Do you ever notice how you feel when someone gives you a zing?
A zing is what I call the feeling I get when someone does something that upsets me. Maybe it’s a harsh tone, or maybe someone hasn’t responded to me the way I wished they would have. Or maybe someone’s being plain old-fashioned mean or rude for reasons I can’t understand.
When I pay attention, I can feel these moments in my body. It feels like something is wrong. Like something toxic is happening. And it can take a lot of work to recover from these zings.
To help myself feel better, maybe I tell myself that the person who zinged me is a bad person, or I tell myself that I’m better than they are. Maybe I try to convince the other person that they’re wrong and hope they apologize. Or maybe I call someone and tell them what happened so they’ll agree with me that the person was a jerk. Or maybe I go eat a cookie to fill myself with something more sweet, or turn on a show to take my mind off what happened.
And though these ways of coping may soothe me for a bit, sadly, none of them will keep me from getting zinged again, because they don’t really get at the root of what’s underneath the behavior that gave me the zing in the first place.
From what I’ve noticed, the way we react to other people’s behavior often has its roots in our own past.
When I think about my own personal history of being zinged, it almost always goes back to my father.
Growing up, I used to feel so very criticized by him. Like nothing I did was ever right. I was always getting punished and always getting told that’s what I deserved.
I remember I used to defend myself, desperate to convince him that he wasn’t seeing me clearly—that I was so much better than he thought I was.
And I remember how tragic it felt not to get his agreement, as if his opinion of me was the grade that would be mailed to the department where the value of my existence was determined.
Well, time marched on, as it always does, but before I could gain any understanding about what happened in my childhood, I had turned into a grown-up.
And because I never resolved my relationship with those old zings, every time I crossed paths with someone who gave me even the slightest hint of criticism, I’d get the very same feeling I got from my father. It wasn’t my father giving me the zing, but I reacted as if it was.
That’s the thing about zings: when we don't take the time to understand where our triggers come from, we may not fully understand why we react to them with such intensity.
A person may only have said to me, “What are you talking about?” But because of my history, I heard those words as, this person doesn’t think I know what I’m talking about. This person thinks I’m never going to amount to anything.
Someone with a different past might be asked the same question, but instead of feeling criticized, “What are you talking about?” might mean only that the person needs more clarification.
So many conflicts in relationships seem to be the result of being zinged by things that remind us of situations that have already happened, but that aren’t necessarily happening anymore.
Thankfully, there are tools we can learn to use to help us better understand behavior—ours and other people’s. One tool is something I like to call The Platinum Rule. (Because I think it’s a little more valuable than the golden rule.)
The Platinum Rule states: What you do was done unto you.
This means, when someone gives me a zing, instead of reacting, I can consider that what another person speaks, is a reflection of what’s been spoken to them.
When I remember this, right away, I go from being zinged to being a detective—to paying attention to the person’s words and tone as if they’re clues to how they’ve been treated—if they’ve been mostly encouraged or mostly criticized.
I’m not saying that we have the ability to know for sure, but using The Platinum Rule not only takes away the zing, it replaces it with curiosity, and sometimes even compassion.
When I looked at the situation with my father through The Platinum Rule, I could see that my father wasn’t intentionally trying to destroy my sense of self.
The reason he wasn’t able to see me the way I saw myself, was because he was seeing me through HIS values, not mine. Values he received from his parents. He saw me as lacking skills that he was taught were necessary to be successful in the world. And when he felt I didn’t care about these skills, he felt I wasn’t caring about my future. The critical tone he used with me, was the same tone the grown-ups in his childhood used with him.
Once I realized this, I didn’t have to make his tone mean anything about me. And it no longer felt like an emergency to get his validation. And I began to realize that maybe I could do the job of validating myself.
But to validate myself, I first needed to get clear about my own values.
So many of us get our values handed down to us, and we’re never taught that we have the right to choose our own values. In my opinion, it’s one of the most important things a person can do.
We can still respect our parent’s values and even adopt them if we want to, but it’s also our right to choose our own values, based on what we decide is meaningful to us.
Without values, it’s very easy to feel like a little leaf—blown off course by a mere look, comment, or tone, and have our days feel ruined.
When I wasn’t clear about my values, life felt like a series of zings all day long. Whether I was at school, or work, or just walking down the street.
I didn’t realize instead of living as the leaf, I could live as the tree.
I didn’t realize my values could be the weight to keep me grounded.
And that with flexibility I could see obstacles as opportunities to grow in new ways.
You can pick any values that are important to you. I picked, being a contribution to myself and a contribution to others, because it felt like a match for who I was and wanted to be.
With our values as our foundation, we can shift from being disappointed by other people’s reactions, to expressing ourselves naturally in order to communicate what’s meaningful to us.
Our values become our anchor to keep us from being constantly swept away by imagining other people aren’t valuing who we are.
Seeing our own values and other people’s values through The Platinum Rule gives us an opportunity to invest our time connecting with others instead of defending ourselves like the value of who we are depends on it.
It also gives us the opportunity to listen to what other people are trying to share with us, so that we can get to know them better and build deeper relationships.
People will still trigger us from time to time and we will still trigger others, but when we remember that everyone is walking around at the very same time with a different perspective and a different reason for being zinged, it gets a lot easier to find compassion for ourselves and for each other.
-JLK
All episodes written, performed and produced by Jessica Laurel Kane, and the music was made by Jerome Rossen at Freshmade Music.