How are you?

It’s inevitable, I suppose, as an opening gambit – but How Are You? is not my favourite question.

Right now the truest answer, which I give quite often, is Deep in process. The problem with this answer is simple – people always want to know more. And when I’m deep in process I don’t want to have to talk about it. That doesn’t mean I never want to talk about it – but I don’t want to feel obliged to do so. Often my process is private, and sometimes the opposite: I’ve talked about it so much I’m sick of talking about it. Sometimes talking helps but sometimes it hinders.

Sometimes I say: I’m not so good right now. This is generally an unwise response, because almost everyone feels the need to make things better when they hear this. I know that’s true because I have done the same, and I probably still do sometimes. But remember this, folks: your discomfort when I say I’m not so good right now is just that. It’s your discomfort, not mine. It’s because you can’t sit with something uncomfortable and let it be. It’s because you want the world to be a nice happy place where everything and everyone is OK. It’s because somewhere underneath it all, there’s probably a part of you that feels not so good right now too. Perhaps if you stay with my not so good right now, it might trigger your own.

While I appreciate the sympathy, I do not welcome it. I want permission to feel as I feel, to be not so good if that’s where I am right now, for that to be OK too.

In The Different Drum, Scott Peck says that our rugged individualist culture can handle the expression of many feelings – anger, sadness, jealousy, guilt, rage – but it cannot handle depression. Depression holds up a mirror to our sickness and it’s perceived as a black hole that threatens to suck others in and make everything dark. So we either change the subject (bad) or try to make everything better (worse).

In her marvellous book Time To Think, Nancy Kline summarises the problem beautifully in her description of our fear of crying:

If we would just let people cry, they would very soon think much better. If we would just sit with them, listen to them the way we would if they were talking, pay attention to them without panicking and without smothering them with our concern, they would recover in a very short time and be able to think for themselves again.

I struggled for many years with the ‘let it be’ approach to difficult feelings. I always had to do something, to make everything better. It was a lover who pointed this out to me, because it was particularly triggering for her to have her feelings received in this way. It made her feel not-seen, not-heard.

And then I started to notice how much I disliked being advised, how much it made me close up when someone assumed they knew how I was feeling and started telling me how to fix it when they hadn’t given me time or space to express myself.

So next time you ask someone how they are, try just listening to their answer – particularly if they aren’t feeling good and are brave enough to say so. If you feel uncomfortable, take a few deep breaths. Then do what Nancy Kline recommends. Ask them: Is there anything else you’d like to say about this right now?

And if you catch me giving you advice when all you wanted was to be heard, slap me and remind me of this blog post!