A Script for Consistency

I had a tough run in with my mom this weekend.  Don’t ask what happened, because I’m not even sure I can articulate it.  It’s just that all my interactions with her leave me feeling less than, feeling like I have to earn her love, and feeling unwanted.  I was processing it through some emails with a friend and it was suggested that I tell Bryan that I really need to feel wanted right now.  Now, in good marriage counseling theory, that sounds like a good and reasonable idea.  In fact, my therapist has suggested it many times for various reasons.  My answer has always been “That’s stupid.  I can’t ask for him to say or do something just to make me feel better.  It will feel scripted and not real.”  My therapist’s response was one of yeah, it probably will the first few times, but you’ll get used to it.

My friend’s response was marriage changing.  It was:

It is scripted - that doesn't mean it's not real. If one of your kids is hurt, you probably have several things you do to either help or make them feel better. That doesn't mean your care for them is not "real". Having a spouse that cares for you when you're hurt is called "a good marriage". Does the script work? That's called "smart". Make sure you run some good scripts on him too.

 

When you’re teaching a kid to read, you need them to not only work on knowing letter sounds, you need them to memorize some “sight words.”  These are words that either cannot be pieced together with the letter sounds, like “the”, or high frequency words, like “is”, “at”, and “me.”  The second set of words might seem silly to memorize because sounding the word out works easily for them.  The rational is that a reader will encounter these words often and you don’t want it to be a new experience every time they see them or they won’t become a fluent reader. 

Now let’s mesh those 2 ideas.  If life is supposed to be calm and smooth (see previous post), then it would stand to reason that every time stress hits, it should not be a new experience.  It’s ok if there are scripts in place to calm things down, take the emotional charge out of the situation, and give you encouragement.  And just because it’s relatively the same thing that was said or done in the past shouldn’t make it any less meaningful.  Likewise, if one person is struggling and the other hasn’t yet noticed and stepped in, then it’s ok to ask for help.  And it’s ok if that help is in the form a “script” that has been used before.  I used to think (until this all clicked for me on my drive in to work this morning) that if the person really loved and cared for me, then they’d go out of their way to customize just the right thing to make me feel better every single time.  (And now that I say that out loud, I can recognize how daunting a task that would be.)

In the interest of true honesty and vulnerability, this also helps with me remembering that life should be calm and I shouldn’t create chaos.  If I know what answer/response/script I’m going to get, it takes the fun out of creating chaos.  If I already know how they are going to handle the chaos, and then it actually does play out like I thought it would, it takes the excitement out of creating the chaos in the first place. This means it will no longer serve the purpose that it once did.  While that’s a good thing, I’m also a little disappointed that my go-to isn’t going to work anymore. 

However, as I grow and become more healthy, I’ve got to image that these new habits of consistency will become just as comforting as my old habits of chaos were.  I have a hope that that is true.