Reposted from my Tumblr“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”.My dad is particularly fond of this expression, and it’s a good one. It calls for us to calm down, slow down, and spend a moment thinking before we open our big fat traps. To shut our pie holes before we open them, and maybe say or do something we’ll regret.
My dad is a very difficult man. He’s never been all that great at expressing emotion. Hell, my sister and I spent the majority of our lives thus far genuinely believing he either hated us or was at best utterly indifferent to our mental and emotional states. The truth is, he feels plenty — it’s just not much of that is visible from the surface. An emotional iceberg if you will.
We just had never really stopped complaining long enough to understand him, and what various things he said or did actually meant.
By constantly complaining that daddy never loved us, we were prizing our own viewpoints and experiences more than his. For my sister, it took her finally moving out to appreciate our dad. For me… well, finances leave me stuck living with the parents as I push closer and closer to 30, so maybe that’s why it took me so much longer to shut up occasionally and take a few moments to what was actually being said.
Dad doesn’t mince words. Nor is he particularly prone to flowery purple prose on any given subject. He tends to be a straight talker from the Ernest Hemingway school of communication (I find this amusingly ironic; he hates Hemingway’s writing with a passion). He says exactly what he means exactly the way he means to say it… or at least after all these years this is what he believes he does. But he’s got a personal lingo, and it can take decades to understand it.
I was nearly 25 before it became clear that saying “That’s not a bad job” is his way of saying “Excellent work”. That “sounds like your day wasn’t horrible” is “I’m happy your day went well”. “Drive safe” is one of several ways he says “I love you.”
He can never seem to say these things directly, and I attribute those to how my grandfather, a classical 1940’s and 1950’s American Manly Man type, raised him. He was, by all accounts, very similar. I don’t think that kind of child raising method scales well to the challenges of two children with varying kinds of Attention Deficiency Disorders, and one of those is also High Functioning Autistic (that’d be me).
At no point has he told me he loves me. According to my mom, it took almost 30 years for him to finally eek those specific words out to HER. At no point has he ever openly admired something that I have worked hard on. He’s often critical, demanding, and holds everything to exacting standards. He has no problems saying those compliments to other people behind my back, but never to my face.
It drives me nuts, more than he can probably ever imagine.
But once I took the time to piece things together, to understand him, it made it easier. I was able to word my complaints in a way he could finally understand, and it has made things so much easier.
Politics though… that still divides us (me, a dyed in the wool Social Libertarian; him, a life-long Fiscal Conservative from an era where those words actually meant something), and I’m like him in many ways, particularly in the way of stamping a foot down on an issue and taking my competition circuit into overdrive. Most political discussions end as shouting matches. Both of us become fixated on winning, not communicating and debate. This is essentially my country’s problem playing out in microcosm— we’re not seeking first to understand the other, then to be understood by the other. We’re seeking first to win, at all costs, no matter the means. It isn’t until we quiet down, slow down, and try to see the other side’s points (and there are always
some valid points) and acknowledge those that it becomes discussion — the free exchange of useful and meaningful ideas and viewpoints.
This is something everyone should be practicing every hour of every day.
Because I love my dad fiercely, like he loves me.
But like him… I suck at communicating this.