If You Don’t Talk It Out, You Will Act It Out

Submitted by Jarvis Howe, M.A.

There is nothing that can drive a wedge between people like resentment, as the following example illustrates. A husband and wife have a dinner reservation for 6 o’clock on Saturday night at a popular new restaurant. The wife has been looking forward to this night and is excited and ready to go on time. Her husband, however, was late getting home from golf, so they left later than they’d anticipated. He briefly apologized and said he had just lost track of time. As they drove to the restaurant, the good-natured wife kept silent but could feel her emotions boiling over inside as she realized they were going to be twenty minutes late. They finally got to the restaurant and were told that their table had been given away and there were no more openings that evening. As they left, the husband vented about how it looked like there were plenty of open tables and wondered aloud how a restaurant could hope to survive if it treated their customers this way. The wife again bit her tongue and refrained from expressing her annoyance at the fact that if he would have returned home from golf on time, none of this would have even happened. Later in the evening the wife discovers that the husband has left crumbs on the counter again after making toast and she goes off on him. “How could you be so careless? How could you be so thoughtless? All you ever think about is yourself!”

What just happened? That can be the only thing on the husband’s mind. There’s a book by Joseph Grenny called Crucial Conversations, in which he talks about how, when people don’t “talk it out,” they “act it out.” I’m sure you can think of a time in your life when you’ve felt that someone close to you was annoyed or angry with you by the way they’re acting. They may be giving you the cold shoulder, giving you short, curt responses, or, like this wife, blowing up over something small that is not the real issue. We have all been there ourselves and treated others this way. But why do we do it, and what is a better way to handle those situations?

Let’s start with the wife in the example above. It’s obvious even to this dense husband that his wife is upset about more than a few crumbs. She had been looking forward to an evening out with her husband and it seemed to her that if her husband had been looking forward to the evening as well, he wouldn’t have lost track of time. Sometimes people feel that it’s not okay to be annoyed or that they shouldn’t feel angry. Some people feel that they “shouldn’t” be annoyed by certain things. These feelings are part of the normal range of human emotions. What is important is how you react to those feelings. Bottling them up often leads to resentment toward the person for which you have those feelings. If this wife would have expressed her frustration appropriately earlier in the evening, her and her husband may have had a pleasant evening. On the way to the restaurant the wife could have said something like, “Honey, I have really been looking forward to spending an evening out with you. I felt hurt when you were late. It makes me feel like you don’t value our time together as much as I do. I just want to be closer to you.” It is easy to see how this approach is much less likely to lead to conflict than “acting it out.” She starts with something positive (“I have really been looking forward to spending an evening out with you”). Then she explains how she felt and what the husband’s actions mean to her. This approach gives the husband a chance to respond lovingly to his wife and reassure her of his love for her. From his point of view, he had just lost track of time; he had no idea how big of an issue this was for his wife until she brought it up, which is why he was shocked when she began yelling at him over a few toast crumbs.

It is easy to see why the wife in the example would be upset. But there are some cases where what upsets you may seem trivial and you may be almost embarrassed to admit that you’re bothered by it. Satan often uses trivial matters to try to drive a wedge between husband and wife. So if you’re feeling annoyed, angry, or upset, respond as the wife did in the car and a lot of times the problem can be addressed right then and there, with no need for any further feelings of resentment or tension. And if the problem is minor or even silly, you may even have a good laugh about it. There have been a couple of times where I’ve brought something to the attention of my fiancée and almost immediately realized how silly it sounded out loud, and the tension was immediately dissolved. Above all, remember that if you don’t talk it out, you will act it out.

Curious about “Crucial Conversations” and interested in more of the story? Take a look at Joseph Grenny’s “Crucial Conversations” presentation at the 2014 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit.