The 'Self': Welcoming her Back Home

Last week I talked to my therapist about a feeling I’ve been having lately. I’m on the precipice of something. It’s familiar and foreign at the same time. It’s a feeling I have at work and at home. It’s a moment when I feel like I actually know what to do without stressing or struggling, without thinking too hard. 

It’s happened recently at meetings with my staff when I leave the meeting feeling like, “well, that was easy.” And also with my daughter when I find myself in the unusual position of offering her advice that seems to help at just the right time. What I notice is both situations is the very clear absence of drama.

I shared this feeling with my therapist who is a very wise, very old (81) woman and she said, in the sage-like maternal way that I love so much, “Laura, that’s your ‘self’.” She explained that for most people, at some point in their lives, the ‘self’, or what I’ve called ‘essential nature’, leaves and a series of parts take over. These parts might be judgers or worriers or caretakers. The parts can be anything and they are different for all of us. We all take on different parts to get us through our complicated lives.

But at a certain point the ‘self’ feels safe to come back and reorganize. “This,” my therapist told me, “is what is happening for you now.”

When I look up ‘self’ online I get this definition, “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.”

I have believed, even proselytized the belief that when women get to the age of menopause they come back to their essential nature, or true selves. It comes from a combination of hormonal reorganization and lived experience. By age 45 or 50 we have learned and endured a lot, and we are done with the bullshit and the drama that come with managing all of the parts. 

This fed-up-ed-ness enables our true selves to come back, take charge and settle in for the long haul. This is the time when the ‘self’ can push aside the parts that have been holding down the fort and reclaim what is rightfully hers.

When my therapist pointed out the presence of my ‘self’ in our session, it felt like a great affirmation and recognition of this belief I’ve been carrying. I have infinite faith and respect in this woman and she has an additional three decades of wisdom on me. To hear her point this out opened up a new portal of acceptance of this concept for me. 

Since that conversation with my therapist I feel different. I have a knowing now that I can’t un-know. I can’t push the ‘self’ back out. She doesn’t want to go. I am aware of a peace but also an absence. I’m so used to the drama, the confetti of other voices in my head that I feel a sense of aloneness without all those parts shouting their opinions.

I know this is going to be an adjustment — it’s just me now, myself. I can feel the changes on the inside — a new openness inviting possibilities. I worry that I might seek out new drama to fill up this space. I wonder if my ‘self’ is secure enough now to resist this temptation. I hope so. I really hope so. 

The Healer

Today I went to see my acupuncturist. I’ve been seeing him for over a decade. Early on in our relationship I determined that he was a true healer. I don’t exactly understand what he does, but it’s magical.

I’ve referred countless friends, colleagues, and former students to him and everyone agrees. He’s truly magnificent. I call him the healer.

I can go a year or two without seeing the healer and then, when I realize no one else can help me, I go see him. Every time I see him I fall a little bit more in love with how wise and insightful he is. I’m grateful that mostly I am very healthy but a few weeks ago I went for a back injury I sustained carrying heavy bags of soil and removing a tree. 

After the healer did his assessment he informed me that I had somehow twisted my lumbar spine. He gave me a treatment and sent me home with some exercises to do. For a week I practiced the squats, pelvic rolls and hip openers. I felt good. I felt great. 

Then in the middle of the second week I felt the pain creeping back. I scheduled another appointment for today. When I went in, as he always does, the healer asked how I was feeling and if anything in my life had changed. 

“I’m exhausted,” I sighed heavily, “I feel so tired today.” He asked if my diet or my sleep or my exercise patterns had changed. When I replied that nothing had changed, as if inviting me to dig deep for the root of my exhaustion, he sat back quietly and waited. 

“I think it’s emotional,” I said, near tears, “there’s a lot of change — the weather, work, and my daughter is eighteen, and she’s almost gone and that is so much harder than I thought it would be.” 

He nodded with sympathy and invited me onto the table where he had me lie down so he could do further assessment. I closed my eyes, grateful for the time to rest. The healer moved around my body manipulating my hips, lower back, and legs. After about thirty minutes he settled on where the needles would go.

By this time I was half-asleep, grateful for the familiarity of his presence and the utter faith I have in his abilities. I could rest here for as long as it took. It felt good to be in capable hands. I trusted the healer implicitly.

After the healer placed the needles into various spots on my body, he left the room and I drifted off. I fell into a hypnagogic sleep, imagining my hands moving even though I knew they were totally still with needles in my wrists. After some time (I don’t know how much), the healer came back in. He palpated my stomach and my hips and said, “Can you lie her a bit longer? You’re not fully cooked.”

