#83 What’s wrong with being serious?

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Gabby
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#83 What’s wrong with being serious?

Post by Gabby » Tue Sep 13, 2005 1:58 pm

#83 What’s wrong with being serious? / Is my position invalidating my friends?

Dear Annie: I’d like to add my encouragement to “Stuck in Adulthood,” who says he is too serious, I am 16 and serious and, yes I am always told to “lighten up.” What’s wrong with being serious? Why can’t people say, “Look at that mature teen getting a head start on life”? All my uncles were serious as teens, and now they are engineers, businessmen, professional musicians and doctors. All my aunts love them. My dad was serious, too, and my parents have a wonderful relationship.

It makes me feel better to know I am not the only one. –Blessed With Premature Adulthood, Leona Valley, Calif.

Dear Leona: Thanks for writing. We can tell by your letter that you are indeed a mature teen getting a head start in life. Good for you.

Gabby's Reply:

Hi Leona: There is a problem-solving exercise in which you communicate from the point of view that you are causing what others say to you. In other words, let’s say it’s the genius in you that unconsciously keeps setting others up to tell you that you are too serious. What do you suppose you have been up to that you’ve been setting up your friends to tell you to lighten up? To invalidate them, to make them wrong? Not! My sense is that you are shut down emotionally and don’t know it. A normal healthy person, one who is whole and complete, flows in and out of the entire range of human emotions throughout the day, even during a given conversation. That you've been driven to write about such innocuous comments indicates that you are incomplete about something. Whatever you do, do not try to lighten up (keep reading).

How we communicate, verbally, nonverbally, and psychically, all that emanates from us, even our unconscious intentions, have an effect on others, especially their aliveness. It’s easy to see with store clerks. The checkout process can be pleasant and uplifting or it can actually detract from your aliveness, sapping your very energy. On a scale of 1 – 10 you stood in line experiencing being 7 in terms of feeling quite good. As you left the store you noticed that you had dropped down to 3. You had been at effect of the more powerful clerk and had been sucked down to her level of aliveness. What I do is to intend to add to people’s aliveness. My purpose in life is to serve. Sometimes what service looks like is saying, to a clerk who has become stuck in upset, “Looks like you’re having a bad day?” Most always this wakes the person up. It’s a simple acknowledgement. It doesn’t make them wrong and gives all but the most determined dramatists, space to transform themselves right before your eyes.

Using the clerk example, it could be said that the clerk communicated to me, nonverbally and unconsciously of course, “I’m stuck. Can you help me? I don’t mean to be grumpy. I’m dramatizing an upset that I don’t know how to clear. I don’t want to detract from your aliveness but at the moment I’m doing the best that I can, and don’t know how to get out of upset,” or serious, or whatever.

There’s another communication exercise in which you must demonstrate to the person sitting opposite you that you have available to you full self-expression. You are instructed to communicate the various human emotions, happiness, anger, love, covert hostility, grief, apathy, joy, etc. reading sentences from a script, using only your voice, not facial expressions. In a weekend-long communication workshop there are always dozens of participants who, at first, can’t communicate one or more emotions. That is to say, they have become stuck. They simply can’t flow in and out of the entire range of human emotions throughout a given conversation. While there are various barriers to full self-expression, quite often a barrier is a position, an unconscious position such as, “serious is good, right, or even boring and therefore wrong.” Or, “My mother was pathetically sad, so I am not going to grow up to be like her;” in which case the person develops a “happy act,” which unbeknownst them to them comes across as phony and insincere.

Your position is having an effect on those with whom you relate. You set up your friends to tell you to “lighten up” yet, instead of thanking them you arrogantly ignore their support. The way in which you relate (communicate) causes others to feel uncomfortable, and I suspect, less-than. Your self-righteous position about being one of the few who is smart enough to want to get a head start comes across as holier than thou. It doesn’t feel good. It detracts from the aliveness of others. It is in fact, covert abuse. It’s a way to make others wrong.

Now here’s my advice. Keep doing it. Keep acting serious, only even more so. Really get into it. Pretend you’re an actress whose character is 10 times more serious than you are. Dramatize it to your fullest ability. Why, you ask, would I advise you to keep invalidating your friends and justifying the dour, intimidating, energy sapping countenance of your relatives? You don’t have any choice in the matter. Your love for them is such that you are now emulating them. You simply can’t conceive that it’s possible to be on-purpose in life and radiate happiness. You are programmed to have a serious looking act. What you can be trusted to do is to observe yourself. Through observation you will begin to have choices. In other words, if your intention is to add to the aliveness of others then the process of uplifting others will uplift you. When you serve you are served.

It will work to discuss this conversation with others. With aloha, Gabby

Re: “Blessed.” Religious expressions used outside your social circle of those of your faith could be interpreted as “holier than thou.” Sometimes it’s used as an unconscious identifier or a covert prosthelitizing communication. It can serve as a separator, creating us/them. It can have the effect of shutting down communication. At other times it’s appreciated. It all depends upon where the person who says it is coming from. Yours comes from self-righteousness, it didn’t feel good. The test for abuse is to ask the recipient, “How did that feel?”

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