How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight

Image by Republica from Pixabay 

“For Presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” Eckhart Tolle

I really have relished this lesson, more now that I am finally getting more successful at achieving it as opposed to when I’m in the midst of the fire. It’s been a bumpy road that was fraught with suppressing my feelings at times, inappropriately expressing them at others and generally leaving trail of carnage either in my inner or outer world depending on how I had dealt with situations.

Listening to Wendy Behary talk to therapists on how to deal with clients who exhibit narcissistic traits this week, I realised that her advice summed up well what I have learned in general about speaking my truth, to anyone.

She talks about developing the ability to stand your own ground with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you. I know you. I know what you are up to”, rather than a defensive one. She describes the aim as:

To be able to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or hurt, feel threatened or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

That is the bit I used to have real trouble with. I had a pattern of getting triggered and acting from that provoked part of me, rather than taking the time to observe what about what had happened/was happening that was actually triggering me. It wasn’t until I took the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with my life story that I started to make progress.

I did relate to one case study she shared of a woman who didn’t feel sure of herself. The lady had been brought up to believe she had to forfeit her needs for the needs of others and, if she expressed her opinion, she was at risk of being humiliated or abandoned.

The client did her work to repair the internal damage and re-parent herself to reinstate the bright, capable being that she was. She was able to get to a point of not being so frightened of losing her husband that she was able to choose him. And once she was able to become more secure in her choices, she became more vocal in expressing her needs.

When I am dealing with interpersonal difficulty I always go back to the Teal Swan’s article on Attunement. She points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:
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1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tends to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs - neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Fighting is just one outcome when I am not attuned to my needs and able to be fully present, what is really happening underneath is a reaction to unconscious memories of those early years, my physiology goes into flight-or-fight mode. As Bessel Van Der Kolk relates in his book The Body Keeps The Score the goal is really self regulation.

It is probably no coincidence that, as I listened to some stories from people around me in the last few days, I began to see how these dynamics play out in all sorts of ways, big and small. I could also see how each of these scenarios could improve hugely by just one of the party’s taking Wendy’s approach.

One man was telling me about the dynamics between his wife, who is a teacher aide specifically hired for her skills in dealing with neuro-diverse kids in the classroom, and the class teacher. The teacher appears to take a very black and white approach and expects the aide to get the disruptive children to behave like every other child.

Knowing a little about the common neuro-diversities seen in classrooms (meaning autism, dyslexia, attention deficit, hyperactivity and so forth), I know a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work, we didn’t all come out a cookie cutter machine. However, it’s possible the teacher was parented in that way and so it has become her modus operandi and her safe place.

Meanwhile, the teacher aide is well attuned to the diversity she is experiencing in the children and adapts her approach to each child, often – in this case – having to act as a buffer between teacher and pupil. I can only imagine the relationship is rather strained, especially since the teacher apparently sees herself as the person who dictates what happens in her classroom.

So this man was relating to me his wife’s frustration and the interactions that have occurred between her and the teacher, sounding not unlike Wendy’s case study of the woman who was afraid of losing her husband, only in this example it’s a job at stake.

I imagined if his wife were able to approach the teacher with a firm, steady posture and an attitude of “I see you” rather than a defensive one. If she could learn how to be able to state her truth, be real, in a calm, clear way. And to recognise and connect with that part of herself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room.

I imagine her calmly telling the teacher after lesson how keen she’s sure her little pupil is to learn from the teacher, but how humiliated he had felt when the teacher shamed him for being late, which was the fault of the parent, and further punished him by not allowing him to participate fully in the game the class were playing.

The teacher would no doubt have leap to her own defence, and perhaps started to lash out verbally at the teacher aide, but I could imagine the aide standing her ground calmly and saying “Well, that’s the way I saw it” and leaving the class, no argument, no defence. “Gosh, I thought, what a difference that would make”. It might not change the teacher’s entire behaviour, but I’ll bet she would be more cautious the next time a pupil was late.

Then there was one of our neighbour’s sons who was sitting out in his car at 11.30 at night beeping his horn randomly. He is a teenage boy on the brink of passing his driver’s test, no doubt longing for the freedom of the road. While another neighbour went out, understandably angry, I could imagine myself getting in the passenger seat instead and having a chat about life, I feel like his beeping horn was an outward expression of some bottled up things spilling over.

And, in my own world, I have talked before about the dynamic in my own relationship and how that has improved by learning to stand more calmly in my truth.

But in another realm of my interpersonal relationships there was an issue that came up over the school fair. Only a couple of years ago the school fair was something I couldn’t even think about without getting highly triggered.

Thankfully, after the work I had done to break that cycle of instant anger that arose in me every time I felt like someone was stepping over my boundaries, which usually escalated to some call to arms on behalf of a bigger cause, I was able to calmly articulate how an intended approach was making me feel. This resulted in a genuine interest in my insights rather than a wall of silence, a standoff or a dust cloud from people running in the opposite direction.

What is it that has to happen to allow you to state your truth, be real, in a calm, clear way? And to recognise and connect with that part of yourself that stands to get angry or get hurt, feel threatened, or incompetent, and to get it out of the room? Will you take the time to go deeper, make the links, and deal with your life story so you can start to make progress?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Makes You So Afraid of Conflict?, Value Your Unique Perspective – Especially When You Feel Rejected, You See What Happens When You Learn to Speak Your Truth and How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.