What We Ask For

There is something bone-deep about the desire to be heard. Not just listened to, but truly understood. Seen. Known. We want someone to look at us and say, without hesitation," I get it. I get you". And most of us have spent a fair portion of our lives searching for exactly that, in marriages, with parents, in friendships, sometimes with complete strangers who happened to be sitting next to us on a long flight.

Not long ago, I was sitting with a client who was carrying the kind of frustration that only a long-term relationship with a parent can produce. She was hurt, she was angry, and she had an airtight case. Her father refused to accept her. Refused to listen. Refused to see her as she actually was, rather than the version of her he'd decided on decades ago.

She made her argument beautifully, I'll give her that.

I listened for a while, then asked, as gently as I could, whether she'd be open to accepting and listening to her father as he actually was.

She looked at me the way people sometimes do when they realize their coach has completely missed the point.

"Absolutely not, "she said. "Why should I accept him if he won't accept me?"

The thing is, I understood her completely. I have lived inside that logic. I spent years in relationships keeping a running tally of who was doing what, who owed whom an apology, who had earned the right to be heard. The scorekeeping was exhausting. And I was terrible at math (side note, still am)

What I didn't see then, and what I've come to understand slowly and sometimes painfully, is that in demanding something I wasn't offering, I had created exactly the stalemate I was so frustrated by. We had both planted our flags on the same hill and were each waiting for the other person to come down first.

My mother, Doreen, was a complicated woman. I adored her (sometimes), and I drove her crazy, and the feeling was absolutely mutual. For years, I wanted her to understand me in ways she simply wasn't built for. And for years, I resented her for it, as though her inability to change was something she was doing to me personally. It never occurred to me that I was doing the same thing to her. That in refusing to accept who she actually was, I was withholding from her the very thing I was begging her to give me.

I think about this a lot when I talk to women navigating the end of a marriage or any other transition. The grief is real. The anger is earned. And underneath all of it is almost always the same quiet wound: I just wanted to be known, seen, and heard.

The painful truth that nobody really warns you about is that being known requires being willing to truly know. Not the version of someone we wished they were, or the version we're still hoping they'll become someday. The actual person standing in front of us.

That doesn't mean accepting behavior that diminishes you. There is a real difference between accepting someone as they are and deciding what role, if any, they get to play in your life. Those are two very different conversations.

But something quietly powerful happens when you stop trying to rewrite another person's story and turn your attention back to your own. When you ask yourself, not what's wrong with them, but what is true right now, and what you'd like to do with it.

What would you like to do with it from here?

That question lives at the center of the work I do. Not because it dismisses what happened, but because it returns the pen to your hand.

The moment we stop waiting for someone else to change so that we can finally feel okay, something shifts. We stop living at the mercy of another person's unresolved story. We stop measuring our worth by whether or not they ever decide we're worth seeing.

And funnily enough, from that place, we become far easier to actually be around.

My client sat quietly after our conversation. Then she said I don't know if I can do that. And that’s ok. You don't have to decide today, just consider it.

That's usually all it takes. A small opening for the light to come through. A moment of honesty. A willingness to ask whether the story we're telling ourselves is the one we actually want to be living.

The desire to be truly seen is one of the most human things there is. But if you're waiting for someone else to go first, you might be waiting a very long time.

What if you went first?

Love and Light,

Michèle