Tag Archives: Boundaries

How to Restore a Broken Relationship

On Thursday I’ll be blogging a review of the new Hobbit movie. In the meantime this search term lead new readers here recently. I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist but I challenged myself to answer the question in exactly 50 words. What have I missed? 🙂

  • First you have to figure out what isn’t working about it.
  • The only person you can change is yourself.
  • Everyone involved must be committed to fixing it.
  • Not every relationship can or should be repaired.
  • Three words: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. If nothing else check out a library book on it.

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What is the Purpose of Gossip?

Someone found this blog recently through this question. Let’s talk about it.

Gossip serves a couple of different purposes:

It provides information about the target.  If what everyone is saying is true “gossip” may provide valuable knowledge about the character of the individual being discussed. I pay closer attention when multiple people tell the same story about someone especially if their tales share eerie similarities, the topic is an illegal or unethical act and not everyone involved is part of the same social circle.

Even this isn’t foolproof, though.

For privacy reasons I’m keeping this story as vague as possible in case anyone more closely connected to it ever reads this post. Many years ago an acquaintance of mine accused someone we both knew of raping her. She reported it to the police but the case was never brought to trial.

Unfortunately the court of public opinion quickly became interested in aspects of her personal life that had nothing to do with whether she was telling the truth. One of my biggest regrets from that time  is that I never turned those asinine questions about sexual history and drinking habits back around on everyone who doubted her.

I’ll never know for sure what did or did not happen that night but I’ve always wondered why so many people jumped to the conclusion that she was a liar given everything we know about sexual assault.

It tells you the truth about the gossiper. Does he or she regularly spread rumours? Have you known him or her to be honest in the past? Would he or she keep talking if the target walked in on the conversation? How would he or she react if their stories were confirmed to be false? I’ve ended more than one friendship based on the answers to these questions.

Respond

This is not to say that I condone spreading rumours about other people. Idle talk does far more harm than good.

I do think it’s important to listen to gossip with one ear, though. If nothing else it will give you an indication of who can and cannot be trusted.

What do you think?

 

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You Don’t Have to Like Everyone

Painting by _bobi bobi.

Recently a friend and I had a conversation about the difference between treating others with respect and liking them as people. My friend was worried about disliking someone they knew for what I consider to be quite valid reasons.

I reassured my friend that it’s ok not to like everyone you meet.  After all, friendship isn’t a synonym for being friendly.

Friendship is reciprocal. I can’t be your friend if you’re uninterested in being mine and the only way the relationship can be sustained is if both of us put effort into it.  It doesn’t matter how much two people have in common as long as both of them are emotionally invested in the relationship and trust one another.

Friendly behaviour is a one-way street. Treating others with the respect, kindness and common courtesy everyone deserves has nothing to do with what you actually think of them or how they treat you. It’s simply good manners to treat other people with the care you’d want them to show you.

Every one of us has no doubt liked some of the people we meet more than others. With seven billion other human beings running around this planet there’s bound to be a few that don’t appeal to you for many different reasons – a personality clash,  value systems that don’t mesh well together, or incompatible interests.

I don’t know where the idea came from that we are obligated to like everyone but I don’t see anything wrong with acknowledging how we really feel as long as those emotions are not used as an excuse to be rude.

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What do you think?

 

 

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The Secrets We Keep

Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto.

Secrets are on my mind this summer for two reasons.

Reason #1: Let’s take a trip back to the 90s. When I was a teenager my parents were a little touchy about secular music. We were eventually allowed to listen to it but they were particular about lyrical content for a long time.

A few months ago a TV special on one of my favourite artists from that era aired about what was actually going on in this singer’s life back then. A lot of old controversies were dredged up in this documentary: her eating disorder, a fatal car accident she was initially blamed for,  a secret relationship she had as a teenager with a much older man , and a marriage she invented in order to preserve her squeaky clean image when she accidentally got pregnant in her early 20s.

As a teenager I didn’t know about any of this. I simply enjoyed her music. Would I have thought less of her if I’d known about all of the things she lied about? No. In some ways it would have actually made me like her more. It’s easier to relate to role models who aren’t perfect, who don’t always make good decisions. I wonder how her life would have been had she felt free to be an (im)perfect role model?

Reason #2: The Healing. A few weeks ago Teresa recommended this book to me. It’s set in the mid 1800s in the south and is about the life of a slave who is kidnapped and renamed by her mistress as a newborn. The narrator grows up knowing nothing about her origins. To make a long story short she’s suddenly rejected by her mistress as a teenager and spends the rest of her life uncovering the mystery of her biological family and helping other slaves/former slaves piece their lives together.

Even that description doesn’t do justice to the plot. Just trust me. This is a book well worth checking out.

Privacy vs. Honesty

Of course not everyone is going to be ok with issue or behaviour X. Some people  may actually treat general-you very poorly because of it. It’s so much easier sometimes to avoid all of that hassle in the short term even if there’s a chance someone will figure it out eventually.

