Big feelings and relationships
Sensitive Soulmates! Graham here.
First, thanks to those of you who sent in such warm, encouraging responses to the last issue. (I did read all of ‘em this time, despite what the auto-reply says.)
A few of you shared your own experiences of really digging into your last crisis, instead of doing the usual thing and just trying to feel better as soon as possible. Reports from those pioneering big feelers suggest I’m on the right path here (even if I’m not so sure myself just yet).
And many more of you are right in that same tender place I am right now, not sure what the fuck to do, but doing your best day to day.
I think this line from one emailer sums it up. “Here’s to experiencing it all yeah?”
Yes yes. Although I will say, 'experiencing it all' is a little easier to contemplate knowing it’s not just me.
On with today’s newsletter (which ironically is coming out exactly two weeks after I said I’m no longer sticking to the fortnightly schedule. Isn’t life mysterious?)
The wrong coffee
It’s a Friday morning, after a big week. We’re ordering coffees, in our matchy-matchy reusable cups.
I get decaf, Honor gets a normal coffee. The real stuff.
As we walk back from the cafe, through sophisticated detective work I become convinced I’ve been given the wrong one.
‘Hey this tastes like soy. Did you get soy?’
She’s on the phone, can only reply in a half-mime that amounts to: ‘No, maybe though, but does it really matter?’
‘Oh dear’, I think.
‘SHE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THE GRAVITY OF THIS SITUATION.’
The internal detective
You see, I’m avoiding full-caffeine coffee for very specific reasons at the moment. In a roundabout way it aggravates the issues I’ve been having with my voice (hoarseness, vocal pain).
The internal detective continues his process of deduction.
Honor often does order soy, so if this coffee is soy then it’s probably her one, which means it’s probably a real coffee, not decaf…
And suddenly I’m in turmoil.
I can’t tell which one I’m supposed to drink. And she’s busy, so I can’t really do what my body is telling me to do which is WORK THIS OUT AT ONCE.
Flap, flap, flap
I switch coffees with her (distracted on the phone, she’s not too fussed). Ten minutes later I switch back again. (Somehow she’s still not too fussed. Bless her. Seriously.)
In that period of ten minutes between coffee swaps numbers 1 and 2, I am in what can only be described as, a flap.
What if I’m drinking the real coffee right now, and it aggravates my voice? We’ve got plans tonight and tomorrow — which is already feeling like a lot for me in my current state.
What if my voice gives out halfway through tonight and I have to awkwardly leave? Or what if the caffeine hit this morning means I crash later, and I’m no fun to anyone?
What if, what if, what if...
(Flap, flap, flap...)
Fear of Failure
By this point I’m walking home the long way by myself, as Honor rushes home for a meeting. I make my way along the picturesque path by the creek, a most scenic setting in which to have a total internal meltdown.
To borrow a phrase from Tara Brach, there’s a theme in all this churning worry over a simple coffee order. What Tara calls ‘FOF’. Or, Fear of Failure.
It all boils down to the biggest ‘what if’ of them all.
What if I’m not enough?
And on top of that, there's the usual spiral of judging my own feelings. I’m this affected by getting the wrong coffee? What does this say about me?
(What if I’m not enough?)
At least I can see I’m in a flap
To my credit, I can at least kind of see what’s happening here. I can see that I’m in a flap. (Simply defined: a state of significant agitation about something seemingly minor.)
I can even see that the business with the coffee might not be as big a deal as it currently feels like it is.
(I mean, I’m pretty sure it actually is a big fucking deal thankyouverymuch, but I can at least entertain the slight possibility that it might not be. Maybe. We’ll see.)
And I’ve taken the quite useful step of giving myself some space in which to experience this whole thing - away from Honor, walking home the long way.
Step, step. Step, step.
As I walk, I try something I’ve been doing lately on my regular walks, when my head is particularly loud. I try to focus on my footfalls - one after the other along the pleasingly crunchy dirt trail.
Step, step. Step, step. Step, step.
It’s a kind of mindfulness practice, I guess. The worried thoughts are still there, still loud. But I try to adjust the faders a little, so it’s the sound of my footfalls front and centre. When one of those ‘what if’ thoughts proves particularly catchy, and I can’t help myself turning it back up to full volume (remix!!), as soon as I notice what’s happening I’ll come back to the footfalls.
Step, step. Step, step.
After a minute or two of this, I notice that the worried thoughts are still swirling, but it’s as if they’re now swirling around the sound of my footfalls. The rhythm of my feet is like the eye of the storm. My awareness can rest there, a little.
‘Maybe it’s not anyone’s fault?’
This buys me just enough distance from the noise in my head, so that by the time I reach our front door, I notice a useful thought, cutting through the mix.
‘Sure, maybe the barista fucked up the order, or maybe Honor ordered a soy and forgot… but, maybe it’s not anyone’s fault?’
In truth, I don’t know entirely what to make of this thought just yet. I’m still too much in a flap about all the possible ‘what ifs’ that flow from me drinking real coffee on today of all days.
But it's a start.
I decide to let the coffee thing go. Then, within about 60 seconds, I storm into Honor’s home office to make the second coffee-swap.
(To be fair, I don’t mean to storm in. I’m trying to be as cool about it as possible. ‘What, me freak out over a coffee order and make you swap with me twice? I mean, sure I’m technically doing that as we speak but… it’s chill. I’m still cool, y’know? NOW SWAP WITH ME AGAIN IMMEDIATELY.’)
(I do not claim to be easy to live with at all times.)
(Especially lately.)
The perfect words
Honor’s still on the phone, still impressively unfussed about my coffee-bothering. We’ve at least drunk exactly equal amounts of our respective coffees, so that’s something?
