We’ve all found ourselves in this spot before. Lashing out at the ones we love most. Placing blame on their behavior rather than reflecting on your own. Why is this? Displaced emotions and the ongoing struggle of addressing our personal shortcomings is my guess. How 'bout you?
We can be so cruel to the ones we care deepest for, dreaming up dramatizations or holding back when it’s best to be honest. It’s one of those complex questions that lingers alongside ones like, oh I don’t know, 'Why am I like this?"
Before we can effectively navigate our way out from these natural tendencies, let’s start at the beginning.
Besides those aliens siblings who claimed they never fought growing up, most of us admit to finding both the best and worst versions of ourselves while with our families. It’s as if that teenage temperament never fully fades, even though the door slamming might. With hope, our families are the people who sit next to us for our highest highs and lowest lows. Perhaps in those experiences, we tie morsels of past emotions to their person, popping back up from time to time as a reminder of both positive - and the pain.
In no world would I remain friends with someone who physically shoved me into a wall (that also happened to have a nail sticking out of it) - thanks, brother. Or would someone still be my friend had I intentionally run them down with a sled for not getting out of the way (all because they had felt left out from the fun) - sorry, brother.
Maybe we’re mean because we believe they know we don’t mean it. Maybe we lash out because they will still tuck us into bed at the end of the day. It’s a harsh and inexcusable reality.
Author Jedidiah Jenkins wrote on the ease of slipping into this damaging behavioral tendency with those we are tethered to:
"Whenever I spend time with family, I'm reminded of the ever-present ghost of the unsaid. The hardened hearts. The brothers who no longer speak, the life choices whispered and worried about in private. It is remarkable how hard it is for families to talk about things. To shine sunlight on the wounds in the basement.
I also see this in spouses. Tiny cuts accumulate into a tone that colors their every conversation. As if perpetually annoyed. As if pinching their little brother in the back seat and telling mom that nothing happened. There is a special rudeness here. Especially when it's performed in front of friends. 'She won't even let me near a motorcycle!' - 'That's not what I said!' They litigate their conversations in front of you, trying to shame the other one with an audience. A power play. A zero-sum game."
Frequently, this pattern in partnerships goes unrecognized until we find ourselves in the thick of it. I remember being snuggled in blankets on my grandma’s floor as a kid with my cousins. It was incomprehensible to our pre-pubescent brains how family members could turn their backs to each other. We would whisper about how we were closer than family - we were lucky enough to call each other friends. Perhaps it was in this friendship, rather than in family ties, that we found our key out of the mess.
Today, I’m able to recognize that life is far stickier than that Legolas-loving little girl had realized. But the beauty is that in adulthood we have the blessing of building a chosen family.
The opportunity to build our own family looks a lot like a blank canvas. We often walk into a relationship and we paint that shiz with sunshine and roses, feeling full knowing that this is what we've been waiting for. Alas, the great wonder of our world has been answered.
It just so happens that this blank canvas is also a human being with their own baggage and their own experiences. At first glance, you think ‘yep, this is MY opportunity to build something. They fit perfectly into my plan.’ However, with time and energy, we realize that we are both beginning on the same canvas, painting a joint picture - sharing our space. In order to create our masterpiece, colors must be compromised to keep it from turning brown. Certain skills fall into different hands and we must learn to let go to let it grow.
As a relationship deepens, our brains often begin to construct false narratives - be it about a boyfriend or a brother. We place blame. Stories can grow to be one-sided. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions, when in reality it should be the other way around.
In a perfectly crafted passage by Alain de Botton in ‘The Course of Love,’ both Botton and the reader dive into an insightful internal dialogue addressing, as Brene Brown says, ‘the stories we make up in our heads:’
"Then again, there have been a number of things over the course of their marriage that Rabih Khan didn't anticipate, either, including his wife's strong objection to his wish to return to architecture, primarily because she didn't want their income too be curtailed for even a few months; her cutting him off from many of his friends because she found them 'boring'; her tendency to make jokes at his expense in company; the blame he has to shoulder when things go wrong at her work; and the exhausting anxiety she suffered over every aspect of their children's education . . .
These are the stories he has told himself, lines of reasoning that are simpler than wondering if he may have held himself back in his career or if his friends really might not be quite as entertaining as they seemed when he was twenty-two."
In unhealthy moments, we grow fixated on elements of sacrifice and control rather than those of growth and admiration. We often focus on what we have given up rather than what we have gained.
What is wrong with the picture we are painting here? We burden the ones we love with our expectations of both ourselves and of them - of everything that we imagined our futures to feel like. In our lowest moments, we feel self-directed fury that can be pushed onto the one in the direct line of fire. After all, that’s an easier path than risking a shot to the mirror that could shatter what you see staring back.
In actuality, the ones we love most should serve as the light at the end of our tunnel. As a guide to focus on like a moth to the bulb, looking to the root rather than the results.
We're such fragile, breakable beings. We dress up in our big people clothes and walk around hiding our ghosts in a briefcase, begging the gods that no one opens it. That everyone else stays too focused on their own issues to question. But then we meet that person, our person who says 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours.' And you let them. You slowly creek open the crack letting their sunshine illuminate the shadows you didn't even know were there. Suddenly, they see everything before you can snap it back closed.
In ‘The Art of Loving’ written by social philosopher Eric Fromm wrote:
"The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art?”
We must continue to work at our relationships and refine our own reflections. You are not a bad person because you sometimes want to slay your mother, you are just a human who needs help redirecting those emotions. We must realize that we are each triggered in different ways and the only way through, it is well, through it. Fromm’s solution?
“And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving."
Love takes work, love takes time. But boy, is love worth it.