By: Penélope Lara (Translated by Allison Párraga)
Week after week in our Neighborly Conversations dialog circle, we discover that it is very important to talk or express ourselves when we feel overwhelmed, stressed, sad or when we feel that the world is coming down on us. This is how we remove a great weight that sometimes we didn’t even know we were carrying on our back.
Andrea (not her real name) has been a long-time victim of a lack of communication. Since she was a child, she always listened, but never said anything. No matter how many problems she had, she did not tell anyone about them, and so she accumulated all of those insecurities, anger, and worries that in the end led to depression.
Now that she has three daughters, she realizes that the lack of communication was not healthy, that it had generated numerous problems in her childhood because she never talked about them, and that to this day she feels immense frustration. She desperately wants to learn how to communicate with her three little girls so that they don’t have the same issue in their lives.
SEEKING HELP
Andrea shared that many people to whom she had given her trust and affection, in the end, had let her down, leaving her feeling very alone. She wants to find a way to try to have a good relationship with her daughters, but she realizes now that she has been taking out her disappointments on them for years. In fact, she has blamed them for her own problems.
But it wasn’t always like this. Before, she was strong and didn’t need anyone’s support to feel emotionally well, but she has discovered that “keeping quiet has hurt her a lot” and now she does want to find a community to support her. She has decided to seek help to be the same Andrea she was years ago, the one who was happy and who gave the best of herself to others.
HOW DID SHE MANAGE TO HAVE GOOD COMMUNICATION?
One of the first steps toward achieving good communication with the people we love is by learning first to communicate with ourselves, to listen deeply to what our inner voice tells us and how we react to those around us. Therapy can help with this process, which often involves learning to love ourselves, to celebrate our achievements and let our conflicts go. Once we feel better, we are ready to engage in conversation with others, and communication will flow more freely
I LISTEN TO ME
Getting ahead and finding happiness in this life is not something that requires depending on others. It is up to us to feel gratitude for what we have, to love ourselves, and to surround ourselves with the affection of family and friends. Life will reward us as these positive feelings spread out into our community and come back to us.