I nodded, happy to stay on that table all afternoon. On this second round of rest I had a memory of the healer in my early days of knowing him. Many years ago, when my daughter was 5 or 6, I had a similar pain in my lower back. During our initial conversation I shared that I was in a mental tug-of-war about moving my daughter to a new school that her teacher recommended. The teacher said this new school would be more academically challenging and better for her.

I was conflicted. I loved her elementary school and I wasn’t sure if moving her was the right decision. That day the healer did a treatment focusing on my gallbladder channel. After the session those many years ago, he explained to me that the gallbladder channel was often associated with decision-making. He said, “it could be that the pain you’re having is related to the decision you’re trying to finalize OR maybe the decision you’re trying to make is contributing to the pain.”

In the end it didn’t matter which was the chicken and which was the egg. Both existed — the pain and my need to make a decision.

This afternoon, after the healer removed the needles from my arms, legs and hips, he said, “Laura, from what I can tell, your back is fine. What I think is going on is that you’re stuck.”

“I am,” I said as I pushed myself up to my elbows to get off the table. As I put my watch on and laced up my boots I shared the memory I’d had of the day he’s worked on my gallbladder channel twelve years ago. He smiled and nodded. “I remember,” he said.

I put on my jacket to go and walked towards the door. As I opened it to leave I said, “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome,” he smiled, “You know, I worked on your gallbladder channel today too.” 

Back when I was the mom of a young child struggling with the decision about where to send her to school my struggle manifested itself as pain in my back. This year, as I round the corner of my life into an empty nest, I am again faced with some big life changes and decisions and the pain, again, shows up in my back. 

Bessel Van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes, “…the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”

He’s right. It’s funny. I taught yoga for twenty years and I still forget to slow down and notice, to remember that the body and the mind are deeply entangled. My first instinct with pain or discomfort is often to try to assign some action that got me to the pain instead of to explore other areas of my life that might be contributing. 

The body keeps the score — my back told me something wasn’t right. But knowing the score doesn’t explain the game. The game is as big as life — there are rules, players, goals, and thousands of other contributing factors. The healer, in his great wisdom, reminded me (again) to slow down and expand my perspective. 

Every time I see the healer I reconnect with the idea that the messages from my body are sharing a bigger story about my life. Maybe I should try to remember this the next time my back hurts. But if I do that, I won’t need see the magnificent healer. And I don’t want that…..

We Are All Connected

Several years ago I did a year-long energy mentorship with an integrative medicine doctor. To this day, I consider her to be one of my greatest teachers. Over the course of that year (and beyond), my teacher helped me to understand energy, intuition, and the power of the universe.

The first thing I, and the other handful of curious women in my class, needed to understand, is that we are all connected, every tiny molecule in the universe is connected. 

Believing in the oneness of the universe is a huge pill to swallow, a great leap of faith, but my teacher helped me to understand this concept by sharing how it is explained and understood in different traditions. She also broke it down for our class, giving us little exercises to see our own inter-connectedness.

The very first exercise we did was to look in our closets every morning and not think about what we would wear, but simply go for the first thing that we reached for. Then, later in the day we could notice if this made sense — did the weather change and we were grateful to have a sweater instead of a blouse? Did we have an unusually long walk and we were relieved to be wearing comfortable shoes?

One class we went to a nature preserve and walked in solitude until we found a plant that called to us. We were encouraged to spend time with that piece of nature and notice what we could learn from it. I found a tiny weed by a creek and sat with it for thirty minutes noticing every tiny detail of the plant that I would have otherwise passed by.

One year I went to India with my teacher and shared with one of my traveling companions about a lunchtime laughing class that they were offering at the trauma hospital in Seattle. I shared how I hoped to take that class upon my return. Later that afternoon, on the bulletin board of the ashram where we were staying, there was a flyer advertising a laughing class in the town we were in — 8000 miles away and 13.5 hours time difference. We laughed together, wide-eyed, at this unusual and magical connection.

There was a time in Mexico when I knew, on a visceral level, that even though the people transporting us seemed legitimate — they were wearing uniforms and made a “phone call” to our hotel to prove their identity — there was something off. I tried to convince my partner that we were being swindled but her counter arguments were strong and I, prone to anxiety, chalked my sixth sense up to being anxious instead of intuition. In the end, my inexplicable knowing that something was wrong was right. We got taken for a fake ride, losing over $300 in the process.

