The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate

by Harriet Lerner

Having an authentic voice means that: We can openly share competence as well as problems and vulnerability.

We can define what we feel entitled to in a relationship, and we can clarify the limits of what we will tolerate or accept in another’s behavior.

This clarification of limits is one of the toughest things for some of us to do.

What we call “the self” is never static, but instead is a work in progress.

People may also feel shame for their honest suffering. Everyone suffers sometime, yet we’re taught to tuck it away, to deny grief rather than welcome its expression. As bell hooks notes, we may feel shame especially about grief that lingers: “Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life, where the hip do not get bogged down in mourning.”

pretending ultimately makes our voice small. It limits our possibilities and potentialities rather than expanding them. Pretending can involve misguided acts of self-sacrifice, and grave, ongoing deceptions, shored up by lying and self-betrayal. Too much of the self (our wants, beliefs, priorities, values) disappears or becomes negotiable under relationship pressure.

Nothing you say can touch the other person, because she has already taken herself out of the relationship and will not allow herself to be moved or empathically affected by what you say. Her need to maintain a sense of goodness and righteousness, and her intolerance for feeling guilty and vulnerable, makes such a person unavailable for a genuine and authentic exchange. Nothing you can do or say will ever really reach her.