I know that I mentioned that in the first trimester I was not at all interested in reading. I’m very happy to say that I’m back on the reading train and read FOUR books in July- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Bad Blood, The New Corner Office, and All Joy and No Fun.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone was one of those right place, right time books, for sure. I’ve been requesting this one from the library for a couple of months and I never got around to reading it. When I finally did, it was exactly what I needed.
Here are some of my favorite sections- Sorry for not capturing the page numbers.
One morning, as I drone on about Boyfriend, Wendell scoots to the edge of his couch, stands up, walks over to me, and, with his very long leg, lightly kicks my foot. Smiling, he returns to his seat.
“Ouch!” I say reflexively, even though it didn’t hurt. I’m started. “What was that?”
“Well, you see like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you out with that.”
“What?”
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain — everyone feels pain at times — but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”
Wow.
I told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships– which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend– and they will hurt you– because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.
But, I went on, what was so great about a loving intimacy was that there was room for repair. Therapists call this process rupture and repair, and if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, the ruptures won’t feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too.
380-381
As I spend so much thinking about childhood, childrearing, and parenting, what a thing to read.
In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”.
This was such a great book. I’d strongly recommend.
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She is a contributor to many open source projects including dbt, Meltano, and GitLab. She lives with her husband Casey, their son RJ, and their pup Bo in Columbus, GA.
