reading my grandmother

Years after my grandmother's death, I started buying her book on resale sites. I would find it used for $5-8 on eBay or Amazon and snap it up. Eventually my grandfather sent me a box of them. When my beautiful friends have babies, I give them one. Originally published in 1965, the lessons remain revolutionary - speak to someone in a way that recognizes and is respectful of their feelings. Despite the title, this book isn't just Between Parent and Child. Till the end of her life, my grandmother remained my favorite person to talk to. She could make me feel better when no one else could.

I remember having a falling out with a friend in college and feeling so angry at her. My grandmother listened to me talk about my anger at a friend’s behavior and then replied, "that must have really hurt your feelings." I immediately broke in tears. Having her listen to me then speak to the heart of the emotion, the hurt under the protective layer of anger, and essentially tell me in one simple sentence "it's okay to be hurt by that, that is a normal reaction to such a situation, and your feelings are valid" was all I needed to hear to regain my composure. After a quick cry, I was myself again. I was suddenly back on solid ground where I could problem solve and see my friend's side of it, to where there was space in my mind to apply logic.

I'm lucky to have experienced her. Today, I hear myself speak to my friends in crisis, trying to give them support by offering another way of thinking about a tough situation, trying to help them see the other side. It is coming from a place full of love because I want them to feel better, but I'm doing the very thing that doesn't work. This is the very thing my loving friends do that ultimately feels shitty, amplifies my frustration and, completely inadvertently, tells me my feelings are wrong. Of course, because they don't want me to be in pain, they want me to move through them, to find the peace on the other side.

My grandmother, italicized and as it's own paragraph, writes "an empathetic response that mirrors to the child their upset feelings and expresses the parents' sympathy and understanding is effective in changing children's angry moods."