Holding vs Dumping
"Being with" for the Win
Holding—by sitting with—difficult and excruciating feelings, especially when triggered, without expressing them to the other until you are more clear, is one of the hardest but most necessary capacities to foster self-growth, greater intimacy, and trust in relationship.
And it’s a two-way street. Both parties must be able to do this for intimacy to work.
It requires deep emotional intelligence and critical thinking, especially the former. The capacity to embody and be with anger, rage, sadness, and fear and process through them without dumping the bulk of your own hurt onto another (that isn’t theirs) promotes growth and harmony and avoids violating those we love.
Most people don’t engage emotional skillfulness. They dump and react, acting out their wounds through passive-aggressive, aggressive, deflective, and escapist actions. They hurt while professing to be kind. This is the tragic result of “non-sitting-with” carried out clandestinely through pretext; it’s doubly hurtful and violent.
“Sitting with” is a crucial emotional muscle requires practice, long practice. When you discover the pain that others can cause through their own negligence, you become more careful about whom you let in that closely—because you end up being the one that has to feel your feels, especially because you realize that not feeling them causes more harm than the temporary despair.
When we can’t be patient to hold and sort through what’s ours and what is truly another’s, we deny our own healing, sabotage relationships, and perpetuate harm.
subject and photographer: unknown (but both exquisite)
That's exquisitely enlightening. Now what can one do when the other is dumping? Some have a habit of dumping, and some feel they've achieved progress, I've seen people claim it out loud, when they can finally dump instead of holding - in the sense of burying, not being with. They feel relieved, or so they say, by not holding anymore and being able to dump their anger in real time. So telling them that it's not true progress will be received as nonsense. Now I can see the futility of telling people that kind of stuff... but... what can we do when that happens? What could be a constructive way to react?