Confusion/thinking aloud (7)

Annual festive visit to Ardarden with a friend who doesn’t do Christmas.  Temps finally cold enough for the first custard pudding of the year - hurrah!  But the woodland seems terribly confused.  Rhododendron in full bud, swamped by sodden fallen leaves.  These fern fronds rising from the ruins of last year’s before we’ve even had a frost.  The feeling that the cycling of the seasons is speeding up, that the tender new is pushing up and out before the old has had time to turn to mulch. 
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Thinking aloud series starts here.

To continue the slo-mo version.  I’d written (but not yet sent) a raw email,  my way of probing for what’s going on beneath the initial reaction.  My current path is to follow the thread of upset as far as I can rather than distract myself; having side-stepped my true feelings for much of my life I’m wary of spiritual bypassing .

I forwarded the blunt email to a friend and arranged to discuss whether it should be sent at all, or changed.  At this point I was just trying to state my position and feelings clearly.  Whether or not I needed to make them clear to the other person, I didn’t know.

It was really helpful that the people I shared all this with were plugged into different aspects - one found the emails I was receiving shaming and passive aggressive, another was outraged at the unfairness of it all etc.  This really helped me remember that all of our reactions (on all sides) were just mechanical, conditioned responses.  What bothered the others had little or no effect on me.  For myself, I was particularly incensed by the duplicity, mixed messages and complete (there I go again) lack of empathy or responsibility from the other person.  Oh and being scapegoated, not keen on that.  Not keen at all.

My friend and I went through the email picking up on each section that made her wince.  My penchant for sarcasm and hyperbole when upset became apparent.  I came to see that when I am reacting to gross (and again :-)) insensitivity, the exaggeration is the desire to hit the other person over the head until they hear me.  A wiser person might have have just walked away, pearls before swine sorta thing.

All week I had the phrase, “ All the dusts are your own, not one mote belongs to anyone else” (Zen, I think), rattling around in my head.  Meaning whenever we are in a tussle [or war] with something/fighting with reality/not being OK with things just the way they are, then we are lost in our stuff.  It’s our problem because we have the capacity to resolve it and to solve it.  Clearly I was lost in my conditioned reactivity.

But at some point my friend pointed out that the email I was reacting to was vague and unclear, that I was buying into its implications as much as its substance (which was bad enough).  My friend was confused about what the sender actually meant. 

Whoomph!  I WAS buying into the implications.  There was much in the email that could be objected to but not enough detail to accurately respond.  My friend said the words, “I am confused.  It’s either this or that (both equally offensive) but it can’t be both.”   I felt my high horse’s legs begin to buckle, I distinctly heard the sound of them crumpling beneath me as we sank together towards the ground.  All the bluster and inflation went out of me.  We closed the call in a state of unknowing, the ground had shifted again.  

I HAD been confused (gobsmacked in fact) when I received the first email.  BUT, fatally, when I’m triggered by sudden disruption my tendency is NOT to recognize that I’m confused, not to enquire into the situation externally.  I STOP enquiring (my usual mode of engagement) and FLIP to vehemently advocating my position (the pattern described in this post).  When I'm shock/faced with disruption, I’d sooner die than say the words “I am confused.”  Far too vulnerable, my go-to defence is “know it all.”  

It’s all conditioning.  Oprah says (of her former self), “I’d sooner run out in front of a truck than confront someone.”  We all have our foibles.  She got to change that one, and baby look at her now.

I had a blast practicing saying ”I am confused” at every opportunity whilst I waited to see how I might proceed sans horse.  I posted this blip.

To be continued ...

#am writing
#am forgetting to mention/log that I am writing ...