Meta-communication is something very dear to my heart these days. I’ve had so many acculturated behaviors and automatic responses so deeply ingrained that were it not for a handful of particularly awakening people and texts and incidents, I’d still be doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Communicating, not knowing how to communicate.
We act so quickly, we don’t think about what we’re doing. And we will fight it out without realizing that just a little bit of thought can change the entire course of our lives. It changes the way we think and the way we react to stress. We are capable of doing so much better if we just spend a little bit of thought on it. And spending thought on communication, communicating about communication, is, of course, meta-communication.
Meta-communication leads us to answers that tell us how to heal our communication ouchies, and avoid the messes we get ourselves into over and over and over again.
Memory can be pretty freaky. Apparently there’s a lot of scientific evidence that our memories are far worse than we would expect them to be, filling in the blanks, etc. We really expect our memories to be pretty accurate but it sounds like the more accurate we think our memory is, the less accurate it actually is—science says this. (Somewhere. I have no sources, but I trust the messengers.) It’s really interesting to me that our most vivid memories are likely our least dependable. That says something about the human imagination, doesn’t it? It also says something about Sunnydale Syndrome, which is what I’m calling the propensity to remember things the way you’d rather have experienced them…
As recently as yesterday, Marty reminded me that we get to pick. I go through little cycles where I’m suddenly afraid over a decision I may or may not make in the future. Is that not the most insane thing in the history of the world? I get to make that decision. I get to choose the outcome of the situation. And if you believe in a thought-formed universe, this point is even more dramatic. We don’t we trust our future selves? Don’t we think they’ll know what they’re doing?
More is under our control than we tend to expect.
Harry Potter and the Permission to Disappoint—isn’t that what it’s called? I’ll keep an eye out, I’m sure that’s it. I give you—and me!—the permission to not be perfect. I give us the permission to want different things. Just because we’re standing in the same room wanting connection doesn’t mean we have this perfect, magical synthesis, suddenly the same. I give us permission to be different people, or whole different worlds. And man oh man, I give myself permission to disappoint others. Because sometimes, they’re just going to have to sit down and take it.
You can tell by the brevity of the second half that I’m getting sleepy. But this material is too important to me to just let go. It’s already done awesome things to my brain and it’s still going. We’re going to the next workshop on Saturday, May 26th—this coming Saturday. You can read all about it on the Usual Error’s Upcoming.org event page. It’s going to be excellent, and it’s going to make me some kind of fabulous Saturday!
Which reminds me, why aren’t more of you on Upcoming? Got somewhere better to be? Friend me!
Tagged as: Blog, communication, conflict, usual error, workshops
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