I recently re-listened to a popular TTE podcast episode called The Meowing Student: Understanding weird behavior in the classroom. In this episode, my friend and co-host, Joe Johnson, came up with a really great axiom: Serve Don’t Save. It’s relevant to teachers, but it’s totally relevant to everybody else.

Here’s what he meant:

Lots of us go about our days looking to help people out. Right? We care. We want to reduce suffering. We want to make a difference in people’s lives. We want to serve.

Which is a worthy goal.

As long as it is implemented from inside your own Garden, with strong Garden Walls that separate your responsibilities and competencies from others’.

If you help someone by leaping out of your Garden into their Garden and then begin weeding and edging and chasing down groundhogs, their groundhogs, then you are not serving. You are saving.

You are fixing them or their lives by doing their work for them. Those weeds? Theirs to pull. That edging? Theirs to do (and they might not even want the sharp cuts you make in their lawn.) Those groundhogs? Theirs to eradicate or co-exist with. In short: That’s their Garden. You need to get the hell out of it.

Saving, in my view, is an assholic move. I mean, if you’re a nurse or doctor or CPR-trained bystander, by all means save lives! That’s a kind of saving we want more of! But psychic saving is a major boundary violation.

That is, not only can I not fix you, but even trying ends up robbing you of the opportunity to fix yourself. And, of course, at bottom you’re the only person who can fix yourself.

Just as I am the only person who can fix myself.

I can support you in doing your work. I can treat you with respect and honor. I can mirror back to you what I see from my Garden. I can cheer you on.

But I can’t save you.

People who revel in saving others are actually doing the complete opposite: They are serving themselves. First, they are protecting themselves from the anxiety (and sadness and anger and whatever) they feel when they look at you and empathize with your situation. They are acting on their own emotions (many of which arise through the very act of empathizing) in order to expunge them.

Second, on top of ridding themselves of unwanted emotions, Saviors get to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Because they are so helpful! And competent! And kind and caring and thoughtful! This is the self-aggrandizing part, what I call Grandiosity.

Meanwhile, the person they saved looks better on the surface but, because they didn’t do their work themselves, they haven’t learned anything (except maybe that their Savior thinks they’re incompetent and definitely that their Savior will do their work for them). They haven’t changed. In fact, they’re going to need saving again eventually. Which might suit the Savior, because Saviors love being needed, but it doesn’t help anybody else in any lasting way.

I know this because I have been a massive Grandiose Savior in my time. (If my next book ever gets published, you can read how that came about — and how I pulled my head out of my grandiose ass. Fingers crossed.)

All these facts about the futility of saving does not mean Saviors can’t serve. It doesn’t mean Saviors can’t care. Or love. It means, if you’re a Savior, you have to get to know and honor your boundaries. And others’ boundaries. And you have to wrestle with the undergirding beliefs you have about yourself and your fundamental value. And about other people’s ability to help themselves. And their right not to help themselves if they don’t want to. And it means accepting realities that are different from yours and might get your fingers itching because fixing those realities would feel so good….

Serve. Don’t Save.

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My husband and I have been buying flowers to put in our fresh, new flower beds. And my husband has planted them. I look out our kitchen window several times a day now and feel kind of inexplicably happy when I see these plants blooming and stretching and thriving. They’re beautiful bundles of utterly contented and perfectly balanced life. When I gaze at them, I feel the way they look.

I cannot gaze at them enough.

I have mentioned in previous posts that I am writing a book about F*ckin’ People. Specifically, about assholes. Working title: Saving the World One <Bleep> at a Time. (<Bleep> because swear words like “asshole” are no longer welcome in book titles.) I have been thinking about and working on this book for years. And I basically gave up on it a couple years ago because I had no idea how to get the attention of an agent given the slews of manuscripts each one reads every day.

