As many of you know, I have been doing a lot of intense therapeutic work over the last few years, with the primary goal of being more consistently emotionally regulated under a variety of circumstances. I have observed a few hard fought but helpful changes in my behavior, and wanted to explicitly write about them.

The primary audience is people who may have known me for a long time in specific capacities - the hope is that this helps provide context if they notice me behaving differently. The behavior difference maybe intentional, or unintentional! If it is in this list, it is intentional. If not, it may or may not be intentional! Talk to me about it if you would like to.

While this is an observational list rather than an aspirational list, I am human and recognize that I can not promise consistent behavior. So don’t think of these as contracts, but do think of these as helpful guidelines for interpreting my behavior if they seem different than before.

Surface and handle conflict, rather than avoid it

I have gone to great lengths to avoid conflict in the past, to the detriment of everyone who should have been involved in that conflict. Conflict exists wether I like it or not. I did not necessarily have the tools to handle conflict in a healthy fashion, so I was avoiding it no matter the cost. This meant I wasn’t gaining experience with handling conflict, so I wasn’t good at it, so I avoided it harder. A terrible negative spiral.

I have better conflict management skills now than I did before. There is always more to learn, but I no longer treat “avoid conflict” as a goal in itself. I am getting better at being able to notice existing conflict, and take intentional action - surface it so it can be dealt with, or intentionally ignore it. As I keep doing it, I get better from experience. A positive spiral!

In the past, this perhaps meant that I would only explicitly surface conflict way past due, when it has metastasized (in reality or perception). Now I am able to do it when it is small, and hence easier to handle. There has been and continues to be a backlog of ignored conflict I continue to deal with however I can.

So, if it feels like I am bringing up more conflict than before, it is not because I hate you. It is because I am no longer ignoring it.

Recognize that friends and colleagues / collaborators are distinct relationships

Friend and colleague as distinct but potentially overlapping relationships. People will have different expectations of me, and I of them based on the kind of relationship I have with them. And this is ok.

I grew up in a way where a lot of my early friendships were open source adjacent. But as my life evolved, I was treating every single open source interaction as a friendship. This was simply inaccurate - while many people I met via open source treated me as a friend, to most I was simply a collaborator or colleague.

Expectations of friendship and colleagues are indeed fundamentally different, and I got my heart broken a few times (“How could a friend treat me like that!?”) before I realized I was pushing friendship expectations on people who never thought of me as their friend. That is not fair to them nor to me. I now accept that a Collaborator / colleague (a blurry distinction in open source) relationship is valuable in itself, and can be deeply fulfilling for everyone involved even if there is not a personal friendship. These are just different kinds of relationships - not directly comparable, one is not ‘better than the other’. This does not negate the many people in my life who are both collaborators and friends. Just that this distinction does exist, and just because I see you as a collaborator doesn’t mean I necessarily see that relationship as “less” valuable or respectable. Just different.

Accept I will make mistakes, and don’t shy away from feeling guilt

I now think of shame as ‘something is wrong with me’ and guilt as ‘I made a mistake’. Being able to separate those different emotions has been a fundamental breakthrough for my sense of emotional regulation. Shame is to a broad extent not helpful to me, while guilt is enormously helpful. I don’t shy away from feeling guilt anymore - it simply means I made a mistake, something I can own up to, and do better. That is unlike shame, which has no recourse for moving forward from. They are both uncomfortable emotions, but guilt is useful while shame is not. Being able to observe whenever I have felt shame, and lean into the underlying emotion there has been extremely helpful.

An upshot of this is that I no longer fear guilt as an emotion, and so am more open to making mistakes. I am free from a default of the ‘freeze’ stress response! I am able to more directly feel the emotions I am feeling, instead of spend time feeling emotions about the emotions I am feeling.

This doesn’t mean I treat people with any less care or respect or thoughtfulness than before! Not an excuse to be a dick. But a pointer to not let perfectionism, the fear of uncertainty, or the intolerable physical feeling that comes with shame to prevent me from living my life.

Not Complete

This is not a complete list of course, but hopefully this is helpful for someone to read. It was helpful for me to write!