What are your Values?

Offering gentleness and a nurturing and comforting presence is so so important.

Those are some of the most important qualities that I am constantly aiming towards.

And I also know, that sometimes, I can take those things too far.

When we approach people with too much gentleness, we are sometimes (unknowingly) projecting our own fragility and sensitivities onto others.

We sometimes assume a person might not be able to “handle” something because of our own trauma, or our difficult past, or perhaps because we simply have a low tolerance for it.

I have projected this sense of fragility onto others (plenty of times) in my lifetime and have assumed others carried the same sensitivities that I did - and many times they didn’t!

To add to that, there were many times that my extreme gentleness felt deeply disempowering to others.

Offering gentleness to others without mirroring a sense of encouragement and courage to face the truth and pain in their life can rob them of expanding into more of their capacity.

It can rob people of feeling confident enough to do the sometimes hard and necessary work it takes to face important and relationally disconnected aspects of themselves.

This doesn’t mean we rip people’s wounds open or force them to see things they simply aren’t open or capable of seeing.

No. That doesn’t work either.

I am talking about offering a little bit of both energies when the time and moment calls for it.

We can offer people gentleness and acceptance and validation and witness them for exactly who we are.

And we can also express our boundaries and we can hold people (and ourselves) accountable for hurtful behaviors (without shaming) one another.

We can make space for our relationships to mirror back to us the shadowy parts of ourselves that lay in our hidden and unconscious parts.

Freedom to be our fullest selves and connection and accountability towards one another go hand on hand.

They pull and tug at one another constantly.
And life sure has a funny way of offering us mirrors to hold us accountable, and to keep us humble, and to keep an eye out for us when we begin to lean too far in either direction.