What are you doing to undermine or limit your relationships, even the way you relate to people altogether?

Some years ago I was leading a seminar on relationships, happens that it was in Holland. I was coming back into the room after the lunch break and the room felt a bit warm to me. Being sensitive to people’s easily getting sleepy right after lunch, I opened a window in the back of the room to get some fresh air. I started back up. After a very short time I noticed a lady right in the front row, less than 10 feet from me was having a hard time, something was clearly bothering her. She seemed pretty upset, giving me kind of nasty looks. I had no idea why. I thought perhaps I had broken some protocol or cultural boundary here in a country I was not that familiar with.

Well, especially given the topic of the day, I had to ask her how she was doing. Well, she really unloaded on me pretty strongly. Really negative towards me. It turns out that she had closed the window in the back of the room just before I came in. I had absolutely no idea that she had. None. She talked about my not acknowledging her, my lack of respect for her and so on. Well, we had a really good conversation, my acknowledging her feelings not reacting negatively to her in the moment and telling her I’d like to talk to her about it more later, which we did, and we were both very relieved. There’s lots more to that story. You might say it is pretty exaggerated,  but in that sense it is a good example of something I want to talk about.

The most common thing that people do in all their relationships is to assume that they are rejected or, as I like to say, somehow dissed or dismissed. All of us, all the time, are going around looking to be accepted and embraced in our simple interchanges as well as in our long term loving relationships. Of course! And that is a really good thing. Human relationship sustains us all!

The twist comes in when at the same time we tend to assume that we are not appreciated, embraced at simple level, loved even. And so we assume we are rejected. All of us do this to some degree or another, however simple, however complex, to whatever degree, and in our own unique way. And so we’re shooting ourselves in the foot! Even when we are accepted and embraced by others we tend to not recognize, acknowledge, accept and receive it,  Does that make sense to you? Why is that? Because we have this underlying philosophy, you could say, or point of view, that we aren’t good enough or smart enough or …make your own list.

Someone doesn’t hold a door open for you at a restaurant. Maybe the person didn’t even see you there, but you still have a negative emotional reaction. Someone is late picking you up for an appointment or date. There are endless ways this takes place. Getting to recognize your own particular pattern and how you play into it – and what to do differently! – can be life-changing, career-changing. I’ll tell some stories about this and other issues on more posts and in my videos.

1 Comment   |   Posted in Blog, Parenting Advice May 12, 2010

1 Comment for this entry

• West Esterle June 5th, 2010 on 4:05 am

  Richard Silk worked with me every week during a very difficult time in my life, a time which is an almost universally hard time in everyone’s life- the high school years. Through Richard’s help and guidance I went from being an extremely angry confrontational kid who was suspended the first week of high school for fighting, and who would almost always resort to physical, or at least emotional violence in the face of presulmed problems, to being relaxed and able to peacefully resolve conflicts and troubles in my life. This extremely valuable skill was just one of the many skills Richard helped me to develop during a pivotal point in my life. I was starting down a road that leads to very bad places in life and I am forever grateful to Richard for enabling me to change the cours of my life and end up graduating at the top of my class with a GPA of 3.81 and many happy relationships.