which would be unacceptable).

If plans A, B, and C don’t succeed at making everyone OK, we start rolling back our truth. We agree to a more likable version of what we need, or we abandon our truth altogether and agree to whatever is better for the other person to keep the peace and retain our likability.

In learning to communicate more authentically, many women struggle with the actual language to use.

Women ask me all the time: “What do I actually say when they ask me why I can’t or don’t want to do it?” “How do I explain my truth when it’s not OK with someone else?” “What do I say that’s not nasty but also doesn’t apologize for or cancel what I want?” It’s strange, but we don’t learn the language of sharing and standing in our truth.

To start with, something women are never taught is this: “No” is a complete sentence. Even though we think “No” needs to be followed up with a thousand other words, justifications, apologies, and sweeteners, it doesn’t. It’s a stand-alone word.

While an unadorned “No” may be the most direct, sometimes it just doesn’t feel right to only say that. And so you can also say things like: “That doesn’t work for me,” “I actually don’t want that,” and “I’m not comfortable with that.” These are just some examples of words we can use when sharing displeasing truths. Adding in “right now” can also soften the blow of delivering a difficult truth, as in “That’s not going to work for me right now.” Play with it; the skill is to keep your words short and simple, say less, not more, and stick to what’s true for you.

At the end of the day, the way to stop taking responsibility for other people’s responses to your truth is to practice not taking responsibility. Even if you still feel to blame, guilty, and desperately uncomfortable on the inside, the idea is to keep your mouth shut and refrain from reacting to that guilt. As you stand there with your mouth shut, not rushing to apologize or make it more comfortable, it can be helpful to repeat a mantra inside your head as a way to distract your mind from instinctively apologizing or justifying and also support yourself in this change process. “I’m not responsible for their feelings,” “It’s not my fault,” “They can figure it out,” “It’s not my job,” and “Say nothing” are mantras that may prove helpful. Use whatever keeps your mind occupied so you don’t react in the old habitual ways. This is a skill that gets easier with time and practice.

The notion that you are responsible for everyone else’s feelings is also a shared belief in our culture. That said, there’s a good chance you will be actively blamed for your unwanted truth and accused of causing the other’s upset. When someone tries to engage you in this way and insists that you’re responsible for their feelings, you can actively choose not to bite the hook, not to engage in this codependent system. You can stay quiet and silently repeat your mantra inside your head as many times as you need, which may be hundreds of times. You can also repeat your initial words out loud, “That doesn’t work for me,” “I’m not comfortable with that,” or just simply “No”—but without the apology that instinctively follows it.

The reality, however, is that we do care about other people’s feelings and don’t want others to be upset. We’re not unrelated, and it often doesn’t feel right not to address another’s experience, particularly when it’s in response to our words. Not all of this is about our conditioning; we are still human beings who care about other people.

And yet, there are ways to empathize without abandoning yourself, rejecting or distorting your truth, and fixing their experience. If it’s true, you can say things like “I’m sorry that this is upsetting or disappointing for you” (which is different than apologizing for your truth). Or perhaps, “I wish this weren’t difficult for you to know,” or some other sentence that attends to their experience, but without taking responsibility for it, making yourself guilty, or trying to make them OK. The point is to be intentional and deliberate about your words—to not engage in the entangled and archaic system that holds you back and disconnects you from your authenticity and power.

Despite what you’ve been taught, you are not responsible for other people’s happiness.

When what you want is unwanted, you’re not to blame and don’t need to apologize. Learning to speak your truth and then to stop speaking—not to sweeten, adjust, or abandon your truth to make it “work”—is one of the greatest skills you can learn. Know this too: When you get the hang of staying silent after sharing an uncomfortable truth, of not fixing what’s unlikable, that gap of unfilled space can shift from feeling scary and awkward to feeling exciting and empowering. You are literally standing on new ground and, most importantly, standing in your own shoes and showing up as your authentic self!

The post Stop Apologizing For Your Truth appeared first on Nancy Colier.

As children, we need to belong; to belong is to survive. To express our experience of the family drama would be to risk the love of our caretakers, our belonging, and thus our survival. When a home is emotionally chaotic, it’s not generally filled with adults who are open and interested in the child’s experience; there’s often no safe person for a child to talk to and even less chance for there to be someone who will take responsibility for, or change, what’s happening.

