My daughter is making her way in first grade. A big activity and area of exploration is telling on each other. Telling the teacher, asking and expecting the teacher to intervene and negotiate, debating what is fair, asserting their positions, having energy about their own and others’ responsibility–all this engages them throughout their play and social interactions. I listen and witness it all with as much humor as I can muster, sometimes with a smile and a laugh, at times with a face tinged with irony or discomfort.
Telling on yourself is really different. I practice it as much as possible–and it does take practice!–and I suggest it to my clients a lot. It’s about noticing what’s going on inside and talking about it. When I watch the kids, they habitually look outside of themselves. They blame a lot. When they ask the teacher to intervene–and she does–they go outside of themselves as individuals or pairs or a community to another authority to make rules and decide what’s fair. At home we often talk about feelings, responses, and actions. But I see how easy it is to blame others for how we feel, to see others as the reason we feel the way we do. And generally speaking our conditioning supports this perspective.
So telling on yourself begins with the practice first of looking inside to feel and know what’s going on in there. To notice your emotions, your body sensations, your thoughts. And then to identify the story you’re telling yourself about what’s happening and why you’re feeling as you do. Being able to identify the story is HUGE. It’s even more powerful to acknowledge the story to someone else. Take it one step further and tell it to the person you’ve cast in a role in your story, especially the one who is activating the emotions in you. That’s telling on yourself–and it’s life changing.
Let me give you an example. We all have emotional patterns that we developed in early life. Some of these we brought with us from other lives, some we developed in our specific families of origin. Whatever the case, we made typically unconscious decisions about how to be, in relationship, in work, in life, in the body, etc. We carry these decisions forward, again usually unconsciously, and they become the basis of our understanding–and creation–of reality. For us, they become “just how it is.”
As we become more conscious, we become more aware of the patterns that had been unconscious. Just becoming aware of them can help them shift and dissolve. But usually some of the patterns really hold on–literally for dear life–because they are survival patterns. We developed them at a time (when young) or in a situation (usually extreme) when we thought I have to do “X” or I will die. Literally. So these are deep buggers that don’t dissolve easily–and you can see why.
So the next step after identifying the patterns is telling on them. OOOOOOO, that’s a big one. It feels so taboo at first. Tell on my patterns. Not to your therapist, or your best friend. But to the person who you are having the interaction with when the pattern comes up. You can say it then or later. I usually do it later when I’ve calmed down, unless I know I have trust with the person.
Anyway, it goes something like this: I’m feeling annoyed. I did all the laundry, put most of it away, and the rest has been sitting in the basket for days. I want to blame my husband for my annoyance because he didn’t put it away. It’s “his job.” I begin to tell myself the story that I have to do everything, he’s not paying attention, and he doesn’t appreciate me. If I let myself run with this one, I could even begin to imagine that he doesn’t love me–obviously, otherwise he’d do his part to keep things going. (I would completely forget the million other things he does “to keep things going.”) Now I catch this one pretty quick because I’ve been practicing for years. Early in our relationship I could actually get trapped in this story, get annoyed, become irritable, be critical later about something else without owning what’s happening inside. Either that or just get mad when I see him.
Then I learned to tell on myself. I tell him: I’m noticing that I’m believing that you should have put the laundry away. I’m noticing that I’m annoyed because I believe you don’t appreciate me and you’re taking me for granted. I’m wondering if I’m trying to buy your love with laundry, and now I’m resentful about it. And you’re not keeping up with the role I made up for you. Ugh. Okay. I don’t want to be mad, I just want to connect. He says: yeah, me too. We smile. I say: I know you’ve been busy this week. And I know you’ve been doing a lot around the house, too. He says: yeah. And I’ll put away the laundry.
It’s gets easier with practice. What I love about it is how fast difficult energy can release and begin to flow into connection with another. Because the emotion pattern keeps us apart, and telling the truth–as much as we can perceive it at the time–creates understanding and connection. Try it and let me know how it goes!
{ 0 comments… add one now }