One of the things I enjoy about Speak Up is that we can start with what sounds like a fairly simple question and end up somewhere completely different by the end of the night.
This time the question was, “Why did that get under my skin?”
I started with a couple of things I’d noticed during the week around how quickly we can react when we’ve really only got part of the information.
I’d put a post on Facebook about a car going through an intersection, and some of the comments made it pretty obvious that people had read the beginning, decided what was happening, and reacted before they’d actually read the whole story. If they’d kept reading, there was more information there that may have changed the way they saw it.
I had something similar happen while doing AB work. A guy told me he was finishing the next day and I said I thought we were actually going through until the 13th. He got quite worked up and told me it had always been four weeks. The funny thing was, there wasn’t really a big problem. If the date needed changing, we could change it. But the reaction was much bigger than the practical issue in front of us.
That became a good place to start.
How much of the story do we actually have?
I think we all do this.
Someone sends a short text, looks at us a certain way, changes a plan, doesn’t reply, says something in a tone we don’t like, and our mind fills in all the missing pieces.
They don’t respect me.
They’re having a go at me.
They don’t care.
They’re trying to control me.
Maybe that’s what is happening. Maybe it isn’t.
The interesting bit is how quickly the meaning we give something can become more important than what actually happened.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t react or that we aren’t allowed to feel pissed off. If you’re angry, you’re angry. If something hurts, it hurts. I don’t think the aim is to become somebody who never reacts to anything.
The question for me is more around where the power goes next.
If I decide that you made me feel this way, then I can easily end up needing you to change before I can feel okay again. I need you to apologise, agree with me, understand me, behave differently or somehow put things right.
But if I can recognise that something you’ve done has brought up a reaction in me, then I’ve got somewhere else to look as well.
What happened in me?
What did I make this mean?
Why did this particular thing land so strongly?
That doesn’t let the other person off the hook for their behaviour. It just means I don’t have to hand them complete control over what happens inside me.
When the story becomes part of who you are
At one point one of the guys said that changing these reactions can take a long time, and I challenged that a little bit.
I don’t necessarily think the shift itself always has to take years.
I’ve learnt tools where somebody can look at something they’ve believed for a long time and see it completely differently in one sitting. Sometimes a perspective can change bloody quickly.
The harder part can be what happens when that belief has become part of your identity.
If I’ve spent twenty years saying, “This happened to me, so this is why I am the way I am,” what happens when I no longer need that explanation?
Who am I without the story?
We got talking about being a victim as well, but not necessarily in the obvious sense of wanting everybody to feel sorry for you. Sometimes the victim story is much quieter. Something happened, it genuinely affected you, and over time it became the explanation for why you react the way you do now.
The people around us can even help reinforce it. They know what happened, so when we react a certain way it becomes, “Oh yeah, that’s because of what he went through.”
Maybe that is where the reaction originally came from.
But does it have to stay the reason forever?
There’s a difference between understanding where something came from and using it as the permanent explanation for who we are.
Sometimes the question becomes whether the story is still helping us understand ourselves or whether we’re now using it to keep ourselves in the same place.
When the body has something to say too
That conversation moved into what can happen physically when we make a big mental or emotional shift.
My own view is that emotion is energy, and although we can’t necessarily see it, our body still has to do something with what we carry. I’ve noticed that sometimes after somebody lets go of a belief, an old story or something they’ve held onto for a long time, they can feel pretty rough afterwards. Headaches, an upset stomach, tiredness, diarrhoea or just feeling a bit off for a day or two.
I’m not saying every illness has an emotional reason behind it. Obviously there are plenty of reasons we get sick.
But I do think sometimes after a big internal shift the body can have its own catching up to do.
There was a funny moment while we were talking about this. The conversation had become quite intense and the birds around us suddenly got really noisy. They carried on while we were in that part of the conversation, and then when the subject changed and the tension seemed to drop, the birds settled down again.
Maybe it was coincidence.
Maybe they were picking up on something going on around them.
I don’t know.
But it was interesting to notice it happening while we were having a conversation about all the things we may be responding to without necessarily being conscious of them.
What if you don’t know the right thing to say?
The conversation then went into a much harder area.
One of the guys who used to come along to Speak Up has recently lost his son to suicide, and that brought up a question none of us seemed particularly comfortable answering:
What do you actually say or do when somebody is suicidal?
The room didn’t suddenly produce a perfect answer.
What came up instead was how frightened we can be of getting it wrong.
A couple of the guys talked about experiences they’d either had themselves or witnessed in somebody else where, during a suicidal crisis, there seemed to be a real disconnection from what was happening. They described it almost like being on autopilot and then, at some point, awareness coming back in and the person suddenly realising what was happening.
That obviously isn’t going to describe everybody’s experience, but it was interesting hearing some of the similarities in what people had seen.
What we kept coming back to was that maybe we don’t always need to know exactly what to say.
Sometimes we might simply need to ask what is going on and then actually listen to the answer.
Did I do enough?
One of the guys in the room is a firefighter, and he shared a job where he had to pronounce somebody deceased at the scene. Afterwards his mind kept going back over it.
Was the guy definitely gone?
Did I make the right call?
Could I have done something else?
Did I miss something?