When we grow up in an emotionally unstable and untrustworthy environment, we develop certain defense strategies to maintain our safety and keep ourselves intact. Put simply, we learn to get okay with a lot of stuff that doesn’t feel okay. We become experts at burying anxiety, fear, anger, and despair; we walk through the wreckage as if nothing crazy is happening, no matter how bad it feels. And eventually crazy becomes our norm.

Our strategies for survival succeed at keeping us safe as children, on a certain level. But when we carry these same defense strategies into adult relationships, they stop working and we end up feeling trapped, powerless, anxious, and angry. The feelings we buried as children are still there— only now they won’t stay underground.

Those of us who grew up in homes where such behavior was the norm often obsessed about what we wanted to say out loud to a parent, but we didn’t say it because it would have created anger or more chaos, and accomplished nothing in terms of changing our world. Similarly, as adults in relationships, we think incessantly about what the other person is doing to us; we make the case for our grievances silently inside our heads, and rehash what we’re going to say and how we’re going to say it. But, again, we stay silent. We think obsessively about the other and our bad situation, but we don’t know how to take steps to make it change: We’re too afraid of the consequences or of our own rage. As a result, we stay stuck in bad situations, feeling powerless to make our relationships change, chronically fearful and overflowing with resentment.

As adults, when we’re confronted with behavior that feels bad, crazy, aggressive, or just not okay, our nervous system goes into a kind of fight, flight, freeze response. Our front brain shuts down in a sense and we enter survival mode. Deep in the recesses of our brain there is an assumption being made—that if we speak up, we’ll pay dire consequences and ultimately be worse off. Our deep-seated fear takes over and before we know it, we’re figuring out a way to make the other’s bad behavior work inside the relationship.

But staying silent doesn’t work in grown-up relationships. It doesn’t allow us to grow, feel known, or develop real intimacy. Furthermore, it doesn’t keep us safe like it did when we were kids. Quite the opposite: The strategy of swallowing our truth and our natural self-protective instinct under the guise of protecting ourselves become the very thing that harms us. We end up consumed with fear, obsessively thinking about what we hate, and carrying overwhelming resentment. We end up enraged at the other and ourselves—for what they’re doing to us and for what we’re allowing.

How do we change when our nervous system naturally responds to bad behavior in a way that keeps us stuck? How do we make what’s happening instinctively into a conscious process so that we have choices? The first step is to start paying attention to what’s happening inside us in the face of conflict—that is, to recognize and acknowledge this pattern, and become aware that we go into reactionary mode when confronted with what feels relationally unsafe. In recognizing and acknowledging this truth, we offer ourselves not just kindness and compassion, but also gratitude for keeping us safe in the only way we knew how. And we remind ourselves that this behavior no longer takes care of us.

Secondly, we stop to ask our fear what it needs to know or hear from a trusted other that would allow it to speak up for itself. Sometimes the frightened part of ourselves wants to know or be reminded that it doesn’t actually need this other person.

If we can realize that we won’t die without this other person, that we’ve projected our childhood dependence onto this relationship, the risk drops and we can find the courage to speak our truth. If we don’t yet genuinely believe that we don’t need the other, we can start taking steps toward the autonomy that can set us free.

On the other hand, the little one inside us may need to know that it doesn’t have to explain why what’s not okay is not okay, or get the other person to understand or agree. Sometimes the fear is about having to defend our case against the other’s anger, blame, and defensiveness that feels most daunting. In truth, we don’t have to get confirmation or validation from the other that their behavior is not okay for us. We can offer ourselves permission to simply say No, this is not okay, period.

There are an infinite number of possible answers to the question, What would I need to believe to speak up in the face of chaos? What’s most important is simply that you ask the frightened part of yourself, with kindness, what it needs to stand up for you, confront the crazy, and speak your truth. Once you know what your system needs to move forward, you can offer yourself that truth, or start on the path to making that answer true.

When we grew up accepting the unacceptable because we had to, and we become grownups afraid to stand up for ourselves, we learn to stuff our anger and keep the peace at all costs, including the cost to ourselves.