But now…

Thanks to a recommendation from my sister-in-law Carol, I connected with a collaborative writer who worked with me to write a successful book proposal. Not only did Sarah write with me and encourage me and represent Your Everyday Reader for me (because I’m so in my head that I don’t know anymore what normal people know and don’t know about relationships), but she also sent the book proposal around to agents she knew (or to agents people she knew knew).

And I got one. I got an agent.

And she is wonderful.

I am not one to share much about myself. It is difficult for me to believe anyone actually wants to know. But I thought my dear TTE readers might want to get this update. My book has made it through the proposal stage and the getting-an-agent stage. Now we’re heading into the hooking-a-publisher stage. And both Sarah and my agent are optimistic that we’re going to sell this baby.

We’ll see. But here’s the lesson I am actively learning (and it ain’t easy, given my particular psychic structure): My expectations of the world — that I won’t be seen or understood, that I’m always out of step — can change. Are changing. Persistence might just pay off this time. If it does, if my book sells, I will have a lot of internal work to do to adjust to this new data!

In the meantime, I am trying to ground myself by looking out my window and breathing gratitude for beauty and for my good, unbelievably good, fortune.

I’ll keep you posted.

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I’m just thinking about the value of silence. I can feel impelled to fill it with chatter and jokes when I’m with quiet people. Silence is a perfect void that I rush into because I imagine it means something bad, like someone is uncomfortable or doesn’t have anything to say or is bored. Or, perhaps most accurately, silence makes me uncomfortable or challenges me to have something to say or, worst of all, gives me space to be bored (which I’m really bad at).

Bottom line: For me, filling silences can be exhausting.

But Memorial Day suggests other interpretations of silence. They’re obvious, I know, but not always evident when I’m impulsively filling a void. They’re worth meditating on, I think:

Silence can mean

• someone is feeling

• someone is thinking

• someone is remembering

• someone is praying

• someone is waiting

• someone is taking up space for themselves

What do your silences mean? How easy is it for you to let silence fall? If you’re a teacher, do you program silence into your lessons? What are the benefits of ushering silence in and letting it be?

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Happy Memorial Day. May you sit in silence for a little bit before plunging back into noisy life tomorrow.

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Of course emotions are bad! They make you feel bad. And they make you a bad person. Only bad people feel emotions like anger, irritation, judgment, envy, hatred. Definitely hatred. “Hate” is a strong word. So hating is bad.

I think, but I’m not sure, that this attitude towards negative emotions is common. I mean, who wants to feel terrible? Who doesn’t do whatever they can to change their mood when they’re sad or frustrated or feeling helpless?

Well, me, for one. And anyone who is curious about the legitimate sources of those negative emotions.

For me, and for Teaching through Emotions generally, negative emotions are a gift. Because, like physical pain, they indicate that something is wrong. And they can be amazingly accurate. Attending to negative emotions with curiosity and a smidgen of psychodynamic perspective can lead you out of negativity and into life-changing understanding! And a plan of action that evaporates the negative feelings and strengthens relationships at the same time! Amazing!

Don’t get me wrong. There are many negative emotions I don’t want. When I’m stressed or anxious about something that scares me — the possibility that someone is irretrievably angry at me, that I’ve done something wrong that I can’t repair, that I’ll be abandoned or attacked or reviled for being me — these deep (what I call) Bedrock emotions are gripping and torturous. I don’t like having them. I want to escape them as fast as I can.

But still I know that they are symptoms. They are messengers. Often they carry information from my past, from experiences that taught me lessons I internalized into psychic Bedrock — experiences that are not relevant now because the original lessons are over and the present is different. When I’m engulfed by these kinds of (what I call) transferential emotions, I acknowledge them — “Oh, hi, Transference. There you are. Let’s see how you communicate with me today” — and wait for them to dissipate. Because they always do. But I hold myself tenderly while I live through them.

Most often my negative emotions alert me to repair work I need to do either on myself or with others. I ask my feelings, “What are you teaching me about myself and others? What is in my power to do to resolve the source of this emotional uprising?” And I try something. What I’ve learned from years of experience is that the relational experiment I try will result in one of two things: relief and resolution OR more data. That I can then fold into my next experiment.