Over the last several years since that first energy mentorship class, I’ve learned countless ways to listen to my intuition. I believe wholeheartedly that we are all connected. This is my faith, the thing that I can tune into when I struggle to make a decision or choose a reaction in my life. I trust that I am not alone, that there is a greater force helping me.

My family likes to tease me about my belief system. Sometimes I’ll say, “I just know” or “I’ve got a feeling about this” and eyes will roll. But sometimes I’m right. When I sold my business just four months before COVID hit, it had been a long-time coming. I went back and forth on the decision. After almost twenty years it was hard to let it go. But in the end I lowered the price for the right buyer and said goodbye. That was the right decision.

I trust my gut on most things, especially big decisions, because I need the support of the universe. I don’t want to be alone in this world.

My greatest struggle of late has been the slow painful letting go of my eighteen-year-old daughter. In the past I had control over her. She still lives at home. She still checks in about her whereabouts. She’s still my daughter. But I am recognizing each day that the actual “control” I have is slipping away. And it should. My daughter’s job is to graduate into full independence. My job is to let her go.

Sometimes, oftentimes, I panic. I worry about my daughter. Is she safe? How can I protect her when she’s at a party and there’s alcohol, and she drinks, and a football player takes advantage of her? What if someone brings a gun to school? How can I protect her then? I can’t. 

Last night my daughter went out with two friends. I rarely see her these days. She’s out more than she’s in, filling her social coffers with the constant flow of friendship. I went to sleep around 10:00pm and woke around 11:00pm to the sound of her voice. “Mommmmmmmmy,” the voice cried from downstairs. The voice sounded unfamiliar, like a much younger child. 

I woke up and called back to the voice. “Lucia,” I yelled loudly down the stairs. There was no answer and the hall light was still on which meant she wasn’t home yet. “It must have been a dream,” I thought to myself. My heart beat fast as I walked down the stairs towards the basement to see if she was in her room. On the way, I looked out the front window and saw her car. There she was, sitting in the driver’s seat, having just pulled up. She was looking at her phone as she often does when she first parks.

When Lucia walked in I shouted down to her, “the craziest thing just happened….” and I shared how I’d awoken from a dream to her calling me and that she’d pulled up in her car at just that moment. I said, “See, we really are all connected.”

“Mom,” she said, “I’ve been sitting out there for like twenty minutes.” I let it go. I didn’t need to annoy her further. I went back to bed filled with a mixture of relief and gratitude. I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep. We really are all connected. 

Melancholy Part ll

I used to be a prolific reader. I still read regularly, but not nearly as much as I used to. It’s too easy to turn on a show on my laptop or scroll through dumb shit on my phone; I waste time that could be spent reading. I keep a library of books that I’ve read over the years. I hold onto almost everything but especially the books that really move me.

During COVID I found comfort in rereading some of those books. I’m a fast reader so sometimes I remember snippets of books I’ve read but can’t grasp the full story in my memory so rereading often yields surprises. Though I don’t remember the exact story of the books I’ve loved, there’s a feeling I remember and I want to go back and experience that feeling again. 

There was one book, a novel I read close to ten years ago, that I have thought about thousands of times that I could not go back to during the peak of COVID. I knew it would be too upsetting so, though I thought about the story often, I left the book on the shelf.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, is about eleven-year-old Julia and her family. They live in California in current times when a rare phenomenon strikes the planet. The Earth’s rotation inexplicably starts to slow. The book follows the course of the Earth’s slowing alongside the adolescent development of the narrator Julia.

Last week I finally felt like I could stomach The Age of Miracles again. COVID feels mildly under control. We have a functioning human as president and my daughter is in actual school. The Age of Miracles was everything I remembered. The story filled my brain for days. I thought about it all the time and I could see parallels in the world we live in now — rising temperatures, fires, and the extinction of certain flora and fauna. For me, the book was then, and is now, viscerally relatable.

The Age of Miracles compels me in the same way the 2008 Disney movie Wall-E did. I recently rewatched that film and loved it as much as I had the first time.

I wonder why certain topics stick in our brains and others move through like water through a sieve. Both Wall-E and The Age of Miracles are about the utter collapse of our environment, the total devastation of our planet. I wonder if these stories are so stuck in my mind because they hold a deep-rooted truth about the world or because the topic is the one that scares me the most. 

