“I’ll be honest: I was a little annoyed,” I said.
“I know. I could tell,” my friend responded.
We were debriefing about a recent group call. I was explaining what I would have called a small frustration that started to bubble up during the interaction. But what I realized is there was something bigger below the surface. My frustration wasn’t as “small” as I had thought. And now it was starting to grow.
My therapy over the last year has taught me a lot of things, but one of them is this: be curious. Don’t stifle or ignore what you’re feeling. That’s not helpful. Instead, ask questions about why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling. That allows you to get to the root and address what’s actually going on. And when you do that, you experience peace, freedom, and growth much quicker.
So that’s what I did with my friend. I started talking out loud. I voiced some ideas about why I thought I might be frustrated. We talked through a variety of them. But then my friend hit me with something I wasn’t quite expecting. It was a question. I could tell he was trying to be delicate, but you can only be so soft when you’re about to hit someone with a hammer. Here’s what he asked me. And it’s a question I need to ask you as well:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Veritas Daily to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.