The Responsibility of Awareness

I’ve learned something about myself that I can’t unsee, and now that I’m aware of it, I don’t have the luxury of making excuses anymore, so I have to fix it. In times of interpersonal conflict, especially with my wife and daughter, I’ve developed the ability to check out completely. It’s something I learned at a very young age, and it has followed me into adulthood.

My dad helped teach me this, and he did it to try to protect me. When I was very young, six or seven years old, and my mom and oldest sister were really going at it with yelling and drama and emotion, he’d grab me and we’d exit stage left until things settled back down. This happened so often that it taught me to remove myself from family conflict, and now, forty or fifty years later, that pattern is still running.

When there’s interpersonal conflict with people I’m close to, especially when it involves emotion and volume, I can’t live with it and sit in it, so I disconnect. I have ADHD, so my mind goes a thousand miles an hour and I see too much too fast, and sometimes I just check out to relieve stress, and I do it during conflict. For whatever reason, I don’t need to do this with people I’m not close to, probably because their emotion doesn’t impact me so deeply and there’s nothing to “check out” from.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t let me express the level of care and compassion that I truly have. It has made me untrustworthy, because people can’t count on my ability to be present when they need me to be present the most. When there’s been big emotion, I’d get up and leave, or I’d practice the art of changing the subject, instead of holding space for the people I love.

Part of it goes back to ego. I’ve always been proud of my ability to communicate and “keep a cool head” in times of high stress, and that comes from the same ability to disconnect. In those moments, the “me” they know is Level-Headed-Lloyd, but in my closest relationships, a cool head isn’t what’s needed. The only way to really be there for the people you love is to maintain that connection, even when it makes you uncomfortable, and sometimes it makes you really, really uncomfortable.

My family knows all the versions of me. Sad Lloyd, fearful Lloyd, angry Lloyd, volatile Lloyd, loving Lloyd, happy Lloyd, joyful Lloyd, and on and on. That’s what vulnerability is all about, allowing people to know all the 1000 versions of you, and it also means that when you put on a mask, in my case Level-Headed-Lloyd, they know you aren’t being authentic and that you’re disconnecting from them. That makes them feel abandoned and misunderstood rather than supported and loved.

Checking out is only one of the ways I leave, though. I can also get really volatile, and that side of me caught up with me recently. We went through a team practice, and it knocked me off my feet when four of my team members asked me to check my temper. I thought that wasn’t an issue for me anymore, and it turns out it still is.

When I have passion and I care about the people in front of me and I can’t resolve the conflict, one of the reasons I check out in the first place is that I get too emotional and too angry, and leaving can feel safer than letting that out.

Both reactions come from the same place. When you go into fight or flight, studies have shown it takes thirty to forty-five minutes to come back. Checking out is the flight, getting volatile is the fight, and when I fight, I fight to win. When you drop down into your brain stem, the things that can come out of your mouth are not very good, with no filter on any of them, and over the years Lora has had to tell me what I said when I have no recollection of saying it.

There’s a balance in here that I’m still learning. My team members’ concern about my temper was valid, and I don’t want to wave that off, while the others on the team haven’t seen me angry much, and when they have, it was righteous anger. Over the last month or so I’ve been vocal and intense, and I can see how that intensity got read as anger, when the thing driving it underneath was urgency. Part of the discipline is learning to communicate that correctly, so the people around me understand the intent behind the emotion instead of bracing against it. It’s okay for them to see a side of you that isn’t perfect, because that’s part of the 1000 versions too.

The trick is that you can’t lose your passion, and you can’t emotionally check out either, so you have to learn to manage it, and the discipline lives in that balance between the two. Have passion without allowing it to hurt others. That’s maturity. I never really got the chance to practice it, because Dad always rescued me before I had to. So now I’m learning it late, with awareness of myself and of the people around me, trying to help them understand my emotion so they understand the intent behind it. The human condition is so conditioned by our own life experiences, and that’s a big part of why communication is so stinking hard.

The bad news about awareness is that once you become aware of something, you can’t unsee it, and once you’ve seen it, it becomes your responsibility to do something about it.