But just because we grew up around chaos doesn’t mean we’re condemned to live with it forever. We can change. We can change our reaction to behavior that’s not acceptable, and in the process, change the situation itself. Or we can leave a situation that doesn’t work for us. Once we become conscious of our own behavior, we have choices. We can learn to be the light in the darkness and create our own reality.

Unlike what we believed as children, we do get a say in our own reality and we can move from the problem to the solution.

The post Are Healthy Relationships Possible After Growing Up in Emotional Chaos? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Lily’s inability to listen had created tremendous conflict in the family. A conversation would happen over dinner, and the next day, Lily would have little or no memory of its content or details. (She was not on any substances.) Their two kids were constantly yelling at their mom for not remembering what they had already told her. Shelly had spent many hours consoling their kids, assuring them that Lily’s inability to pay attention to the details of their lives did not mean she didn’t care (which is how it felt). Although Shelly experienced tremendous resentment and hurt herself when Lily didn’t listen, she did her best to convince the kids that it was their mom’s distraction that was to blame, not them.

Shelly had been talking about this issue for a long time, mostly about how to change her partner and get her to listen better. She had explained to her wife on many occasions how it made her and the kids feel when she didn’t remember what was discussed or the daily goings-on in the family’s life. She had expressed the profound emotional value of remembering the details. Shelly had described in poignant detail how it felt when Lily uttered, “Uh-huh,” at a place in the conversation where clearly no “uh-huh” was called for or appropriate. And how, with that simple, ill-attuned “uh-huh,” Shelly would know instantly that Lily was not present and not listening to what she was sharing. She had talked about the sorrow and loneliness of that moment in great depth and detail.

Shelly had also gone through a stretch of encouraging Lily to get a brain scan, to see if there was legitimately something wrong that made it hard for her to pay attention and land in the present moment. (Lily discovered her brain was fine after a routine cat-scan for an unrelated issue.) In addition, Shelly got Lily into a program of meditation and gave her books on being present and managing distraction. Despite positive changes, when Shelly stopped leading the charge for her wife to meditate, Lily’s behavior eventually reverted back to the way it had been before.

Shelly had also run the gamut in terms of expressing her anger. Again and again, she had begged her wife, “Where are you? Are you ever here where everyone else is, actually listening?” On behalf of herself and their children, she had demanded a change: “Your family is here at the table, we need you here! Where are you?” For Shelly, it felt like an emotional trauma each time it happened.

Shelly had given it the full college try, working at changing her partner for more than a decade. She had lived in a state of waiting—waiting for Lily to change. Some part of her believed that she couldn’t be fully content until her wife became someone else, someone who was not distracted, could pay attention closely, cared about how much it all hurt, and wanted to remember the lives discussed. Shelly had been waiting for her partner to become someone who made her happy.

But as frustrating, enraging, and hurtful as Lily’s behavior legitimately was, the bigger problem as I saw it was Shelly’s belief that her own well-being and freedom depended on someone else changing. Shelly was hostage to a situation she had absolutely no control over (as was abundantly clear by now). Her captor was not actually her wife (as she imagined), but rather her conviction that her wife’s behavior was responsible for her own happiness or to blame for her unhappiness.

Before Shelly could get free from this belief, it was important to offer empathy to the despair and rage that her wife’s behavior triggered, the familial pattern it held, and the emotional abandonment historically tied, for her, to the act of listening. Empathy and compassion for our own experience is a necessary step in letting going of a limiting belief, and in this case, Shelly’s belief that her happiness was tied to someone else’s behavior.

No one, not even our partner, is responsible for our happiness, for providing us with a sense of meaning, or filling up our emptiness. No one is responsible for our well-being—no one except ourselves. (This does not apply to children and their parents.) As adults, it is our responsibility to make ourselves happy—to make choices that are in alignment with our own needs.

