How easy it is - for any of us, at any age - to let ourselves get sucked into someone else's whirlpool.
A loved one or friend or even pleasant acquaintance gripes & groans about someone else. We go along, or - worse - agree. It can feel so right, so supportive of the other, but how wrong it can go, and so quickly.
My experience of this happened almost 16 years ago, in the room next to where I am now, in what was Mom's bedroom. Mom was sitting on her bed, chatting on the phone to someone dear to her heart, little suspecting she was getting sucked down into the depths of a whirlpool.
The door to the computer studio, where I was working, was open, as was the one to her room; there was no avoiding hearing her end of a phone conversation.
"Un huh... Un huh..." "Oh, really..." "Oh, that's too bad..."
Those phrases & ones like them were basically the sum total of her end of a lengthy conversation. By the time she finally said her supportive good byes, I was hooked. What was the situation?
The friend on the other end had railed about her son's new wife being the daughter-in-law from hell. Mom was heartbroken that her friend's son had married someone so awful. How she longed to give soothing comfort.
The problem was, she had. With every "Un huh" & "How sad...," she'd given comfort AND her unspoken stamp of approval to the friend's distress. Which, I still suspect, was what the phone call was all about.
The problem was that Mom didn't know the young woman in question, but she did know that her friend had made harsh judgments before that Mom knew were totally off base.
Mom could see she'd gotten sucked into her friend's emotional whirlpool. My worry was about what happened down the road - when the friend & her d-i-l grew past in-law issues, became friendlier, maybe even close. And Mom would be stuck out in the cold, with her negative image & harsh judgment.
Praise be, Mom immediately wrote a tender, loving e-mail to the friend, expressing regret for the younger woman's difficulties with her son's wife, offering her own early challenges as a mother-in-law.
Sure enough, over the years the m-i-l & d-i-l grew closer. As Mom had pointed out in her e-mail, they had a great starting point in both loving the same fella.
What if Mom hadn't hoisted herself out of the emotional whirlpool that threatened to suck her down into dark thoughts & hasty judgments about someone she'd never met? She would have died with an unhappy image in her heart of the gal he's still crazy in love with, still happily married to after all these years.
Moral of the story: as comforting as it might be to agree with others about something we don't know thing one about, it's wiser to respectfully keep
OUT of friends' & loved ones' emotional whirlpools ~and~ never try to suck them into ours!
No comments:
Post a Comment