I leave the room, with a coffee I have no idea whether or not I want to drink. Honor texts me a few minutes later. ‘You okay my sweet?’
It turns out these are the perfect words. A gentler code for, ‘I see that you’re acting like a big weirdo, and I still love you.’
We’re in adjacent rooms when she texts me this, but with the slight distance of a text conversation I’m able to acknowledge what I couldn’t when I was in the room with her. That yes, something is happening, and no, it’s not just about the coffee.
There never was a soy coffee
Having swapped back to my original coffee, and having now gotten a bit of perspective on the whole situation, I realise something. I don’t think either coffee was soy. I think I was just reacting to the slightly unusual taste of the decaf combined with the milk.
TWIST.
This flap (like many flaps) was produced entirely by my mind.
Produced. Like a little one-man theatre show (‘Presented by... your own neurosis!’). The kind of one-man show where you rope in unwitting audience members.
(Sorry Honor.)
An ongoing conversation
She comes into our room once she’s done on her phone call. We chat about it for a minute.
Honor: ‘My first thought was, “he’s pissed off at me, for some reason. Because I’m on a phonecall?” But that didn’t make any sense.’
Me: ‘Yeah I wasn’t pissed off, I was just overwhelmed.’
Honor: ’Well I actually realised that this time. That’s why I was so chill about it. I thought, “oh he’s just gone inward. And he possibly even knows that that’s what’s happened, but he can’t explain that to me from in there.”
Me: ‘Haha, yep. That’s exactly what was happening.’
This is part of an ongoing conversation we’ve been having lately about this whole dynamic. Usually, in the past, this situation might not have resolved itself quite so neatly or easily. She might have assumed I was just angry with her, I might have then gotten more defensive, more withdrawn, seemingly proving her theory.
But instead she was able to notice that what was happening for me had nothing to do with her (even if it meant she had to change coffees twice). And I was able to notice that too (even if it meant making her change coffees twice).
What looks like anger…
To reach this level of understanding, we've had to have a series of not-very-comfortable conversations. Conversations where Honor has given me feedback (often quite hard-to-hear feedback) about how I can come across when I’m in full flap mode.
I often seem angry, to her, when I’m in that mode.
And for my part, I have slowly been able to let her in on my side of that experience. How I’m not actually angry at all most of the time, I’m overhwelmed. And my first impulse - practiced and honed for many years - is to tighten up, to hold her and the rest of the world at arm’s length.
Better to appear angry than to let her see what’s really going on. Why? Because when you’re having a reaction that doesn’t even make sense to you in the moment, it’s very hard to trust anyone else to see it and not recoil completely.
‘Don’t look at me!’
Or perhaps it’s even more primal than that. The feeling is simply saying, ‘don’t look at me!’
That flappy, overwhelmed feeling needs time and space in which, just maybe, I can listen to it and piece together what’s really going on. But to my partner, ‘don’t look at me!’ looks a lot like ‘just fuck off and leave me alone.’
And the thing is, there’s wisdom in the ‘don’t look at me'. Some alone time was exactly what I needed. But for the partner of someone who’s flap-prone (and particularly so lately) that can be a bit of a lonely experience. ‘What the fuck just happened. Does he hate me now?’
Against my well-honed impulses, I’m slowly coming to see that you need a partnered approach to this stuff (whether it’s with your actual partner, or whoever else that’s closest to you and most likely to witness you in full flap mode).
Over four years together, Honor and I are slowly growing this partnered approach to my moments of full-blown flappiness (and hers, when they happen).
But hold on, shouldn’t I just work it all out myself??
I think for the Big Feels audience in particular, this can be a bit of a hard pill to swallow. I’ve heard from enough of you to know that we are a highly conscientious bunch, desperate to not make our big feelings into someone else’s problem.
Many of us have learned from a young age that our emotional responses don’t always make sense to those around us, so it’s best to keep them as hidden as possible.
But we eventually learn something else too. Those people who really know us will often know that something is up, even if they don’t know what it is. They’ll register the hiding itself, if not the thing we’re hiding. And it can come out in unintended ways (‘Does he hate me now? What just happened?’)
'How might we approach this differently?'
It’s worth saying, the answer is not, ‘here, you deal with my feelings now.’ If I was making Honor swap coffees back and forth with me on a regular basis, she'd probably stop getting coffee with me.
But neither is the answer for me to ‘just relax and be less of a weirdo’. Because, well, I’ve tried that one a few times hey…
So I think ‘the answer’ is really more of a question, to be asked regularly. ‘How might we approach this differently, so that it works better for both of us, when it happens?’
I’m finding these post-flap conversations are getting easier to have over time, as I learn to trust Honor with this most tender part of myself - the part of me I still don’t entirely understand. And now we’ve even got a term for it, which I suspect might make it easier to name next time.
‘Hey so… don’t quote me on this but I think there’s a slight possibility… I might be in a flap?’
‘Uh ohhhhhh.'
Big feels and relationships
There’s so much more we could look at on this particular topic. e.g. There’s the question of what happens to your relationship when one of you is in crisis.
If you’re interested in that, you can check out this article I wrote about being with Honor when she was in full-blown ‘can I stay alive?’ doom town. (An article in which I get to come across as ‘the stable one’. HA!)
And you can click here to share your thoughts on today’s newsletter, along with any ideas you have for further explorations on this topic.
I’m not as responsive as I have been in the past (see: going through something even bigger than usual), so I probably won’t see any emails you send me right now. But I like the idea of collecting your thoughts here for future Graham to have a look through and see what they spark for possible future writings…