I’ve written this whole long thing because I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that this knowledge and these practices — the knowledge and faith that negative emotions are a motherlode of valuable information and the practices that strengthen relationships — are not second nature to most people. That most people avoid these emotions at all costs — even if the costs include disconnection, objectification, deepened disaffection, loneliness. If you’re like, “Yeah! Damn straight! Why would they be second nature? Everyone avoids negative emotions!” then I hope you keep reading and listening to Teaching through Emotions. Because I believe the fate of our world depends on our ability to connect with each other humanely. Which means we have to deal with our negative feelings. Which means we have to at least acknowledge them, maybe label them, even sit with them, to see what they have to teach us.

I’d love to hear your perspective. What do you do with negative emotions?

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Filling the void is a way we can fit together. Kind of an interesting one, because void filling can feel like such an individual move. Like, “Hey! There’s a void. I think I’ll fill it.” But there’s much more to it.

Here’s an example from the classroom:

• Teacher asks a question.

• Student falls silent (or says he doesn’t know).

• Teacher becomes impatient (anxious about the silence? about the student’s not knowing? about internalized pressure to keep up the pace? or to make students know? or to just cover the content? about the suspicion that the student’s silence or not knowing means something bad about the teacher? What is it?)

• Teacher does the work for the student (by answering the question herself or doing the requested task).

• Student learns that playing the passive role invites the teacher to play the active role. (That’s the fit: the passive one locks into the active one, who ultimately does the work.)

Filling the void isn’t necessarily bad. Getting the work done can be a good thing. The filling-the-void dance becomes problematic when the way the work gets done is not good for one or both of the dancers involved.

In the case of the silent student, it’s quite likely that the passive role will not lead to learning. At least, not academic learning. Unless the silent student is really working to fit with the teacher’s question by thinking about it, looking for a way to connect with it — in which case it would be much better for the teacher to let the silence stretch out, to give the student time to think — simply hearing the teacher answer her own question probably won’t matter much to the student. It will just end the immediate ordeal. Or end whatever attempts he was making to answer the question. Either way, not good for the student.

Successfully playing the passive role, though, does lead to relational learning.

That is, if I can tolerate the anxiety between us longer than you can, you will do the work. If I pause long enough before taking the next step in our dance, you will take the step for me. If this happens over and over again, I’ve got me a fit. Effective. Comfortable. And lockstep. But it’s a dead-end dance.

So the filling-the-void dance can be a double-whammy: It teaches your partner to be passive (or incompetent or untalented or unthinking) and it prevents growth and learning.

A dead-end dance.

If you’re a void filler, watch your partners. How do they manifest passivity? When do you start feeling anxious or impatient or uncomfortable or impelled to take action? What are those feelings potentially about? What happens if you wait just a beat, or two, or twenty longer? What happens inside you? What happens outside you?

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Let’s say you just encountered an asshole. You’re filled with feelings: anger, shock, confusion, humiliation, outrage. What do you do with all this emotion?

Call the TTE hotline.

I know. It’s the Teaching through Emotions hotline. That’s only for teachers, right?

Nope. It’s for everyone.

Emotion work is relieving for everybody!! So give it a shot: Punch this number into your phone

413.239.4158

and record your story. Call as many times as you need to. If you want, leave an email address so I can get back in touch with you. (No phone numbers, please. Asynchronous communication increases the chances of my making contact.)

I’ll possibly respond to your story on the air! So make sure you don’t use names — unless they’re pseudonyms. Or initials. That sort of thing.

Sharing your story will do two important things: get relief for you. And help other listeners who have had similar experiences. Which makes you both brave and generous.

And smart. I mean, this is what I do. I help people unpack and understand their worst experiences. Because these experiences so often mean something entirely different from what people think they mean! And getting the meaning right — with the help of someone like me — can change everything!

I hope you give it a shot.

