I Asked, You Answered, I Was Wrong

I did a post a few days ago about anger and the dreaded silent treatment. I explained the reasons that I didn't understand it.  That I thought it was a waste of time and energy. That it's better to talk it out, work through it, and move on. At the end of that post I asked if I was wrong, if there is value to it that I wasn't seeing. As it turns out I was wrong, there can be value to it.

I'm told, and understand now, that sometimes silence is a person's way of not hurting the person they care about. Some of us become overwhelmed with emotion.  Actually I think we all do at some point. We all just have different triggers. We all become overwhelmed with love, lust, anger and sorrow.  I said in my post that I become overwhelmed when there is any trouble in a relationship. Sometimes to the point of not being able to concentrate. And I want to get past the discomfort. I want to be done with it. 

I've thought about that discomfort a great deal this week.  I've thought about why I'm so anxious to get past it. And what it teaches me about anger and relationships.  No one enjoys being angry. No one enjoys discord in a relationship. But it happens. If we expect perfection in either others or ourselves we are setting ourselves up to be disappointed and hurt. Knowing that in our mind and truly knowing that within ourselves are two completely different things.

Part of my drive to talk about it right now and get through it, get it behind us comes from insecurity. Insecurity that maybe your anger means you don't care any more. It's a learned insecurity. An intrinsic part of that insecurity is also anger turned inwards. Anger with myself for not being perfect for the other person. After all, that's what I'm supposed to do, right? I'm supposed to never screw up because when I do people lose control and things fall apart.

It's OK to not be OK

I did a post last week about our expectations of people and events external to ourselves. Brandy struggles with expectations, but not those of others, those she has of herself. 

Brandy feels unworthy of happiness and love because she doesn't meet her own expectations. This is largely a remnant of her marriage in which perfection was expected. Of course,  she never met that expectation. She learned to expect it of herself and still does. This sets her up to fail and to disappoint herself continuously. It gets in her way with relationships because she fears the day it moves past the dizzy-in-the-head feeling of new love to something more serious. She fears showing her flaws. She fears the person running when they see her imperfections, many of us do.

Brandy has to learn is that imperfection doesn't make us unlovable and shouldn't keep us from being happy.  She knows this in her head, but she still beats herself up over every shortfall because she doesn't know it deep inside herself. We should expect the very best of ourselves, but we also have to accept that we are human. We cannot give a hundred ten percent endlessly. We get tired. We get sick. We get hurt. We feel sad. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the person we care about the most. That's human. That's life.

There's a saying about not being able to love someone else until you love yourself. Corny, I know. But true. For Brandy,  this means she has to love herself enough to take the risk of letting someone know her flaws and her strengths. She has to accept that some people will run because of certain flaws. She should do the same. Not that we should expect perfection, but we have to know what we are willing to deal with and what we are not willing to deal with. We have to set boundaries.