This sums up the vibe I want in my home—in my relationships with my partner, my kids, and myself: support instead of pressure.
If I want my husband or my kids to do something, hassling and pressuring them not only doesn’t work (they just dig in their heels), but it also just makes things worse. It adds conflict and raises all of our stress levels.
What works instead is to support them: ask what they need; give reminders that are gentle and non-threatening; and lead by example and collaboration.
It’s a top-down vs. bottom-up approach, like this:
Crucially, the person I most need to relate to this way is—can you guess?—me.
Hassling myself to do things, shaming and blaming myself, operating by force—that’s the pressure mode, based in anxiety, that perpetuates stress and leads into burnout.
I want to build habits of relating to myself supportively. Ask what I need; seek ways to accommodate myself (eg., use strategic reminders instead of expecting I’ll just remember things); and most of all, give myself lots of compassion for all the ways in which I feel inadequate and all the things I haven’t been able to get done.
Who’s with me? 💗
River Roundup
Section posts from the past week
🌀Divergence Deeps
Reflections on the importance of agency for the autistic nervous system
“The common thread is that we feel like our autonomy has been taken away—our consent has been railroaded over—and we are powerless, helpless, and trapped in an unaccommodating situation.”
🪷Serenity Splashes
There's a kind of enduring hard moments and tasks that’s not the same at all as the kind of enduring— helpless and alone— we did when we were small. I learned to suppress my feelings and needs and pretend everything was fine. You learned that there was no one anywhere who cared about your cries. Now we’re grown and in the grind, but we have points of choice— to recognize our options and respond to our own voice. 💗
Maybe I don't even know what strength my power pack holds within-- I'm accustomed to it running low from letting everyone else plug in.
a reminder to myself
It literally does not matter what anyone else may think about the story of your life. Don't write it with their ink.
This life did not come with a map (they gave me one; it turned out wrong)-- so I have to make it up, updating it as I go, sometimes just throwing it out and starting fresh. With time and courage, less and less my map leads me into pits; more and more to what I need, to what fits for this life to feel like mine.