7 tweets · January 2021 · 29 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Sometimes I am temporarily incapacitated in some way (eg tiredness or fixated on a task) and I do things that upset people. When I try to say "you could try getting my attention by...", they think I'm saying that it's their job to ensure I don't upset them, & feel blamed.
This is really frustrating to me because, sure, there might be something I can do about this ultimately, to have more capacity in these situations, but in the meantime 𝙄 𝙙𝙤𝙣'𝙩 and it seems to me like there's some lower-hanging fruit they could pick that would improve things.
Guessing that part of what is going on here is: 1. they don't yet feel seen re their experience of my impact on them 2. in the convo, getting heard about that is more important than solving thing 3. they read my "here's a thing to try" as not listening!
I think also when people hear my suggestion, they think that if they tried it, it would be sort of enabling me to continue doing a thing that they think I shouldn't be doing. And that may be true in some sense*, but them treating it like that doesn't dialogue with my generator.
There's often an assumption that if someone really understands how what they're doing is hurting you, then they'll stop. This piece doesn't account for the extent to which we don't understand what's generating our own behavior in the first place, so we can't change it. Need both.
Part of where this assumption comes from is a counteractive model of behavior change where you try to repress the generator and immediately do something different. This is (self-)coercion, and creates tangles & internal conflict, on net.
Anyway, pragmatically, what / can do in this situation is to reaffirm my own intention to integrate rather than layer, and then figure out how to understand what the other person needs, both so I can help where I can, and so they can get space to hear how they can help.