This last week, Shelly told me about a recent incident with her wife. In passing, Shelly had mentioned something about an upcoming weekend trip her older child was planning. Lily, per usual, hadn’t been listening when they discussed the trip at dinner (and other times as well) and thus needed Shelly to fill her in yet again on the details, and also to be convinced that she should be allowed to go. In years past, Shelly would have gotten angry, explained what not listening did to everyone in the family, perhaps made an interpretation of her wife’s psychology, and then, finally, done what she always did… repeated the details and explanations so Lily could be included when she was able to pay attention. This time, Shelly felt a sting, but remarkably did not feel inclined to participate in the same way. This time, she calmly told her wife that the conversation and trip had already been discussed, and she was not going to repeat the information again. She then left the house and moved on with her day without anger or resentment. This was, for both of us, a huge victory.

Shelly had done so many things differently in this interaction. For one, she had actualized the serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. She had spent more than enough years trying to get her wife to change, which clearly was not in her control. By continuing to spend her time and energy explaining her anger and repeating the details that had been missed, Shelly had unknowingly been inviting her wife to continue not listening, and also condemning herself to the suffering of the relational pattern, ensuring that nothing would change.

On this occasion, however, she did not do what she had always done, and as a result, did not get what she had always gotten. Following the interaction, she did not live a day full of anger and resentment, did not suffer from high blood pressure and anxiety.  She did not spend the day ruminating and obsessing over how and why the problem had happened again, and of course, what to do about it that she hadn’t already done. Shelly had changed her own behavior, had taken ownership of what she wanted, what she was willing to do and not willing to do, no matter what choices her partner made. This is the most important change we can make in any relationship.

In deciding to stop trying to change her partner and start changing herself in response instead, Shelly discovered that freedom and happiness were already available, now. It’s not to say that Lily’s behavior was suddenly satisfying or delightful; the frustration still arose, but Lily’s behavior did not define Shelly’s emotional state or dictate how Shelly needed to spend her energy or attention. Shelly was not captive to Lily’s choices or limitations. Furthermore, she was not responsible for changing Lily, but she positively was responsible for owning her own wants, needs, and boundaries, and acting accordingly.

In this profound paradigm shift, Shelly realized (as we all need to realize) that it was up to her to decide and also act on what she wanted and what she would participate in. She was no longer waiting for Lily to behave in a way that made her happy but rather taking responsibility for her own happiness—separate from her partner.

When we claim and act according to our own wants and needs; when we get clear about what we’re willing and not willing to do (or do anymore); when we give up trying to change others into people who can make us happy; when we’re willing to take responsibility for our own happiness, then, finally, we’re free. As it turns out, when we are responsible for our own happiness, we get the job done better than anyone else possibly could!

The post Freedom: Taking Ownership of Your Own Happiness appeared first on Nancy Colier.

And yet, despite glimmers of hope and movement in the direction of happiness, Alan continues to repeat certain comments to Viv. Specifically, “This marriage is a failure,” “I’ve totally failed at marriage,” or “I haven’t even been able to succeed at anything, including marriage.”

When Alan first started uttering these statements, Viv’s reaction was to become defensive and angry. She felt hurt and back-handedly insulted; his words felt like aggressions against her and the marriage. Her reaction would then be to defend the marriage or blame her husband for destroying it and them. Alan would then react and accuse Viv of being the one who was impossible to have a relationship with. One hundred percent of the time, when Viv engaged with defensiveness and aggression, the interaction went south and created more pain and disconnection within the couple.

After years spent defending herself and the marriage, blaming Alan for ruining things, and trying unsuccessfully to get him to see the marriage in a different way, Viv adopted a new strategy. She began pretending as if she didn’t notice her husband’s comments; she behaved as if he hadn’t said it, hadn’t hurt her. It was an attempt to stave off her shame at being wounded and show him (falsely) that his efforts to cause her harm were useless. Unfortunately, this strategy didn’t work either, because, underneath the nonchalance, she felt enraged and deeply hurt. Pretending in this way made her feel like she was tucking away and even betraying her true self, and this caused deep resentment and confusion in Viv.