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For my own sanity, I remind myself and others all the time that relationships are about experiments. You simply cannot know for sure what’s going to happen in them. I mean, you can know that something will happen — because we fit together and therefore influence each other all the time — so you can make extremely good guesses. But you can’t be sure.

Which is a good thing, because being sure about what your relational partner feels or is going to do is really annoying.

So not knowing, being open to and even excited about trying relational experiments, is a great skill. That’s what this post is about.

And here’s one last chance to win big at tomorrow’s TTE merch drawing:

Take the survey

If you’re loathe to take surveys because what’s the point? I can tell you the point here is pretty basic: It’s a chance for me to get evidence that you’re out there, that you’re reading and listening, and that TTE is either benefitting you or needing improvement. If it’s benefitting you, your survey response will make me so happy! If TTE needs improvement, your response will also make me happy — because then I can improve my offerings.

In any case, thank you so much!!

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OK so you’ve gotten defensive, left the room to center yourself in your Garden, practiced self-awareness, refused to take things personally or to blame anyone, and done a lot of active listening. A good week-and-a-half’s work!

Now for the next skill. It’s actually more like a trick because it works like magic. You’re gonna love it.

But first: Please take the TTE survey. You know the drill. And thank you!

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Oh, how I hate it when someone says to me, “Don’t be so defensive!” It shuts everything down. Well, I’m here to tell you how defensiveness can actually open up communication that leads to mutual understanding.

Huzzah!!

As always, I’m going to exhort you to take the TTE survey. (If you haven’t already.) Hearing from you makes us feel like we’re landing somewhere and not just floating in the ether. How is that landing? Let us know! (And maybe win an excellent TTE Tee or mug!)

Take the survey

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This skill is another muscular one. Like listening, some of us have to really rein ourselves in to conform to this basic rule of relationships. But it is so helpful and humane.

Before we jump in: Please, if you haven’t already, fill out the short TTE survey. It’s your chance to give concrete feedback to me and my team about what (if anything) you want us to keep doing and what (if anything) you want us to stop. We’d love to hear from you! Your name will go in the Valentine’s Day top hat out of which I’m going to draw the winner of some TTE merch on VDay itself. Do not miss this opportunity to WIN BIG!!!

Take the survey

Now. On to the muscular skill.

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Welcome to the Monday before Valentine’s Day! I hope you’re enjoying these daily advent treats. Not just tasty but nutritious!

Before we jump in: Please fill out the TTE survey. I’d really like to hear what you think of the blog, the podcast, and the TTE content in general. Is it all worth it?

I’ll make it worth your while by putting your email address in a drawing on Valentine’s Day for a winner of some TTE merch. A TTE Tee or mug! Wahoo!! Thanks in advance for your help!

Take the survey

Today’s skill is going to seem obvious to you. But

• it might not be obvious how it relates to Gardens and conflict.

• obvious or not, in my experience this skill is too rarely practiced.

But you can practice it! With your beloved. (And everybody else!)

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If you’re like, “Quiz? What quiz?” then um. You didn’t do your homework yesterday.

The quiz was to unpack the scenarios I laid out in which partners (and, in one case, an entire group of siblings) fit together in dysfunctional ways.

Since I know some of you are DYING to know if you got an A on that quiz, here are the answers. (And here’s a subscription button in case you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet.)

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One of the best ways to avoid conflict and engage fruitfully is to listen.

Such a powerful tool:

• Stand in your garden.

• Look over your garden wall and get curious.

• Ask questions.

• Listen to the answers.

What I mean, of course, is active listening,

the art of opening to other people’s words without cluttering your attention with tho…

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This concept is, in my view, the foundation of all human interaction. With the world and with other people.

And you’re going to learn it right now.

To get to the calendar door so you can learn what this foundation is, become a paid subscriber!

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When I figured this skill out, I was blown away. Because I didn’t think it was possible.

(And reminder: This is the last of three free Advent Calendar posts. Become a paid subscriber to move seamlessly into the fourth post tomorrow and beyond, all of which will be paywalled.)

