When Someone You Love Screws You Up a Little
By: Patti Flinn
Tags: Self Improvement, Bonding, Mothers And Daughters, Love, Body Image

When Someone You Love Screws You Up a Little

Emotion trumps logic, even against our own best interests.

Photo by Brit for Nappy

I recently wrote this post about how I bonded through unhealthy eating habits with my mother.

I never expected it to be taken as an endorsement for said unhealthy eating habits. It took me aback when someone suggested I was doing so. It made me look at my piece and wonder if what I intended was what actually ended up in the piece. I made an effort to clarify my position and explain that I was describing how unhealthy habits happen, from my own perspective.

Like most kids, candy was my favorite food group. Let’s face it, I wasn’t gonna eat cottage cheese for any Tom, Dick or Harry off the street. But I recognized that the quest for slimness would give me direct access to my mother, who was dieting and who happened to be my favorite person in the world. I jumped on the fad diet bandwagon because my mother was already up there and loved my mother and would have followed her most anywhere.

So, I see cottage cheese today and immediately think of how much I love my mother and how much I enjoyed that time spent with her. My mouth may protest but my heart loves those milky white curds.

Yes, I’ve had lifelong issues with food, probably because of it.

That’s the price I’ve been paying for that particular quality time. And I muster up the memory of the taste of cabbage soup at odd moments. I know what it feels like to survive on a liquid diet. I have muscle memory of exercises to build up things that weren’t supposed to be on a child (circa, Laverne & Shirley … you know what I’m talking about).

None of these odd proclivities or memories make me love my mother any less so I can’t unearth anything but fondness when I think of them.

And that’s how lots and lots of bad habits start … with love. We all have plenty of vices adopted simply because we wanted to fit in with people we idolize. It’s a sad, odd fact of life that I make light of as a coping mechanism, not because I don’t understand the serious implications.

But in clarifying my position, what became clearer to me is that we (as a people) have a need to put things into “right” and “wrong” buckets. “Good” or “bad”. “Pretty” or “ugly”.

It’s easy to point to someone and say they were wrong when you don’t know them and don’t have skin in the game. Hindsight — and perspective — is twenty-twenty.

I understand the sentiment in wanting to cut to the heart of things; impact over intent. And I agree: It’s critically important to see dangerous behavior for what it is. But the issue is, most of us don’t see danger for what it is when it’s happening. Most of us only recognize danger in hindsight … when we’re far removed from the emotion of a situation and can look at it logically.

In the moment, logic is usually nowhere to be found. I’m no psychologist but I’ve developed a theory on this:

Our hearts, emotions, and involuntarily bodily responses tell us good people can’t do bad and bad people can’t do good. We’ve hard-wired and conditioned our brains to believe that. We feel first, and then we link our “good/bad” logic to those feelings. And that’s how our “black and white” gets so screwed up. Wrong can feel right if it’s being dealt by someone you love, and vice versa. And the world is all sorts of shades of grey when it comes to right and wrong — those shades make it extremely difficult to see the forest for the trees.

I hope I didn’t seem to be condoning wrong in my last post. I’m only being honest about my life and my weakness and the love that shaped me as a person. I respectfully ask not to be judged for my honesty.

I also hope other adults can relate to my post in terms of trying to see their way through emotional fog to get to the heart of the matter.

We have to know how to recognize when our emotions are coloring our perception of a situation. And we have to know it’s possible to love people who do wrong. Not just brain-know, but in-practice know.

That love colors everything they do in our eyes. It forgives minor infractions. It makes everything they say “not so bad”. It awards them the coveted benefit of the doubt. It’s important that we don’t get fooled by the right/wrong, good/bad way of feel-thinking into assuming a good person will always do right and a bad person will always do wrong.

We all make mistakes that hurt the people we love, good intent or not. I propose we use hindsight as a learning lesson instead of a castigation of the people who lovingly screwed us up, because many of them were just as lovingly screwed up themselves and just didn’t know any better.

Case in point…