Comedy = Tragedy + Time (Pandemic Fights)

How are you doing?

These are some hard days we are all going through. No matter where lies your political alliance, no matter on which side of the bench you sit regarding vaccines and masks, we can all agree that this sucks! This global state of fear and terror sucks! In fact I think most of us would agree that “it sucks”, is a gross understatement of how we are feeling.

I have been thinking a lot about family dynamics and how those living under the same roof have been dealing with seeing each other every day.

Here is a rather funny story (in hindsight) about how my household is feeling and an exercise for you in the end:

My sister, with whom we are bubbling, was over a few weeks ago.

We usually have this breakfast routine when she is over, where my partner cooks a delicious breakfast of pancakes and eggs and broccoli, served with toasted bread and jam and honey on the side. It’s delicious.

That weekend, I decided that I would contribute to this delicious festivity by baking some French muffins. I decided I would wake up early in the morning, hours before others, and bake the muffins so that my partner and my sister would wake up to the sweet and warm smell of the baking and have muffins.

I did not wake up as early as I wanted. But still managed to wake up just early enough to get to the kitchen and start the baking process.

My partner woke up shortly after, at his regular time, and wanted to begin preparing the breakfast. The kitchen was already crowded with my baking activities. Oh and did I mention, we live in a 2 bedroom apartment with a very small kitchen?!

There was not much space left for him and he became annoyed that he couldn’t use the kitchen as he planned. He was trying to cook for us after all. Then I became even more annoyed at his annoyance of me. Here I was doing a nice thing for everyone and he wasn’t appreciating my work. The trouble with this line of thinking is that I assumed what I was doing was in fact what others wanted. It wasn’t. This way of thinking has gotten me into some hot messes.

Me baking muffins certainly wasn’t what my partner wanted. He actually told me that he doesn’t like muffins!

So he became annoyed and I became annoyed and I don’t even remember how the rest unfolded, but we were both angry with each other to the point that we couldn’t hide our anger and had to come clean and tell my sister that we were having a fight and didn’t want to put her in the middle.

I am grateful for having my sister there that day because her face summed up the conflict quite well. “I woke up and baked muffins, but it took too long and I didn’t tell him about my plans and he had his morning set up about cooking our usual breakfast, and me just baking and not telling him about it in advance messed up his cooking schedule, and now he tells me he doesn’t even like muffins and he wanted pancakes and well we are not agreeing and having a fight.”

My sister listened compassionately and then her face opened up in the smile she was trying to suppress. In her face I could see the ridiculousness of the argument. As though she was witnessing two toddlers having a melt-down on how one wanted to make muffins and the other one wanted pancakes and now they are both crying.

Of course, there are more nuances to this conflict, or any conflict in general. Things are rarely just about muffins or pancakes. In our case, a big contributing factor on my part was my lack of communication to my partner about how I wanted the kitchen in the morning. I wanted to surprise people, but when I couldn’t wake up on time, I continued my plan without thinking about the time and when my partner was going to use the kitchen.

It is seemingly innocuous but conflict can often be this way and transform into something bigger or smaller depending on what we chose to do with it. And of course during times of hardship, such as now, we are stretched thin. The pandemic has taken its toll on our relationships and our mental health.

I wanted to share something that helps my partner and I during a conflict, and it has helped us enormously during some tough conversations in the past year.

A Mirroring Exercise

This is from Imago Relationship Therapy. The point is to understand what it is that the other person is upset about, to really understand their story and the way they view what is happening. And as I have written before, understanding is not an agreement, or forgiveness or an apology.

To understand someone, is to be able to recite their worldview so clearly that if a third party dropped by in the middle of your conflict, while your partner is still there, and you were to tell them the story of the conflict from your partner’s perspective, your partner would nod their head in agreement of what you said. You don’t have to agree with what they are saying, but you do have to understand it.

The exercise goes like this:

Person A: Tells their thoughts about something (in a few short sentences because the human brain generally cannot remember everything that was said when someone talks for more than 1 minute or so).

Person B: Paraphrases what they heard. Then asks Person A “Did I understand that well?” Or “Did I get that?”

Person A: Either “yes” or “No”.  

If the answer was a “no”, as in ‘No you didn’t quite get everything I was trying to say’ then, Person A continues re-explaining what they just said. And Person B, paraphrases and asks “Did I get that?”

If the answer was a “yes”, then Person B, asks “Is there more?” as in ‘is there more that you want to tell me? Is there more that you want me to understand?’

The answer to this question is often a “yes” from Person A.

Repeat this process of listening and paraphrasing until Person A says there is no more that they want to say.

You can then repeat this pattern and reverse the persons. Person B, now gets to respond in few short sentences about how they view the conflict, and Person A’s job is to listen, show that they are listening by paraphrasing what they have heard, double-checking to see if their understanding was correct, and giving space for more to be said.

This pattern of conversation interrupts jumping to conclusions before understanding someone fully, it allows the person who is speaking to really understand what they themselves are saying, because when someone paraphrases what we have said for the purpose of understanding us, we can begin to hear our own thoughts and arguments and perhaps we might come to see some of the flaws in how we were thinking.

You can practice this with anyone and on any topic.

Sit with your partner tonight and talk about “rocks”. Each person telling the other partner what they think of rocks, the other person paraphrasing what they understood and going through each step. Then switch roles so both of you had a chance to talk about rocks.

Give it a go and tell me how it worked for you.