When I read about Julia persevering in a planet ruled by days of cold darkness followed by days of sun that’s become dangerous and radioactive, I take a pause to grieve for my daughter’s future; I pray that she dies before we get to that point. I am terrified of her living in a world like that.

But in The Age of Miracles, Julia and millions of other people on the planet adapt. They find ways to survive while understanding very clearly that their time on Earth is limited, that they will probably witness the demise of their planet and of themselves. Despite this imminent destruction, they have an enduring hope that keeps them going day after day. 

In Wall-E, the humans abandon the Earth and wait out planetary destruction somewhere in Outerspace on a giant spaceship. After signs of life on the formerly dead planet become evident, the Earthlings come back and try to rebuild what was destroyed. Starting from nothing they trust that they can recreate a habitable world.

In both the book and the movie there is a sense of utter despair and surprising hope that totally pulls me in. It is not unlike the feeling of melancholy. The feeling of welcoming both the tragedy and the possibility, of existing in that opposite land is strangely comforting. 

I know we’re not the first generation to fear the future. Humans from the beginning of time have faced peril— vicious predators, famine, world war, nuclear arms. And they have carried on. Their perseverance has gotten us to this point and now we will keep going, enduring, and hoping.

I will read The Age of Miracles again and I will watch Wall-E again. As hard as it is to recognize how close we are to the planetary destruction of those stories, I take great comfort from the undeniable presence of hope that runs through them.

Melancholy: My Perfect Emotion

I’ve always liked sad music, heartbreaking books, and movies about love and loss. Last week when I was writing, listening to a classical playlist, a tragically sad song came on, one that made my pen slow down;  a wash of warmth moved through me. I felt simultaneously somber and content. I could feel my heart rate slow down and my breath become more shallow. I felt a deep sense of calm and okayness.

As I wrote I recognized that I loved this feeling I was having. If the music coming from my phone had been the soundtrack from a scene in a movie I would have been sitting on a beautiful horse on a vast prairie remembering a great love lost. 

The deep sorrow of loss does indeed create an opening for memories, images, and feelings related to that mourning. I often feel it when I read a poem or look at photos of my late father — melancholy — great sadness merged with nostalgia. 

Melancholy is the quintessential welcoming of opposites to create a sense of peaceful presence. For me, melancholy invites me to slow down. To welcome all that comes with melancholy, my overly active physical body and always busy brain have to downshift to experience the complexity of the emotion.

It’s why I love to read heartbreaking memoirs. It’s why I gravitate towards slow, storytelling music like country and folk. It’s why I’ll always choose the tragic family dramas on Netflix. When I enter those spaces I invite in melancholy.

We learn early in life to steer clear of sadness. We learn that it will bring us down, keep us from living our best lives. And it’s true. Wallowing is not the same thing as melancholy. When my grandmother died and then her son, my father, a few months later, I experienced deep sadness, grief, and mourning.

But twenty years later when I think of my father, when I write a poem and his humor comes through me, or when I share with my brother how alike they look, I feel melancholy. I miss him and wish her were still here. And at the same time, memories of him run through me like a warm stream. I am happy-sad all at once. It is a feeling of fullness and complete presence.

Freud writes of the difference between melancholia and mourning. Mourning, he posits, is finite and external, related to immediate loss. Mourning, he says, eventually ends in acceptance. Melancholia, on the other hand, is more complex. The pain of loss is relegated to the unconscious so is not obvious, even to the griever. 

From my cursory review of Freud’s analysis, what I can gather is that melancholia exists when a grieving person has not had the opportunity to fully move through loss to acceptance. And I wonder if any of us ever fully moves through deep loss or if there is always some residue of melancholia.

This makes sense to me. Sometimes I reminisce about days when my daughter let me hug her and snuggle her. I remember the times when she needed me to guide her. And I miss that. I miss that version of her that is gone now that she is a young adult. Sometimes my iPhone will send me a video of images of her, of my family with sad music playing in the background. It comes at random times, a delightful surprise where I can take a break from whatever I am doing to pause and welcome that perfect sense of melancholy.

Maturing into Humility

My therapist is 81 years old. A few months ago when I was weeping over the news that a ten-year-old had shot and killed her mother’s friend accidentally, she cried with me. After a few minutes of sitting together in our sorrow, she said, “and there is so much good.”

In another time, a different era of my life, I would have found this type of comment glib and annoying. But that day I took comfort. I believed her. I trusted her wisdom and her experience. 

