TranceBreakers Newsletter

My mother is eighty-six and has been a marriage and family therapist for more than forty years. This week she was on a call with me, talking to a group about relationships, and she said something I want to write down before it gets away. If you feel unloved, give what you need to get. Not ask for it. Not wait for it. Give it. If you’re starved for affection, be affectionate. If nobody’s listening to you, go find somebody and listen to them. If what you want is patience, go be patient with someone. I asked her what that actually looks like, because a line like that can float off if you let it. She said: open my heart instead of sitting there waiting for him to go first. Let myself be vulnerable. Look at where the pain hit and what I need to heal and where I’m afraid. Then she said the thing. She and my father were married almost sixty-three years. He died four years ago. And she told that room, on a live call, that she still catches herself reaching to blame him. It’s habitual, she said...

  Somebody you love is upset. And there's this thing that happens, almost automatically, before you've decided anything. You start explaining why they don't have to feel that way. It's not that bad. Here's another way to look at it. This will pass. It's going to be fine. Let me tell you three reasons this isn't worth getting upset about. You're being helpful. You genuinely are. You want them to stop hurting, and you can see a way out, so you hand it to them. And it never works. I've watched this in a lot of rooms over a lot of years, and I have never once seen the other person say, oh, thank you, that changes everything, I feel completely different now. What actually happens is they get louder. Or they go quiet and cold. Either way, something got worse rather than better, and you have no idea why, because you were trying to help. Here's what I think is going on. The answer is sitting right there in the word. Feelings are to be felt. That's th...

  I remember being brought home from the hospital I was born in. I remember the Kennedy assassination. I was seventeen months old. People don't believe me when I say that, and I've stopped trying to convince them. But I have thousands of details from the first few years of my life, and most people have almost none, and for a long time I had no idea why. Here's the only explanation I've ever had. When I was five my parents took me to a drive-in in Concord, California to see The Jungle Book. Colonel Hathi has a line in it. An elephant never forgets. I said it for days. I said it until everyone in the house was tired of hearing it. And at some point my dad looked at me and said, but you won't. You're a kid. You'll forget all of this. It horrified me. I went into my parents' bedroom, stood in front of the mirror, and decided I wasn't going to. Then I did something I still find strange. I stood there and went through them one at a time, out loud, delibera...

  People come to me carrying a sentence. Something somebody said to them years ago. Sometimes decades. And they can tell me everything about it. Where they were standing. What the room smelled like. What their own face did. How long they cried afterward and whether anybody noticed. And then I'll ask what the point was. Most of them can't tell me. The pain landed. The message didn't. I've seen that enough times now that it changed what I think about honesty. The delivery costs you the content Here's what I mean, practically. Somebody decides they have something important to say. They believe it's true and they believe it needs saying and they're probably right on both counts. So they gather themselves and they say it, and they use the sharpest available version because they want it to finally get through. And what happens inside the other person is not comprehension. It's injury. Injury produces defense, and defense is deaf. Nothing gets in after that poi...

  In any market there are three or four or five stations doing the news at the same hour, pulling from the same pile of stories. Different newsrooms. Different people. Different backgrounds, ages, politics, life experiences. Each group meeting on its own, arguing it out, making independent calls about what to cover and what order to put it in. Then the newscasts go on the air and they're nearly identical. Not similar. The same stories, often in the same order. I ran one of those newsrooms for years. And for years people told me it was a conspiracy. That we all got our marching orders from above, that the owners fed us what they wanted the public to hear, and that the matching newscasts were the proof. It wasn't true. Nobody from the top ever sat in one of my meetings. Nobody reviewed our decisions. The arguments in that room were real, sometimes heated, and we genuinely didn't know what the lineup would be when we walked in. And we still landed where everyone else lan...

  Something came up enough times this year that I finally sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Two people you love stop talking to each other and start talking through you. She tells you what he said. He tells you what she meant. You explain each of them to the other, the temperature comes down, and everyone feels a little better. It works. So you keep doing it. Here is what I did not see for years. You are not passing messages. You are explaining motive. She did not mean it that way. He is just tired. That is just how she talks. And to explain somebody, you have to make them smaller. You cannot hand over the whole person. You hand over a version that fits in a sentence. And a shorter version of a person is much easier to be angry at than the real one. So you build a small character out of someone you love, and you hand it to someone else you love. Then you do it in the other direction, because you are fair. Two villains. One in each house. Built entirely out of kindness. That i...