How to Be Authentic with People Who Love You but Don’t Understand You – Part 1

I don’t know if you had a chance to see it, but Darcy left a really good question in the comments under 5 Reasons You Might as Well Be Authentic. She wanted to know how you can be authentic when the members of your own family don’t seem too excited about the idea. Here’s part of what she wrote:

I have to ask, how do you do this with your family? Because my family,
well, they are not such big fans of authentic me.

They think I need to get a job and get married and do various other things that they want me to do that mostly depend on me not being myself. Mostly at this point I just avoid them, but that solution misses the point, because then I’m not being authentic, either.

Authentic me wants to have her family in her life, just not at the expense of having the life she wants.

Got any thoughts on this one? I’m all ears.

I actually do have some thoughts on this one, Darcy. So many, in fact, that I spent almost the entire evening trying to write a post about them, until I realized I’d have to break the whole thing down into several pieces. That’s how many thoughts I have about this one.

You see, I’ve thought about this issue for a long time because I’ve been around for a long time and throughout all that time I’ve been what some, especially my own family, would call . . . well. . . weird.

I’ve heard that word a lot. Weird. I’ve also heard the words odd, strange, crazy, nuts, bizarre, and occasionally dumb and stupid. And the place where I’ve heard them most is in my own home.

There are three ways you can react to such words. You can resist them, feel angry and hurt, and fight them, which is how I used to spend half my time; you can can accept them, feel ashamed, and try to change in order to win approval, which is how I used to spend the other half; or you can learn to embrace them and quietly, happily wear them like a badge of honor, which is precisely what I do today.

Throughout the rest of the week I’m going to share with you what I think I’ve learned about How to Be Authentic with People Who Love You But Don’t Understand You. And the funny thing is that it’s really pretty simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple.

Instead of a big list of things you need to start doing, it’s really just a a small list of three things you need to stop expecting and only one thing you need to stop doing.

Basically, you need to

1. Stop demanding that people understand you. I’ll cover this in tomorrow’s post where I’ll show you how overrated being understood really is and why it’s futile to try and squeeze it out of your family members.

2. Stop asking people to give you what you won’t give yourself. On Wednesday, I’ll write about how we often expect our friends and family to see things we can’t yet see, believe things we don’t yet believe, and to give support to things we don’t yet support ourselves. And, of course, I’ll explain why we need to stop doing this.

3. Stop asking people to give you what they don’t have to give. On Thursday, I’ll discuss how some family members simply might not have what you’re looking for and how to give up the search without giving up the relationship.

4. Stop robbing people of the opportunity to grow. On Friday, I’ll share the last post in this series and cover why being anything less than truthful about who you are is much like being an overprotective parent who robs their child of the chance to stretch, learn, and grow, and why you might not want to do that to your family or yourself.

I hope you’ll be joining me throughout the week and sharing your thoughts in the comments section. Until then, why not go out and make a little meaning? See ya soon.

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Tagged as: Be Authentic