Hard Conversations - What Are They Good For?
Sometimes the hardest words unlock the deepest freedom.
I’m continually fascinated by how little I know about my body. Thirty-eight years with it and in some ways I feel like a baby, fascinated I have a hand, except not about hands. Fascinated that when I eat certain foods, mainly spicy ones these days, I end up not feeling great afterwards. Maybe not all the time, but enough of the time, that I’m finally starting to skip out on them occasionally, not because I don’t enjoy them, but because I enjoy feeling good.
Maybe that’s a silly example. Probably an obvious one if you’ve been reading for a while, was alcohol. I continued to drink, regularly, even though I knew at minimum I felt better the next day if I hadn’t had a drink the night before, even if it wasn’t a “big” night. But even that attention to my body took a while to catch on. So much that I would look my therapist straight in the eyes four years ago, describe my nightly ritual of a martini, and then wine or potentially another martini, and tell him it wasn’t impacting me.
And I think I was disassociated enough internally that I could actually say that, because I was so adept at numbing that I couldn’t feel the big feelings in my body, let alone any kind of nuance.
This isn’t supposed to be a post about eating or drinking, it’s supposed to be about our bodies, or specifically my body, and how much it can carry without me even realizing it. How balled up and tight I can become internally, literally in my body, without being able to register the stress in my mind.
I’ve been sleeping pretty poorly the last couple weeks. It’s not a novel pattern, but I would fall asleep fine and then wake with regularity somewhere in the 3-5a.m. window. And I’m a regular person with a job and kids and life and I experience stress. And also, I can be so out of touch with my body, still, that I intellectually limit the impact of that stress to only my mind. Thoughts racing or anxiety are the reasons for those early morning wake-up, but that’s it. Sure, I have stress, but I’ll meditate or do some breathing exercises and get through it. And eventually, it should go away, right?
Except that being human also means having a body. And I don’t have references to point to here, but there’s a whole movement of people writing and talking about the interconnectedness of the brain, mind, and body in recent years. The general point being that we can’t separate the two, what is experienced in the brain or mind impacts the body, and vice versa. And beyond that even, our body can store or hold past experiences or current tensions, even when we’re not aware of them.
Back To The Sleepless Nights
“I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.”
– Parker J. Palmer
There was a particular hard conversation I’ve known I wanted to have for a while. The details don’t matter here, and maybe at some future point, I’ll share them. For now, generalities. It’s one of those conversations I’m sure you’ve had and dreaded at one point. The one where you think life might look and feel better on the other side of the conversation, but where there is also a tremendous fear about how the conversation could go sideways, and also how the ramifications of having the conversation are largely unknown, and, therefore, pretty scary.
I didn’t have a timeline for this conversation, honestly didn’t even know if I would have the guts to initiate it. And then a couple things happened this week that brought the whole situation into stark contrast and I knew it was time. And Friday I made the conversation happen. My words didn’t flow as beautifully or freely as I would have liked, but my words were well received and the whole thing went better than I could have imagined.
And the rest of Friday afternoon and evening, I felt a huge emotional letdown in my body. As if the tightly wound and tangled ball of tension was finally starting to loosen and unravel. The heaviness behind my eyes and physical fatigue in my body were very real. Beyond all that, I’ve slept better the last two nights than I have in recent memory.
And I didn’t even know I was holding all that within. When I’d tell my wife about the sleep troubles, she’d reference content around the conversation I knew I needed to have, and say it was probably causing stress in my body. I might have intellectually agreed, but I also heavily discounted it, not believing this thing could have that much impact. Spoiler alert: she was right.
And even after the conversation I had, there are other, different conversations hanging open in my life, and maybe weighing me down in my body. And even on the heels of a hard conversation that went well, I won’t lie to you and tell you I’m sprinting toward another one.
Part of my fear around hard conversations is an over-concern for taking care of the other person’s emotional needs. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have difficult conversations with great care, but what I’m talking about here is more “caretaking.” Not saying our own truth because we’re worried we’ll hurt someone else’s feelings. And after a while, enough of this repressing of our own truth inside builds up to the mental and physical tangle of tension. We normalize this tightness so much because it’s “just how we are,” not remembering there was a time where we felt more freedom internally. But we’ve slowly ignored our own truth for long enough, unwilling to even look toward it, hoping it goes away, that slowly the knot tightens. All this takes place slowly enough that we don’t even register it happening.
Until one day, something happens and this inner tension gets our attention. We can’t ignore it anymore, and we finally acknowledge our truth, first to ourselves, and then with another person.
And maybe you’ve paid enough attention over the years that you don’t have a similar ball tightening up inside, and I hope that’s true. But if you’re not sure, what would it be like to pay a little more attention to your body in the coming days? To listen to the subtext below the mind’s incessant thought? Is there a conversation that needs to be had? Or is a truth of your own there, waiting to be acknowledged? Waiting to receive the light of your attention to ease the darkness of its tension?
Whether you ever have the conversation or not, acknowledging the truth inside yourself is a great first step to finding internal freedom and ease. And for me, having the conversation was the final acknowledgement to my system that I could own my truth, that I didn’t need to worry about making everyone else happy, that maybe it’s time to start paying more attention and credence to my own happiness.
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Where do (or have) you felt stuck in the churning winds? What helped you shift, or what can you imagine might help you shift now?
Loved this, Josh.
It reminds me of something a friend told me recently, "information without action is anxiety." It blew my mind to think of it like that but it makes so much sense.
I can feel a similar tension recently and can relate to much of what you wrote here. Thank you for sharing it with us!
Thank you Josh for putting on paper what has materialized in my own recovery. For years, I had numerous aches and pains, feelings of malaise, injuries, some imagined and some real.
It took getting sober, both mentally and physically to acknowledge that.
While my pain and angst were real, when I addressed and worked on what was underneath and behind it, I felt better… much better.
Emotional sobriety is key to my mental and physical wellbeing.
I appreciate your writing.
🙏