My blog hasn’t become a high-traffic site yet, but that hasn’t stopped some interesting exchanges anyway.
I put this post and comments about coaching highly intelligent people on two of my blogs – I felt there was a poignant quality to the exchange.
Now I’ve received a very harsh, angry comment from someone who, I first thought, may know the writer and her family directly, and who apparently became incensed by what he read here.
The gist of his angry comment is that the mother was being blatantly self-serving and self-justifying, not really doing right by her son. He does make specific criticisms – putting kids with problems on psychiatric meds for one - but his tone is excessively harsh. (That harshness means I won’t “approve” his comment, but I’d like to respond to some of it anyway.)
My first instinct is to be protective of the mother who commented on my post and shared some of her concerns about her son. I appreciate that she was looking for something, clicked around, found my blog, and shared her situation with heart.
It’s virtually impossible to be brutally honest about ourselves and our families – either to ourselves or others. That’s not really news, and I’m very used to starting out with a more or less distorted, one-sided, very human narrative whenever I start listening and trying to be helpful.
Having a child who struggles causes anguish in any parent, but, yes, it’s also true that some parents don’t respond as effectively as they otherwise might, and it’s usually because they’re invested in seeing reality through “lenses” that are more about the person doing the looking than the person or situation being looked at.
But, again…most of us know that.
Since my work is usually with people already up to their necks in very ripe problems, with no chance of backtracking to square one for a “do over,” my focus is always on how we can best move forward from here, starting now.
My angry commenter apparently saw my exchange with “Alpha” as the Mom sanitizing her own part, avoiding responsibility - and me providing her with the cover to do it.
I truly don’t see it that way, but in my next post I do want to take up some of what got touched upon in his comment: specifically, giving too much credibility to professional expertise, and – even more specifically – diagnosing children, then putting them on psychiatric meds.
To be continued …..
Tagged as:
emotional intelligence,
human nature,
parenting
Anger Toward Her Anguish
by Shaun on Friday, April 29, 2011
My blog hasn’t become a high-traffic site yet, but that hasn’t stopped some interesting exchanges anyway.
I put this post and comments about coaching highly intelligent people on two of my blogs – I felt there was a poignant quality to the exchange.
Now I’ve received a very harsh, angry comment from someone who, I first thought, may know the writer and her family directly, and who apparently became incensed by what he read here.
The gist of his angry comment is that the mother was being blatantly self-serving and self-justifying, not really doing right by her son. He does make specific criticisms – putting kids with problems on psychiatric meds for one - but his tone is excessively harsh. (That harshness means I won’t “approve” his comment, but I’d like to respond to some of it anyway.)
My first instinct is to be protective of the mother who commented on my post and shared some of her concerns about her son. I appreciate that she was looking for something, clicked around, found my blog, and shared her situation with heart.
It’s virtually impossible to be brutally honest about ourselves and our families – either to ourselves or others. That’s not really news, and I’m very used to starting out with a more or less distorted, one-sided, very human narrative whenever I start listening and trying to be helpful.
Having a child who struggles causes anguish in any parent, but, yes, it’s also true that some parents don’t respond as effectively as they otherwise might, and it’s usually because they’re invested in seeing reality through “lenses” that are more about the person doing the looking than the person or situation being looked at.
But, again…most of us know that.
Since my work is usually with people already up to their necks in very ripe problems, with no chance of backtracking to square one for a “do over,” my focus is always on how we can best move forward from here, starting now.
My angry commenter apparently saw my exchange with “Alpha” as the Mom sanitizing her own part, avoiding responsibility - and me providing her with the cover to do it.
I truly don’t see it that way, but in my next post I do want to take up some of what got touched upon in his comment: specifically, giving too much credibility to professional expertise, and – even more specifically – diagnosing children, then putting them on psychiatric meds.
To be continued …..
Tagged as: emotional intelligence, human nature, parenting