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Open the door

(Click on the graphic below)

This skill is so valuable. In every setting. For every type of caregiver. Parents. Therapists. Teachers. Aides for the elderly. Nannies. Spouses. Valentines.

Everyone, really.

Because when people act out — when they do something you’re tempted to take personally — chances are very good that they are not telling you anything very interesting about you. What they’re telling you is all about them. Which can be super interesting! And surprising, because they’re probably totally unaware that their behavior has revealed truths about themselves they might want to keep hidden. Or don’t even know about themselves.

Which gives you a great deal of power.

Which you can use for the good.

By recognizing how bad your relational partner must feel when they, say, call you a slob. Or how honest your students are being about how much they hate the book you’ve assigned. Or how desperate to belong people who exclude you must feel.

Uhhh! It’s hard not to take all this personally. But you can do it: Focus on the data. Use the power the data has given you to try to understand the people whose behavior you’re tempted to think is all about you. When it’s, I repeat, all about them. Understanding, even if only provisional, changes everything.

Practice

Interestingly, the way to practice the skill of Not Taking It Personally is to root yourself in your Garden and look over your Garden Wall. At the Garden(s) of your relational partner(s).

With curiosity.

What is going on over there? What is their behavior teaching you about them?

When your partner, say, calls you a slob, what do they need? (They might need you to agree that you do have slobby tendencies and will work on them.) But, in addition, they might be teaching you that they feel overwhelmed by a sense of encroaching chaos, which they simply cannot abide. Not because of you directly, but because they learned long ago that chaos is dangerous and dysregulating.

When your students rebel against the book you’ve assigned them to read, what do they need? Well, they might need to hear that you love that book. But they also need you to accept that they don’t. And run with it. “What do you hate about it?” you can ask. I guarantee you the resulting conversation will be rollicking.

When two people whisper to each other while looking at you, what are they teaching you? For one thing, they’re rude. For another, they’re regressed to an earlier stage of development. Like, middle school. Maybe more interestingly, they’re probably teaching you how fundamentally insecure they are. They’d rather use a convenient third person (you, but it probably doesn’t matter who) to reinforce their bonds to each other. Which protects them (in their minds) from the very bullying behavior they’re enacting on you. Ew.

Got an example that bamboozles you? Leave a comment and I can work on it. You’d be doing me a great favor, as I love unpacking bamboozling examples of bad behavior.

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Oh dear! This is the last free post of the Valentine’s Day Advent Calendar. If you want to receive tomorrow’s post seamlessly in your inbox, please upgrade your subscription. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you very much!

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And share this post with your Valentine! Or your students! Or your rude co-workers! Subscribe for a month for less than a third of the cost of a bar of wild chocolate from Caputo’s or for a year for half the cost of the Wild Chocolate Trio Gift Box. What a deal!

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First, an apology: Yesterday’s advent calendar door did not open! I am so sorry! Here is the post you should have gotten behind Door #1.

And now: This second skill isn’t very sexy, but it’s incredibly useful. It is the skill that follows on Getting in Your Garden. Once you’re in there, this is what you gotta be able to do.

(And reminder: This is the second of three free Advent Calendar posts. Become a paid subscriber to move seamlessly into the fourth post and beyond, all of which will be paywalled.)

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Open the door

(Click on the image below OR click here)

I hope you’re thinking, “Hey, Betsy, self-awareness involves much more than just noticing internal sensations.” Because you’d be o so right! Interoceptive awareness is just a start. What you make of what you notice is super important. That is, learning about yourself, about your particular, peculiar, precious organism, is the goal.

So yes: Notice your pain. Notice your emotions. And notice your thoughts. Your beliefs. Notice the nasty voice(s) in your head that cut you down or push you to do things (like restrict your eating or question your right to exist) that your best friend would tell you aren’t true or aren’t good for you. (I say your best friend because often nasty voices are so persuasive they’re difficult for you to have any perspective on.) Notice your unwillingness to be alone with yourself, your fear of feelings, your terror at the possibility of being retraumatized, your distrust of yourself.

