Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Just like I’ve adjust ed my behavior toward employees in order to relate to them best and create trust that leads to them becoming the best employee they can be, the same could be said for adjusting the actual words we use or the way we say them. For example, John knew how to soften his approach with me from what would be his natural tendency, and he asked me to hit him over the head with mine, or in other words, to be very direct with him. At one point, I was extremely frustrated with him and sent him a very brief text that said something like, “ Either treat me right or leave me the f*** alone.” I had tried using my words with him for years and he wasn’t getting it, but when I used language like he would use, I got through to him. He understood what I was saying, but that took intentional time and effort for me to adapt my language. I clearly didn’t do enough of that , and there were many other issues outside of that, but it was a good lesson for me that my language made perfect sense to me, but I lost him after about two sentences. And if you know me at all by now , there aren’t many times I only write two sentences. In order for me to get his attention, I had to hit him over the head with words he could understand and that would grab his attention. A few years ago, I thought grief was something that only applied to death. Perhaps I wanted to believe that so I could avoid it, since I have been very fortunate not to have lost too many people in my life who were extremely close to me. For all other painful experiences in life, I thought I had no right to “feel sorry for myself” since it’s not like someone died. And through the years, those painful experiences remained unexpressed, pushed down until I was filled up with nothing but…grief. I’m not sure I wrote much about this in that chapter, but after John resigned and I fell apart, much of that grief was about all the other things I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve. I was definitely grieving the loss of him in my life, but once the floodgates opened, I was reliving many things from the past I hadn’t ever allowed myself to feel . When I fully felt the loss of John, I also began to grieve all the other losses and pain and overwhelm and terror. It was two weeks of immersion into how to feel grief and not to compare my grief to any other grief, just allow myself to feel it all. I believed “complaining” was wrong, so I simply didn’t do it. You may have heard this phrase , “If you want to complain, I’ll give you something to complain about.” The first listing of the definition in the online Merriam Webster dictionary of complain (verb) is, “to express grief, pain, or discontent.” ( Complain Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster). Whining means , “complaining or inclined to complain in a childish or petulant manner.” ( Whining Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster). I find the use of the word complain in the definition of whining concerning. If I combine the two definitions, it would be, expressing grief, pain, or discontent in a childish or petulant manner. To me, the use of the words grief and pain is quite different than discontent. Is a child expressing grief or pain ever really whining? Perhaps expressing discontent could be whining, but I think we do some damage when we don’t understand the difference and tell children they are whining about things that are actually grief and pain. I’m sure the super smart people at Merriam -Webster would have a different and perhaps more accurate explanation of why those words were chosen, but my point is simply that our words have power and it’s important that we think about the words that we choose and the power those have over behaviors that lead into adulthood and can impact self-image and relationships. I would have been a much healthier person if I had complained, or expressed grief, pain or discontent, when some difficult things happened to me in my life, but believing complaining was synonymous with whining, I just opted out and told myself I had no right to complain about anything. And there are so many examples of how words can push people away from God. When I heard the phrase “all things come from God,” that’s exactly what it did because if God wanted me to be raped and wanted all the other bad things that happen in this world, then He wasn’t for me. Now taken in context, this phrase may make perfect sense, but when well-meaning people who had far more Bible knowledge than me said things like that and didn’t explain further, I wanted nothing to do with them, their church or God. Co ntext and perspective matter so much in communication and when we mistakenly assume others come from the same knowledge base we have or from the same perspective we do, that’s when communication can break down before it even begins.

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