Which seat are you in?

 

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 is the part I want to sit with here, because this room is full of people who are good at holding both sides. It is a real skill. It is usually why you got the job.

There is a harder piece in the full write-up, and it is the one that stings. If you are in the middle of one triangle, you are almost certainly running another one somewhere else, and in that one you are not the go-between. The friend you vent to about your sister. The colleague you brief before the meeting so they will be on your side.

I wrote it up as a new toolkit resource. Free, nothing to sign up for.

https://gobetween.trancebreakers.com

Something to try this week. Just notice. Do not fix anything yet. When someone tells you what a third person did and then looks at you to make sense of it, catch the moment before you answer.

That pause is the whole practice.

And if you feel like sharing, I would like to hear which seat you tend to land in. Not the confession version. Just the honest one.