All of this noticing exposes the various plots in your Garden. The spots that are barren. The dangerous spots. The spots you can’t even penetrate because they’re shrouded in darkness. The places where monsters lurk.

And this noticing suggests where you need to focus your beautification efforts, quite possibly with a good therapist.

You know? I could just as easily have called this second skill Noticing.

Practice

The very best way to practice Self-Awareness is mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts, centering yourself in your body, having the courage to follow negative self-beliefs down to the emotional bedrock so you can get to know their origins — and smash them to smithereens.

Yoga will do, too.

Because Self-Awareness is all about noticing your body and everything that goes on inside it, the practice for this skill is all body all the time.

• work meditation into your daily routine

• do regular body scans — set a timer and, when it goes off, turn your attention inward and label what you’re feeling

• label as much as you can, since capturing big, inchoate, overpowering feelings in words makes the feelings much easier to manage and work with

• do gentle exercise like stretching and yoga — especially if you have trauma to work through

• breathe — especially in difficult situations

• work with a therapist on negative self-beliefs — “I’m stupid”; “I’m unlovable”; “Everything I touch gets ruined” — so you can root them out and make your Garden safer and more hospitable to you

• work with a therapist on the unbearable feelings and thoughts that come up when you try any of these practices (again, trauma can make your Garden seem uninhabitable)

• notice any resistance you’re feeling to these ideas and wonder about it

In general, just notice. Everything.

That should keep you busy for a bit.

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Of course, your partner can afford to notice, too.

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If you want to hear a podcast episode about someone who made remarkable use of her self-awareness, go here.

And, as usual, you can upgrade to paid right now for the cost of less than half of a Botanical Bar & Tablet from Tavernier Chocolates for a month and much less than the cost of the Couple Bon Bon Collection for the year. Thank you for considering it!

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Welcome to the TTE Valentine’s Day Advent Calendar! The calendar that counts down to the most romantic day of the year by giving you solid skills to practice to make your romantic (and other) relationships the best they can be!

So here’s how your Valentine’s Weekday Advent Calendar works:

I’ve chosen a series of skills I know are important for healthy relationships. Much healthier than chocolates. How do I know? I’m a therapist, psycho-coach, and relationship warrior and have seen my clients — and myself — use these skills to great effect over and over again.

And, while I like chocolates, they don’t really contribute to my good health at all. Sadly.

Every weekday until Valentine’s Day, I’m going to publish a post about one of these skills (and maybe the occasional concept). I’ll give some initial context and then provide a little door flap you can open — by clicking on it — to find a gem from the TTE archives that explains the skill or concept. I’ll end with a suggestion or two — or fourteen — on how to practice the skill on your own.

Note that the first three Advent doors are free to everybody. Starting on the fourth day, though, you’ll have to become a paid subscriber to access the rest of the Advent doors.

So. Let’s get started!

This first skill is a favorite of the people I work with. They use it all the time.

Open the door

(Click on the image below OR click here)

This skill is all about boundaries. The line or wall between you and someone else that demarcates your reality from theirs and allows different realities to co-exist without threat.

But it’s also about you. Your psyche, your internal space, your safety with and trust in yourself. It’s not enough just to Get in Your Garden. You have to be able to stay there. Which means you have to know (and like) yourself, recognize your self-defeating reactions, kill off your self-critical voices, know how to find comfort and strength in your own company. You gotta tend your Garden so it’s easy, even welcoming, to inhabit.

Crucial, crucial, crucial skill.

Practice

The basic practice of Getting in Your Garden is resisting the urge to jump into someone else’s.

• by jumping into a conversation or argument through interrupting

• by jumping into problem-solving mode for someone else’s problem

• by jumping into a vacuum and doing the work someone else has failed to do

• by jumping to conclusions about what is happening right now

• by jumping into defensive mode

• by jumping into reactive mode

• by jumping into the fray and going on the attack

How do you practice this skill?

