Journaling project, Day 13

[drwex]

It’s OK to… Say “no.” Speak up. Tell the truth. Ask questions. Believe differently. Change your mind. Prioritize your needs. Learn from your mistakes. Embrace your imperfections. Forgive and seek forgiveness. Begin again, stronger than before.

What can you do to loosen the grip your have on yourself? How can you give yourself a little extra space to make the right decisions today?

On the one hand, I resonate with this. I've long thought that "what is the right action" is the most important question we can ask. I know I don't always do the right action, even within the context of the time and information I have available when I have to make a decisions. But still, I want at least to think about it. I believe strongly in "satisficing" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). When I read Simon's writing on this back in undergrad psychology I was very taken with it. So sometimes making right decisions is too hard. The return on investment isn't enough. You make a "good enough for now" decision and hope that gets you where you want to go.

But I'm stuck on "give yourself a little extra space". Does that mean taking more time or getting more information? I think of those two things as they keys to making right decisions. Looking back at the intro text, I think I'm pretty good on the saying "no" and telling what I see as my truth. You'd likely laugh if you heard how often my coworkers complain about me changing my mind. They've started writing down design decisions because it's so often that I see how something looks when implemented and I want it changed. "But you SAID..." they tell me. Yeah, that was then. This is now.

I'm also not sure what forgiving oneself and others has to do with making right decisions. I think I may be taking some of this too literally, maybe? Help me out here, please.

Comments

[pygment]

Ok add the question, who are you making the right decision for? Are you making it for yourself or because you are worried about how the other person is going to react? I know this means different things for you, as neuro-diverse, than it does for me with my anxiety and training in "Hintish" I spend/t an inordinate amount of energy trying to make the right decision for other people so that they are happy and won't be sad or grumpy with me. Trying to make the right decision FOR ME is hard. You've even encouraged me to do less of this behavior and it's helped. Thank you.

So that's my take on this and how I would read it.

[redbird]

A guess: forgiving people in this context means separating "it would have been better if we'd done X"/"next time let's do X" from things like "We should have known better than to do Y" and "Why didn't you tell me to do it that way?"

[corylea]

I don't know where you got the prompts from, but as I read them, they seem to me like a program that's designed to undo some of the deleterious effects of female socialization. Since you aren't female, I can see where some of the things that are said don't make sense to you.

If Person A wants X, and Person B wants Y, and there's only enough time or enough money or enough energy for one of them to get what they want, how do they decide? Women are taught that what we should do is suppress our own needs and meet those of others. Besides the obvious unfairness, the problem with this is that if one never meets one's own needs, soon there is nothing left to give. Replenishment must happen.

So I think a lot of the stuff in this particular prompt is trying to convince self-sacrificing people that their needs also matter. I think the decisions that the prompt is talking about are often the decisions about whose needs to meet when resources are limited -- one's own, or someone else's. The decisions are about balancing relationships and making sure that both parties give and both parties take.

I was given very strict female socialization. And although I've consciously rejected it, it's very, very easy for me to fall back into deferring to my husband and meeting his needs at the expense of my own. I need to forgive myself for having done what my socialization taught me to do. I have to forgive him for not noticing that I was giving more than I was taking and not asking what the fuck I was thinking. I have to try again to balance our needs, as two people of goodwill who care about one another but who've gotten training that teaches us that I should give and he should take.

Does that put the prompts into a context where they make more sense?

[flexagon]

Well THERE'S an insight. I think you're on to something. The themes I initially saw in the prompts was along the lines of "let go of past mistakes and figure out what makes sense for now", but frankly I think that ties right in with female socialization. We are so expected to agonize over the past forever! If you're interested in scanning the whole list of prompts, it's here:

http://www.marcandangel.com/2018/06/24/40-summer-journaling-prompts-that-will-take-your-mind-off-things

[drwex]

Yeah, I remember this. I've always known I was making the right decision for me.

[drwex]

Ah, so "forgiving" in the sense of "not blaming for things coming out wrong." I can buy that for a nickel.

[drwex]

Interesting, and not something I'd ever considered. When presented with conflicting needs like the X and Y I go back to my philosophy. Early on I learned a core tenet of Jewish ethics, which is that life/safety/health take precedence. You get to break other rules in order to make those things happen. Later Maszlowe gave me another tool for evaluating X and Y - is someone's "want" a way of expressing a need somewhere on that scale? If so, there's a precedence.

When considering equal wants (for whatever measure of "equal" you like) negotiation begins. What is each side's deal-breaker? How much can be traded and still have people walk away feeling satisfied? Can you bring in external authorities or other resources that weren't in the original formulation to help make a decision?

I really like the trio of books from the Harvard Negotiation Project on this (Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations, Getting Past No). It's a framework I don't always remember to use but it has saved me from getting fired from at least one job, and it's been helpful in other ways.

I'm sure that all of these trainings and systems have gendered aspects, but that's never been foregrounded to me. Probably been there all along and I'm blind to it.