Tell me what you want

It was a seemingly ordinary morning. The girls were at school and the house was quiet. But inside my mind, it was everything but. I had been offered an opportunity – a remarkable one at that – and I was turning it down. The choice was obvious, but that didn’t mean it was an easy one. I had made my decision – that wasn’t the difficult part. What was difficult was trying to come to terms with it. So I was on the phone with my sister, trying to give the turbulence inside my head some shape in the form of words. My sister, being the fiercely protective woman that she is of the people in her life, was telling me to reconsider. That maybe I didn’t have to turn it down. That maybe I could rethink my decision because what she saw down the road was a better future for me. And I understood all of that; of course I did. I knew where she was coming from too. But it wasn’t helping the turbulence inside my head. If anything, it was getting worse because now I was having to justify a decision that I made that I myself was grappling with. So I pressed pause.

“Wait. Stop,” I said. “Ask me what I want from this conversation.”

“Huh?” my sister replied.

“Ask me what I want from this conversation,” I repeated.

“Okay, tell me what you want from your conversation,” she said.

“I want your understanding, and your support, and your presence,” I said.

“Of course. I understand you. I support you. I am here,” she said, and just like that, I found myself calming down.

At that point, I thought I had stumbled upon something revolutionary – a way to let people know exactly what you want from them. Too often, when people come to us with issues of their own, our first instinct is to want to help them, to make things better. Who wouldn’t want to help a close friend or family member who is struggling? So we try to provide them with solutions. We try to tell them what they ought to do, and sometimes, even how to look at things. I mean, how many times have you caught yourself saying, “But look at the bright side… “?

One of the first things that I learned as a therapist was to believe in my client’s ability to solve their own problems. We are not here to hand them out solutions. We are here to hold their hand while they work out difficult emotions, give them a safe space to explore thoughts and feelings they don’t explore anywhere else, and sometimes we are just here. Listening.

Case in point? On one particularly overwhelming session with my own therapist, a few weeks before that conversation with my sister, I ended up talking for the better part of half an hour. I kept going on and on, the chaos inside my head spilling out into words that tumbled over one another, while she kept listening. At the end of it, all she said was, “What do you want from me at this point?” I ended up crying, telling her I wanted her to tell me that this was hard and that I was doing my best. She said all those things, of course, and mentioned how she always admired how I worked so hard, whether she told me explicitly or not. Until that day, I don’t think it had occured to me that I could actually ask her what I wanted from her.

Now that I think of it, I think the seed was planted by her. The seed that turned into this seemingly brilliant concept of mine – you can always ask what you want from a conversation. And if you’re on the listening end, you can always ask what they want from you. I think it is perfectly fine to call up someone and say, “I am going through a tough time, and all I want from you is to listen without judgement. I don’t want a solution. I don’t want you to tell me what to do. I just want you to listen and be here.” In fact I have started prefacing my conversations with such disclaimers. Like this time I called my best friend and said, “Listen, I am in a mood, I am mad, and I am going to rant and you’re not going to dismiss my issues and tell me it’s okay.” (Because she has a tendency to do that, my best friend. She’ll tell me, “Oh leave it, it’s okay,” and most of the times maybe it is, but there are times when it isn’t) Or yesterday, when a friend of mine told me they were having a bad day but they didn’t want to talk about it and I asked them if they wanted me to be with them while we didn’t talk about it.

Why I am writing this today is because I realise that even though I am getting better at listening, I still haven’t been able to turn down that deep desire in my mind to want to actively make things better for the person in front of me. “What’s wrong with that?” you might ask. Isn’t it perfectly fine to want to make things better for someone you care about? Well… because you see, sometimes what you think is best for the person isn’t necessarily best for them. I remember this one time when I was trying to tell a junior of mine that she should rethink some choices because I could see a lot of myself in her, and I was trying to stop her from making the same mistakes I did. It came from a place of good intentions, of course, and the way I saw it, I was simply using my experience to help her out. But then she said, “You know what, it’s okay if this is a mistake. Because guess what, it is MY mistake to make. Maybe I need to learn my own lessons from my own mistakes.” And that really stopped me in my tracks.

In the book “How to be Sad”, author Helen Russell talks about how, as parents, we are wired to do anything to keep our children from experiencing pain – starting with something as simple as painkillers, sometimes offered to babies in anticipation of pain, because society tells us that we are bad parents if we let our children suffer in any form. I think not just as parents, but even as well-wishers, friends, family members – it is our natural tendency to jump in and do whatever we can to stop the other person from suffering. Hence the unsolicited advice. Hence the taking over conversations and offering solutions that are well intended, but too often, not really what the other person might need at that point.

The point of it all? The next time someone reaches out to you because they are going through tough times, maybe ask them what they want from you, what would make them feel better. If they don’t know – maybe just listen. And if they want you to go out with them on a crazy night out that ends up temporarily distracting them from their pain even if you know that it’s not the best idea and they might just end up feeling more miserable the morning after – well, you do that too. Because guess what, it’s not about you. It’s about them, and what they want from you.

P.S. That junior of mine stuck to her decision and proved me wrong so there you have it, proof that what’s best for you is not really what’s best for the other person.

P.P.S If you’re one of those 12 people reading my blog, chances are we are already know each other so feel free to preface your conversations by telling me what you want the next time we talk.