Someone wrote in during the Change Your Mind Q&A about a relationship they were struggling with. The other person in it seemed unable to read or notice emotions, their own or anyone else’s, and held onto their opinions no matter what came up. The person asking the question had been taking that reaction very personally, and said they were still working on not doing that.
Recognizing that it’s the other person’s nature is a good place to start. There’s usually a little bit of work to do internally after that, moving from knowing it to actually being at peace with it and accepting it. That work can show up especially if we have longings for something more from someone than they’re capable of giving. Over time, in a different kind of situation, we begin to realize it’s not that the other person can’t. It’s that they won’t. They just don’t want to. They ain’t gonna. And after multiple rounds, multiple cycles, maybe we’ve been as skillful as we could possibly be, by any reasonable standard, a reasonable standard of care, like in medicine. We’re meeting a reasonable standard in our relationships. So, no blame here. We just realize they’re never going to do that, or they say they want to, but they’re never really going to deliver the goods. The best predictor of the future is the past, especially once there’s been repetition, and a fair opportunity for the other person to shift.
And if you start to recognize that the way a person is is just hardwired, innate, they can try to compensate for it, but even compensating might be out of reach for them, given their biology, or an injury, or whatever happened, there’s just a kind of acceptance available. Sometimes inside that acceptance there’s a grieving, a mourning, a coming to terms with the loss. The loss of hopes.
I’m determined to a fault, myself. If I’ve messed up in my life, it’s often because I was too darn determined to try to get blood from that stone, to find cheese somewhere down that tunnel. It took me a while to realize, ain’t no cheese down that tunnel. That dog won’t hunt. Don’t send a duck to eagle school.
There’s a term, disenchantment, that I think is a very important part of changing our mind. We start to realize, wow, I was enchanted a little bit, maybe often in a sweet and wonderful way. My innocence as a child, or the childlike longing in me, or a sense of possibility, some intuition of a way of being, or a world that could be, draws me into opening up again and again. It’s a little bit like the Charlie Brown and Lucy comic strip. The classic setup: Lucy sets the football down, she’s going to hold it for Charlie to kick, and as soon as he comes toward her, she pulls it away, yet again. We can become disenchanted. Sometimes there’s a real sorrow in that. But then we end up waking up from the spell, and we’re in the cool clear air of reality as it is.
What I want to get into next is the practical part, what actually changes once you’re standing in that clear air. There’s a rule of thumb I use for knowing when a relationship has genuinely told you what it’s going to give you, and something I think is one of the deepest wounds a lot of us are carrying that has nothing to do with the person who couldn’t meet us.