Most recently, Viv’s and my work together has been focused on letting go of (or loosening) the controller in her—the part of her that feels it has to change or manage her husband’s behavior. When Viv is able to allow her husband to be the way he is, to let go of the idea that it’s her responsibility or duty to change him, she feels liberated and, unexpectedly, not resentful. She’s realized that there are a lot of things about her husband’s behavior that she doesn’t like, and that’s OK. When she’s not failing at getting him to be the way she wants him to be, and he’s not failing her by not being how she wants him to be, she can actually relax. She can hear his comments and not have to do anything with or about them. Viv has been learning to watch what happens when she lets everything be just exactly as it is, which may be the most important lesson we ever learn. The wise spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, calls this the practice of true meditation, a form of meditation that can happen everywhere not just on the cushion.

When Viv lets go of the controller and allows her husband to be as he is and also her experience of him to be how it is, she feels more separate from him, but also more aware of who he and she actually are, and paradoxically more in relationship with him, rather than the idea of the man she wants him to be. This doesn’t mean that she stops telling him when he says things that hurt her, but she no longer sees him as a piece of clay she has to mold. Alan transformed from being an object in her psyche, one that possessed the potential to make her happy, and became a separate human being with pleasing and not-pleasing parts.

There was a surrender that occurred within Viv; her 25-year effort to make Alan different (so that she could be happy) had given up. As a result, she was left with reality. Reality had always been there, but she had been in a battle with it, rejecting it and living in a state of chronic dissatisfaction and frustration.

The process of letting go is vastly liberating, but it also includes grief. When we surrender the controller, we surrender the hope that we will get to have the partner we wish we could have, that we will get to have the happiness we imagined our partner could bring us. We may discover a totally different kind of happiness, but our idea of how it was going to happen and who our partner was going to become must die.

When we stop betting our happiness on our partner changing, we discover a different kind of partnership, a bond without shackles, a union that’s both separate and together. When we step out of the role of manager, we start to see who our partner actually is rather than who they’re not, and hopefully, we can do all this with a bit of compassion.

This process, while painful in many ways, is a spiritual evolution. It involves shedding a central part of ourselves, a primary component and motivation in how we relate. Our relationship, with a loosened controller, is fundamentally different; our purpose is no longer fixing the project that is our partner. Without a controller, it’s a relationship without the hope of having exactly what we want, but with a new and undiscovered hope of meeting what we actually have, who our partner is, and who we are in this relationship as it is.

In letting go of the controller, we give ourselves the freedom to focus on our own behavior, our own happiness. We have permission to not have to be in charge of everyone else’s behavior. The more we practice this, the more we get the hang of letting others be who they are and moving on. In so doing, we also give ourselves the possibility of loving our partner now, not if and when we turn them into who we want them to be.

And remarkably, when we change our responses to our partner’s behavior, our partner’s behavior also changes. It has to, as we’re feeding it different food. One thing’s for sure: If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting what we’ve always gotten. When we change, the people around us change, either through their own behavior or simply through how we see them.

Most recently, yet another shift has occurred; Viv has found a new clarity, a new wisdom that’s not about Alan or the marriage. Viv has discovered an authentic desire to move away from negativity and what hurts and move towards love and kindness, towards friends and family who have a positive experience of their relationship with her—who do not view their relationship with her as a failure. This desire in Viv stems from self-love, from letting things be as they are, and it allows her to disengage from her husband’s comments, to leave them alone in the interest of her own well-being. While she still finds Alan’s words hurtful in these situations, Viv has developed wisdom that, in the moment, tells her to let go and act in service of her greater happiness. Or, as the wonderful Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron puts it, to not bite the hook that’s dangling. When not responding is not just another response tactic, but rather a true act of self-love, we’ve discovered a most powerful tool.

Evolution and happiness in our self and our relationship is not about figuring out how to better control our partner, learning to not care, or swallowing behavior that’s hurtful. It is, however, about learning to allow everything to be as it is, letting go of control and responsibility for our partner’s behavior, and practicing self-love. Ultimately, it’s about learning to take what we want and leave the rest behind, moving away from what hurts and moving towards kindness.

A caveat: In the case of abuse of any kind, emotional or physical, we do not allow anything to be as it is. When abuse is present, we remove ourselves from the situation. When abuse is happening, we do not surrender control or wait for our partner’s behavior to change, we take ourselves out of harm’s way. This article is not applicable in cases of abuse.

The post Is Your Relationship Evolving or Devolving? appeared first on Nancy Colier.