I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. As hard as it may be to stand in our integrity publicly, especially when it requires us to go against the prevailing attitudes of our coworkers or community, those occasions are, for most of us, relatively infrequent occurrences. Where we end up being tested in our integrity practice more often is in having emotionally difficult conversations with our nearest and dearest.
We all want to belong. And though belonging in our community at large is emotionally important, the prospect of losing our sense of belonging with our loved ones is perhaps more terrifying. You can potentially find a new community, but finding a new family? New friends? A new romantic partner? I think that’s harder, honestly. Because you can be an integral part of a community without facing the challenges of intimacy, or the vulnerability of emotional exposure, but you can’t show up fully with the people you love that way.
This means that emotionally charged conversations with the people we care about are particularly challenging to show up for with integrity. The knee-jerk tendency to avoid or placate in order to keep the peace is so strong. Not to mention the historic emotional patterns and roles that get established in long-term relationships which may need to be rebelled against in order to confront difficult topics honestly.
There are self-help books out there that provide detailed instructions on how to navigate difficult conversations, but if you’re like me then you don’t want scripts or prescriptions to help you communicate better. You want stories from real people about how they’ve approached the same topics, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. We learn better from stories. They stick in our brains and can be recalled even when our emotions are running high.