Try it in a simple situation. You’re having a friendly conversation with someone. When you feel the urge to speak, try not speaking. Let them talk a little longer. Or allow silence to fall. (This can be so hard for so many people! But damn: Silence can be incredibly generative. People say things to fill silence that can be quite interesting!)

Or next time someone has a problem, actively resist solving it. Instead, say something like “That sounds tough. What are you willing to do about it?”

If you need a more customized practice suggestion, leave a comment. I’ll come up with something for you.

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Getting in Your Garden can be hard enough. Staying in it can be even more difficult. But, like all relationship skills, it is crucial. Staying in your Garden means feeling safe there. Which means knowing and trusting thyself. And being able to regulate yourself. All of which comes with the second skill of relationships, which I’ll unveil tomorrow.

In the meantime, you might want to provide yourself — and others — with a bold reminder of the valuable relationship skill you’re developing.

And you might want to listen to a podcast episode about how Getting in Your Garden can transform a relationship — here.

You might also want to upgrade your subscription to paid (if you’re not already a paid subscriber). You can subscribe for a month for 1/5 of the cost of a 9-piece box of chocolates at Chocolate Springs. A year’s subscription costs the same as a 20-piece box of dark chocolates. Just sayin’.

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And pssst….Share this post with your Valentine.

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Consider:

• One colleague criticizes and intimidates another colleague.

• A student yells, “Fuck you!” in a teacher’s face.

• A mother emails her son’s teachers daily about her worries about her anxious son.

How does a person even begin to start dealing with these dilemmas?

With the No Blame Frame.

Of course, most of us start dealing…

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This is a trick you can use every day all day. Not only will it help you dissolve conflicts and other unpleasant interactions, but it will make you a better person!

The trick is based on the premise that emotions are contagious. Through empathy, of course. But also through behaviors.

You want to make me mad? Pretend you don’t…

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OK this is going to seem really simplistic, but many people I’ve worked with have found it helpful.

Here goes:

When I think of people, when I think of individuals, I think of gardens. I think of each of us as standing in the center of a circle — a garden wall — filled with flower beds.

The garden wall is a boundary, a personal boundary, a membrane that defines where we end and others begin.

The garden is ourselves: our needs, our safety, our identities, our happiness, our interests, our power, our psyches, our reality.

We cultivate our own gardens. We choose what flowers we plant and where and when we plant them. Ideally, we make our gardens beautiful and safe for ourselves. We range freely in our gardens and value them.

And we decide if and when anybody else gets to come into our gardens. We build up our garden walls, lower them, open the garden gate, close the garden gate. We invite people in when we want to and, when we don’t want them in our gardens, we have the right to tell them to get out. Ideally.

I told you it would be simplistic!

But the metaphor is also really useful.

Because, if my garden is my reality and your garden is your reality, then I don’t get to trash your garden. I don’t even get to enter your garden without your permission. I get to talk to you over our garden walls about our gardens, try to understand why you planted deadly nightshade right next to your garden gate, admire your hollyhocks, think about planting some of my own.

I get to wonder about your garden, your reality, from the safety of my own garden, my own reality.

I don’t have to take on your problems or energy or emotions. I don’t have to convince you to make your garden look like mine. I might think your garden desperately needs tending, but when I remind myself that it’s yours, I’m clear that the weeds in your garden are not my responsibility. I might wonder about them; I might express concern about them; I might itch to pull them; but I don’t need to fight you about them. They’re yours.

Conflict happens, I believe, when I charge into your garden and start planting or fixing or weeding or judging or — UGH — defining your garden for you. Or when you do this to me. Engagement happens when I can be curious about you and your garden without co-opting or colonizing it. And, importantly,

when I am confident that I can prevent you from co-opting or colonizing my garden.

I’m here in my garden. You’re there in yours. Let’s be clear about that.