That six-word statement, heard at the right moment, from a trusted guide and elder opened up a tiny portal for me. Like a rainbow milky-way encircling me, I felt it, all the good things that walk with me every day of my life — my family, my community, my health, the trees, the lake, the birds. And, along with the despair I felt for that ten-year-old girl, I felt grateful. 

Today is September 11th, the 21st anniversary of one our country’s greatest disasters. I remember the day. I was set to fly to Los Angeles on September 14th for a three-month yoga training but at the last minute, afraid to fly, I decided to drive. I spent months after 9–11 frightened, unmoored, waiting for another bomb to drop.

I was thirty-two years old then and I thought I had more control than I did. I thought that worrying, fretting, and listening to more news, would keep me in charge of the situation. I believed that keeping my mind on the matter would prepare me for whatever else was to come.

Today there is a thick layer of smoke blanketing the sky, alerting us to the devastation that is happening to forest land to the north of us. We cannot see the bridge to the north or the mountain to the south. We’ve closed all of our windows and altered our outside plans. I can’t help but think about the birds. What are they doing? Where are they hiding out?

As I look at the sky I wonder how far in every direction this smoke goes. At what point does the sky turn blue again? I remember when I first learned about brackish water. How do the freshwater fish and the saltwater fish figure out where to live? Have they adapted special abilities over time so that they can live in fresh, salt, or brackish waters?

The birds are adapting to the smokey sky. I don’t know how, but they are. Some of them will learn to manage the smoke, others will retreat to the sky that is clear and some will manage to live in the brackish sky.

Last night I went to an outdoor cafe with a friend. The sky was brown. It felt like we were in some kind of a smoke-induced solar eclipse, but we decided to sit outside anyway, accepting the possibility of being in unhealthy air quality in exchange for a few hours of much needed time to catch up with each others’ lives.

My daughter’s school district is on strike, a galling and appalling situation after two years of half-cooked school. Trump is up to his familiar manipulation tactics, reminding us of the utter and pervasive corruption in our country. There is smoke in my sky and skies all over our region. Women are being denied rights to their own bodies. Russia and Ukraine are at war. Guns are more valued than books. Loved ones of those killed in 9–11 are remembering and grieving those they tragically lost twenty-one years ago. People are suffering all over the world. 

And, there is so much good. I go back to that moment with my therapist all the time, “and there is so much good.” In my mind’s eye, I can see her face — kind, loving, and earnest. When she spoke those words to me she really believed them. And I can feel, as I get older and more mature, that I am starting to believe them more too. I am entering a phase of acceptance. And with acceptance comes the ability to feel grateful for the things I missed when I was younger, hunkered down in my suffering.

I think about the birds right now, about how they are managing in this smokey sky. They aren’t like humans. They aren’t processing how fucked up this is. They aren’t getting angry at the trees for igniting or at the humans for creating this tortured planet. They are just figuring out how to live in the brackish sky, accepting and adapting.

There is so much to be outraged about in this world. And there are things we can change with our anger, with our votes, and with our financial support. As I get older I see that suffering does not have to accompany anger and outrage. We do our work, we fight our battles, and we accept that this is what it looks like now. We accept so that we can experience the things that bring us joy and happiness.

The birds, even the crows, are nowhere to be seen this morning. Maybe they found a haven somewhere to wait out this smoke. I hope so. As I sit here on my couch, all the windows sealed tight to prevent the smoke from coming in, I feel humbled by the earth. I am no more or less important than the birds who are out there finding their way through the smokey skies. 

Every year, we experience more challenges, tragedies, and disasters, and with each one, we adapt and get through. It’s what the birds do. It’s what my therapist, in her age and wisdom, has learned to do. I can see the future and it doesn’t look so bright. Environmental, social, and political issues are somersaulting their way across the news media every day. I live in this world where there is so much to fear and despair. It is scary and unmooring and infuriating. And, there is so much good. 

Task Conflict vs. Relationship Conflict

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Last week I was in a meeting with two men and two women. The focus of the meeting was to address some work conflicts that one of the men and I were having. The other two parties were there to facilitate this potentially difficult discussion. This issue I have with this particular colleague is a long-standing issue. I’ve been frustrated, irritated, angry, and complacent at different times during our time working on this project together.

This meeting had been called to bring things to the surface, to put it all on the table. And so, as the meeting unfolded I didn’t hold back. I leaned into this opportunity and said everything (almost) I thought. When my colleague started spewing revisionist history I barked back with the real version, citing emails, and calendar clarifications. When he told me that we hadn’t had the required meetings I snapped that I wasn’t his secretary and he could make the meetings as well as I could. I was pissed, and I did not shrink in that room.

