This is one of my many faults. I’m aware of it, though, and work on it constantly. My mom did it, too. It was much easier for me to recognize it when SHE did it, than to acknowledge that ‘I’ did the same thing for many years. I try to stay CONSCIOUS of my tendency. If I find myself jumping up and down inside to say something, I know I’m doing it again.
Yes, you want to share. When someone is saying something to which you relate because of your own experiences, you want to tell them that you understand. But if you DO jump to tell them, some people even interrupting the other to share, you miss out on so much of life.
When I was in my ‘holier-than-thou’ period of teenage years, I would try to get my mom to change, to make her aware of what she was doing. When she would visit with someone, she dominated the conversation. She would be so eager to talk she would interrupt the person who was talking to tell her story, using the very same words she used the LAST time she related the story. I was very critical as a teenager – being perfect myself :0) – and would ask my mom what the person she had just visited had said about 1), 2), and 3). My mom looked startled, and then said she didn’t know. (I found out many years later – when I had finally quit being ‘perfect,’ that she actually knew quite a lot about her friends. She just found out details at different times than when I was listening.)
I found myself doing the same thing and was horrified. Yes, I wanted to share if I thought something we were doing might interest my friends, but I wanted to know what was happening to THEM, too.
The way I finally got my own attention about this problem was that I wanted to be able to tell myself what was new in each of my friend’s lives and how they felt about it after we had visited. I wanted to come away with a feeling of closeness and understanding – maybe even an idea of their hopes. If they weren’t forthcoming, I would ask questions, showing I really was interested, and LISTENED to their answers, and then responded to what they had said, or asked another question.
It’s a work in progress, but it’s one at which I really want to be successful. My friends are wonderful and deserve my ears and attention.
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