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And maybe it does lead to fights when it's let out but little and contextually appropriate fights, and then the people dig deeper and gain a better understandin
by jimkleiber 3y ago
And maybe it does lead to fights when it's let out but little and contextually appropriate fights, and then the people dig deeper and gain a better understanding of their situations.
Anger can tell people that we want them to stop doing an activity and sometimes people don't even know their behavior is breaching those boundaries. One time an ex visited me in a park. I juggled the soccer ball then kicked it to her. She rolled it back and said she didn't want to play. I juggled it for 15 more minutes and then kicked it to her again. She stood up and kicked it with me for like 5 minutes.
Three weeks later, she got angry and said "And you don't respect my boundaries!" And I was really confused. She said, "I TOLD you I didn't want to kick the ball and you still kicked it to me."
I wished she had expressed more anger when I kicked it the second time. I wasn't trying to make her angry. Kicking the ball with her wasn't that important to me. I just didn't know that it bothered her that much and if I did, I immediately would have stopped.
- chaos_emergent 3y agototally. Smaller conflicts are much more manageable and keep people in connection so much more than repressing it.
- jimkleiber 3y agoExactly that, "keep people in connection." I love how you framed it. When we suppress the conflict, we distance more and more from each other and from ourselves, disconnecting more and more.