A few days later, the other man at the meeting and I were debriefing and he said to me, “I’m so glad you two (me and the other woman present) were direct with X.” I knew he meant that as a compliment but I what I heard was his sense of surprise. He wasn’t used to women standing up like this and that made my heart sink.

Expressing anger, outrage, and injustice are all natural reactions in the face of conflict, but from the time we are girls, we are subtly (and not so subtly) coached to tone it down, to steer clear of conflict. We’re taught to see things relationally, to take care of people, to not create unrest. 

And at what cost? Minimizing or avoiding conflict does not solve anything long-term. It simply covers things up until they fester, get bigger, and show up again. I see it in my marriage, in my friends’ marriages, at work, and with my daughter. Last week on the Hidden Brain with Shakar Vedantam I heard an interview with psychologist Adam Grant. Grant shared the following:

I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they assume that less conflict is better. That if you want to build a successful collaboration or a great team then you’ll want to minimize the amount of tension you have. But as some researchers have argued based on a lot of evidence, the absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy. If you’re in a group where people never disagree, the only way that could really happen is if people don’t care enough to speak their minds.

Grant differentiates between “task conflict” and “relationship conflict”. Task conflict involves debating about different perspectives and ideas and can potentially be constructive because parties on both sides can learn something. They are focusing on the content of the conflict and can move through it. 

Relationship conflict, on the other hand, is personal, so when there is an issue up for discussion or debate, it becomes emotional. Feelings are hurt. Productivity is thwarted, and the possibility for future communication is further ruptured.

When I left that work meeting last week I felt better. More clear. We’d looked the conflict dead in the eyes and each said our piece. I don’t know what will happen with our working relationship moving forward. Fortunately, we work for different organizations and my tenure on this project is limited. The worst-case scenario is I grit my teeth and endure. In the best-case scenario, we focus on the task conflicts moving forward and strengthen our working relationship.

Recently my daughter and a few of her friends found themselves in the middle of a conflict. An issue between two of the group of friends emerged. Sides were taken and factions were quickly formed. My daughter stood staunchly on one side, firm in her beliefs about the story. She was ready for conflict. Invested. Engaged. Energized. 

And I could see that the kids who stood on the other side were equally invested and energized in their story. As I watched this teenage drama unfold, I was aware that I was witnessing a full-blown relationship conflict. The actual story, or difference in the story was buried beneath the raging emotions.

And what I also understood was that I have had similar experiences in my adult life. In lieu of learning a different perspective, I have fueled my conflict coffers with emotion, basically blocking any possibility for movement in the disagreement or misunderstanding.

The title of Grant’s recent book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing what You Don’t Know says a lot. There is power in stepping outside of the emotion to hear the other side. 

Last night one of the parents of one of the kids on the “other side” of the conflict my daughter is embroiled in called me and left a message that she wanted to talk. Feeling roped into this teenage soap opera I felt panicked about what I would say to this mom. I didn’t have the facts. I just knew the emotion, and mostly from my daughter’s perspective. How would I communicate with this representative from the other camp?

My partner and my daughter and I talked about what I might say to this mother. My partner is a mediator and had great advice. “Even if there is one truth,” she said, “even if the event did happen, everyone has a perspective, an experience.”

“The conversation with this mom,” my partner said, “is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about the lesson for the kids in making room for all perspectives. It is about each party taking accountability for their part, whatever that is.”

It’s true. My daughter and her faction digging their heels in and saying, “This is the only truth” only makes the kids on the other side plant their feet more firmly and shout, “No. this is the only truth.” No movement is made. It’s a tug-of-war without relief.

We talked more about how my daughter can navigate this conflict, how she can make room for all of the different perspectives. It’s not easy to take the emotion out of hard conversations. It takes maturity, perspective, and basically removing any ego involvement. This is hard for adults and nearly impossible for teenagers. 

I can’t help but go back to my own relationship history (both friendship and romantic), to my own past conflicts. And there are many. I can see that I have limited myself by leading with my emotions and taking different perspectives personally. In blinding myself from other ideas I never learned what I didn’t know. 

I plan to talk to that mom today. I’m gearing myself up to hear a different perspective, to make room for it, and find the power that comes from that process. I know I alone cannot solve this conflict for my daughter and her friends but maybe I can learn something by trying.