Episode 34 - The Conversation You May Never Get to Finish

And it's really important to be able to recognize them because all of us have experienced this from time to time.

It could have been an argument where we feel we were treated unfairly.

It could be a situation where we weren't given the opportunity to speak, to say what we wanted to say or what we thought or what we believed.

And we feel closed out.

Perhaps the other person has said, well, I don't want to speak about it anymore.

Or, well, we've discussed it enough.

Or, why can't you just move on? Why do you keep needing to raise it? Why do you keep going back to it? Why can't you let it go? The problem with you, you're like a dog with a bone.

You won't let it go.

So what can happen is our need to have an answer can be met with the other person's.

Perhaps it's their frustration.

Perhaps it's their straightforward unwillingness to give us closure.

Perhaps it's because they don't have the answers.

So I want to talk a little bit about what's happening psychologically in this situation.

And there are so many different scenarios where this can happen.

So I don't expect my explanation to hit every single circumstance.

But what I do want to talk is what is happening underneath this kind of dynamic.

So say I feel like I've been misunderstood or misrepresented by somebody.

Perhaps I said that I would show up at 2 p.m. in the afternoon and I didn't get there till 3 p.m. And the person that I was meeting, instead of hearing why I was late, what the reasons were, they instead say, well, the trouble with you is you are always late.

You are never anywhere on time.

And you want to say, well, I am sometimes on time and there was a reason why I was late on this occasion.

And I don't feel that it's fair to say that I'm always late.

Sometimes I am late like we all are, but sometimes I'm on time.

So that internal dialogue that I just described there of wanting to explain yourself, wanting to be clear, wanting to avoid being labeled as always late, for example.

that hits our sense of internal sense of justice it will actually hit aspects of our own internal moral compass because we want to be treated fairly we want to treat other people fairly and treat ourselves fair if the person that we're speaking to isn't allowing us that opportunity to say what happened for us then we can very easily be left feeling like we have not been treated fairly It's perfectly acceptable to want to be treated fairly.

So what happens is we can get stuck in a loop where we feel that we can't move on until we're heard, until the other person accepts our explanation, until the other person removes that label.