From the mind of critic: “If we’re expressing ourselves and people feel like we’re attacking them, does it prevent us from being honest? Do we view our words, body language and tone differently than the person we’re directing it toward, making it seem like we’re being attacked because somebody views something differently? Or somewhere in our subconscious do we know we’re attacking the person, only because we feel they attacked us first? We hit somebody, they hit us back, then we hit them again, and on and on it goes. What may start out as one person calmly expressing how they feel or what they think, can quickly blow up into a continous tit for tat. Maybe we don’t have the capacity to step into the other person’s shoes, and can’t even fathom how language to us sounds normal, but to them it sounds like they’re being attacked. Then in an effort to defend themselves, they attack us. Then in an effort to defend ourselves, we attck them back. Then the whole thing gets blown completely blown out of proportion. When it should have stayed a judgment free zone, by having an honest back and forth. Many things in life can anger us from our family, to our politics to the world. Once we realize that we won’t be able to honestly express ourselves when we’re angry because we can’t think straight, we’ll see that to diffuse any situation we must stay cool, calm and collected. If we ever wanna get past our ingrained issues, we have to have honest discussion. To have honest discusssion, we can’t fly off the handle when that honesty is displayed. Honesty is the best policy in any relationship. However, unless we let the honesty flow without attacking it, we will never get to where we wanna go. We must let honesty in, not defend ourselves against it” 🙂