There are also privacy issues to consider. Not everyone needs to know everything all of the time. It’s not only ok to be a private person, one can be 100% comfortable in his or her skin without feeling the need to broadcast their lives.

To give a silly example: this past weekend was the annual Pride parade here in Toronto. Every year volunteers sell these stickers that say things like, “str8,” “married,” “bi,” “gay,” etc. for people who want to wear them. While Drew and I were walking around the booths he kept teasing me about not wearing a sticker.

“You should be proud of who you are!” he’d joke.

“I am proud,” I’d say. “I just don’t feel the need to advertise who I am.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that, for the record…it simply isn’t my style.

Thoughts?

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Should You Forgive Someone Who Has Anger Issues?

How do I forgive someone without speaking to him or her?

How to forgive someone who doesn’t know they’re wrong?

Should I forgive when an apology isn’t given?

My search logs for On the Other Hand have been blowing up lately with questions about forgiveness. These are just a sample of them.

I’ve talked about this before but I thought I’d expand on this topic today. (Click on the links if you’re interested in reading about the how of forgiveness.)

History

I grew up in religious traditions that heavily emphasized forgiveness. My parents grew up Mennonite and passed many of those values down to their children. Turning the other cheek is the definition of that denomination.

When I was young my parents attended/pastored churches that believed in stuff like demonic possession. One of the ways demons were thought to gain a foothold in your life was by latching on to something in your life (some people call these doorways): an unconfessed sin, a traumatic experience, reading or listening to the wrong thing, a sin committed by your ancestor, etc.

People who were thought to be possessed by an evil spirit were encouraged to purge their lives of anything that might draw negative beings near them.

The Upside…

Of this is that I grew into an adult who very rarely holds a grudge. If anything I’d bend over backwards to restore a damaged relationship even if the other person hadn’t done anything to show that he or she was truly sorry.

Is this a bad trait? Not always. It’s much hard to make an enemy of someone who is (virtually) always willing to reconcile.

My challenge in my 20s, though, has been and is to find the balance between reconciliation and setting boundaries with people who run roughshod over them. In the past it’s been hard for me to say, “it really hurt me when you did X.” My first impulse is to forgive and forget without ever really talking about it or asking for different behaviour in the future.

This isn’t good.

How Have I Changed This?

By getting pissed off.

There comes a time when you’ve had enough. My definition of that term probably isn’t yours in any given situation. And I’ll admit that I’m still learning how to be more assertive. Each step in that direction is a small victory.

But when I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough.

I’ll forgive but I won’t forget.

Internet searchers, this is what I recommend you do as well. By all means forgive for the sake of your own health but remember that you have options. Forgiveness isn’t a free pass for anyone to keep causing harm to you.

You can forgive and never speak to that person again. You can forgive and take a giant step back from them. You can forgive someone without giving them your trust again.

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A One Hour Trip? That’s Too Far Away!

Seven years ago when I moved from Ohio to Ontario travelling wasn’t a burden.

I’d spent the previous eleven years living in a small town. Going almost anwhere – church, the grocery store, school, the gas station – required a vehicle. Sidewalks existed mostly in the older sections of town and not all of them were well-maintained. Often my mom and I would take a twenty or thirty minute walk without seeing anyone else on the sidewalk.

Friends would sometimes say, “I saw you out walking last weekend. Is everything ok?” It was  assumed that the only reason someone would walk is because they didn’t have enough money to drive (or had lost their license).

Enter Toronto, the walkable city.

Coming from my background it was strange at first to “share” the sidewalk with other people. Sometimes there would be so many people walking that everyone walked single file for several blocks!

I loved the idea of visiting three or four different stores without once climbing into or out of a vehicle but it was kind of funny to hear Torontonian friends say, “You want me to travel an hour just to go to dinner? That’s too far away!

Fast forward to 2012. I’m turning into one of those Torontonians.

An hour or two of travelling on it’s own doesn’t sound too bad until you realize you have to do the same trip to get back home. Before anything else happens, then, you’ve already spent 2-4 hours of your day just travelling.

Once you arrive at your destination you’ll probably spend at least that much time- if not more –  eating dinner, socializing and participating in other activities. It wouldn’t make sense to spend more time travelling than you do at your destination, after all.

Suddenly a “one hour” trip turns into a full 8-hour day and that’s if there are no public transit delays and everyone moves smoothly from one activity to the next.

I don’t want to become one of those people who stays in the same neighbourhood all of the time…but I’m really beginning to understand why it happens.

A one hour trip just for a meal? That’s too far away!

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How has moving to a new area or spending time with new friends changed how you think?

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You Are Not a Guru

  I really don’t like wearing it but I have to do it…

she said with a soft sigh. Somehow the conversation had tumbled into all of the stuff women do to look presentable – high heels, makeup, shaving.

