How to Embrace Clarity and Communication to Heal Your Relationships
One of the insights I gained early in my recovery journey was that I’d been expecting people to read my mind my whole life — well, at least subconsciously. If you had asked me, “Are you expecting people to read your mind?” I probably would have said no.
As I talked with others on my recovery journey with me, we realized that was true for all of us. And the reason we wanted people to read our minds was because we thought that’s how it works! Again, this was all subconscious.
We realized we’d all been trying to read others’ minds our entire lives, so why weren’t they reading our minds??? Let’s forget the fact that we were wrong about being able to read other people’s minds!!! That didn’t seem to matter.
In trying to understand all this, it helps to think about the four primary rules under which dysfunctional families operate:
- Don’t talk
- Don’t trust
- Don’t feel
- Don’t remember
In the case of believing we could and should read other people’s minds, the rule we were sticking by is the don’t talk rule. That means a few things:
- Don’t ask questions when you don’t understand something. I internalized that as meaning that I had to have an…