What I wanted to say:

So stop wearing it! It’s your body, your decision. Why waste your time and money on something that you dislike so much? Most people will never notice a thing and anyone whose opinion of you is changed by something so petty doesn’t deserve to be part of your life in the first place.

What I actually said:

We haven’t known one another for very long. It felt weird to tell her what I thought she should be doing instead. What works for one person may fail miserably for another.

And it was hard to think of a spur-of-the-moment way to say that some of us don’t bother with any of that stuff without sounding like a sharp-tongued street preacher I saw last year who yelled at a woman for daring to walk past him while wearing a skirt he thought was too short.

Maybe someday our conversations will circle around to this topic again and she’ll ask me questions about my life. If that happens I’ll answer them happily.

In the meantime, though, I am not a guru. Neither are you.

 

how do you get away with it? By just doing it. But respect where others are coming from…even if their reasons are circular.

 

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Is Forgiveness Without an Apology Really Forgiveness?

Is forgiveness without an apology [really] forgiveness?

Someone recently found this blog by typing that question into a search engine.

I know I’ve mentioned this here before but the answer is yes. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.

At the bare minimum reconciliation requires an apology, a commitment to change and stitching your relationship – professional, romantic,  platonic or otherwise –  back together. In short, it’s something that can only happen if everyone participates. Reconciliation is a beautiful act…but it’s never guaranteed to happen.

One can forgive someone without being given an apology because it’s not about them or what they did anymore. Instead it’s about allowing yourself to walk away from the cycle of harm.

And even with forgiveness the person who harmed you still has to face the consequences of his or her actions – legal troubles (in extreme cases), the erosion of trust, a relationship that may or may not overcome whatever has just happened.

Often forgiveness is the first step to restoring things to the way they used to be.

Sometimes people forgive and the relationship continues with a few additional boundaries in place.

And every once in a great while a person will forgive without allowing for the possibility of reconciliation. I’ve only ever had to exercise this option once but it was the best choice for that situation.

Respond

What do you think? Have you ever struggled with differentiating between forgiveness and reconciliation? What have been your experiences with forgiving someone who never apologized?

 

 

 

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It’s Never Just Gossip

Originally posted on January 13, 2011. I haven’t been feeling well lately and am taking a short writing break while I recover.

Let’s begin with a one-sentence working definition of gossip for the purpose of this post: saying or listening to information (true or otherwise) about someone that you wouldn’t feel comfortable participating in if that person was standing next to you.

Between a difficult half-dozen or so years in school and growing up as a preacher’s kid in a series of small, insular towns I spent a good chunk of my childhood avoiding the ridiculous stories other people shared about me and my family.

The most important lesson I learned from those experiences is that it’s never just gossip. Listening to or spreading the latest juicy earful, even if it seems to be harmless speculation, can permanently damage your relationships for the following reasons:

It erodes trust. Most people consistently exhibit the same types of behaviours over time. If someone wants to share the latest titillating rumour about so-and-so I can only assume that they’re saying equally unflattering things about me when I’m not around. This makes it extremely difficult to share anything with them that I’m not ready for the entire world to know and if I can’t trust someone with at least some private or highly personal information we probably won’t be spending much time together in the future.

Words have sharp edges. They can destroy reputations and annihilate a lifetime of trust in one conversation. If I’m going to influence someone else’s life I want to build them up instead of tearing them down. Destruction is easier and faster but the only thing it leaves behind is emotional rubble. I want to be and do more than that.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Outward appearances and our assumptions about what is going on should never be taken as substitutions for the truth. They can point towards it but ultimately we can never truly know what is in the heart or mind of someone else unless and until they tell us.

Criticism is a habit. The more you practice it the easier it is to view others, the world and yourself with a critical and unforgiving eye. We need more grace and acceptance in our lives, not nitpicking or condemnation so this is how I try to treat both others and myself. Criticism does have its place in certain situations…but I believe it is a far smaller one than most people think.

I’d include celebrity “gossip” in this as well. Hearing that so-and-so is getting married, having a baby or won a prestigious award is fine. Rumours about alleged personal problems or nit-picking someone else’s appearance, family status or religious/ethical beliefs are activities that I find rather offensive. If it isn’t something I’d want to be said about me or someone I love why would it be somehow ok to do it to a stranger?

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That’s (Not) Just the Way It Is

That’s just the way s/he is.

This [organization, group, charity, etc] has always operated like that. You’ll get used to it.

Time for another rant. 😉

Well, that’s just the way it is isn’t an excuse. It isn’t even a real answer.

And that’s just the way it is so easily slouches into I can’t do anything do change it. Why bother trying? 

No, we can’t wave a magic wand and change how other people behave or certain circumstances in life – chronic health problems, the fact that autumn is slowly slipping into winter. Some things are beyond anyone’s control.

But we can change how we react to them and in certain situations we can reduce the amount of time and energy they demand from our lives.

So no, whatever you’re thinking of that’s not just the way it is.

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