I recognised the thought process immediately, although from a completely different situation.
When I’m doing AB work, I put this tiny amount of semen inside a cow and then walk away. There’s nothing I can see afterwards that tells me whether I’ve done it right, yet somehow, if everything works, that tiny amount of fluid eventually becomes a calf.
There are times when I’ve finished and thought, “Did I actually get that right? Surely that tiny bit can’t possibly be enough to create an animal.”
Obviously creating life and confirming that somebody has died are worlds apart, but I found it interesting that the mind can still ask the same questions.
Did I do enough?
Did I do it right?
What if I got it wrong?
Some of that second-guessing is probably useful because it’s how we learn. But when the consequences feel really serious, the fear of making a mistake can sometimes make us not want to look at all.
If I notice that somebody is struggling and ask them how they really are, what if they tell me something I don’t know how to deal with?
Suddenly I can feel responsible.
Sometimes it may feel easier to convince ourselves that they’re probably okay, miss the signs or change the subject.
Maybe we don’t need the perfect answer.
Sometimes, “How are things actually going for you?” followed by enough silence to let somebody answer honestly might be a pretty good place to start.
Can you listen to understand rather than listen to respond?
What does love look like when it is all giving?
That question about listening rather than immediately fixing things flowed surprisingly well into the last part of the night.
One of the guys started talking about his relationship and what love meant to him. Almost everything he described was about what he did for another person: how he showed up, what he gave, what he was prepared to do, and making sure the other person was happy.
As he was talking, one thing stood out to me.
There wasn’t much receiving in his definition of love.
I’d mentioned earlier in the night that I’m listening to a book called The Art of Giving and Receiving, and it has had me looking at this in quite a different way.
Even something as simple as giving your partner a massage can be very different depending on what is actually happening underneath it.
You could be touching somebody entirely for their pleasure because you want them to feel good. You could be touching them and also allowing yourself to enjoy the connection and the feeling of touching them. You could allow somebody to touch you because you know it makes them feel useful or wanted, while not actually letting yourself receive much pleasure from it at all.
The action might look exactly the same from the outside, but where is the giving and receiving actually happening?
Once I started looking at things that way, I realised it goes a hell of a lot further than sex or relationships.
Can you actually receive?
Even something as small as being thanked can show us something.
Someone says, “Thanks, I really appreciated that,” and how often do we immediately reply, “No, thank you”?
They’ve just given us some appreciation and we’ve bounced it straight back.
What would happen if somebody thanked you and you simply said, “You’re welcome”?
Could you actually let their appreciation land?
Then you can ask the same question about other things.
Can somebody help you without you immediately feeling like you owe them?
Can somebody compliment you without you minimising it?
Can you receive attention?
Can you receive money?
Can you come first at something and actually enjoy it?
Can somebody do something kind for you without your mind immediately working out how you’re going to repay them?
For a lot of us, giving is much easier. We know how to work, provide, fix, help and make ourselves useful. Being the giver gives us a role.
Receiving can be a bit more uncomfortable because sometimes there is nothing to do.
You just have to let something come towards you.
That tied back into another conversation we’ve been having over the last few groups. If I’m only happy when you’re happy, then I’m going to spend a lot of my time trying to make you happy. But if you’re also only happy when I’m happy, you’re doing the same thing back to me.
Now there are two people working bloody hard trying to create happiness for the other person, while neither is really asking themselves a very simple question:
What do I actually want?
That doesn’t mean we stop caring about the people around us. It doesn’t mean becoming selfish.
There just needs to be room for both.
Giving and receiving.
What you want and what I want.
What if you didn’t have to earn it?
This was probably the question from the whole night that stayed with me the most.
What if you didn’t have to earn it?
What if you didn’t have to earn love by being useful?
What if you didn’t have to earn rest by working yourself into the ground first?
What if you didn’t have to earn somebody’s attention by constantly doing things for them?
What if you didn’t have to prove that you deserved affection, money, praise, success or pleasure before you were allowed to receive it?
What if something good could simply be offered to you and you could let yourself have it?
I think that can be much harder than it sounds.
Giving gives us something to do. It can make us useful and needed, and sometimes there is a certain amount of control in that.
Receiving asks something different.
Sometimes it asks us to stop doing long enough to let something come towards us without first proving we deserve it.
Maybe that’s something worth noticing.
The next time something gets under your skin, before you rush to fix the other person or decide exactly what their behaviour means, maybe get curious about what happened in you.
And the next time somebody offers you something — help, attention, affection, appreciation or even just a genuine thank you — notice what happens there too.
Can you let it land?
Or do you immediately start looking for a way to give something back?
Sometimes what we react to and what we struggle to receive might tell us more about ourselves than we first realise.
If this keeps showing up for you
Sometimes simply seeing the pattern is enough to start changing it. Other times you can understand exactly what you’re doing and still find yourself ending up in the same reaction, relationship dynamic or situation again.
That’s the sort of thing I work with one-to-one.
We can slow down what is actually happening, understand what sits underneath the reaction, and work with the part of you that keeps taking you back there so you have more choice about what happens next.
You don’t need to arrive knowing exactly what the problem is. Bring the thing that keeps happening and we can start there.
A 60-minute session is $150.
Book a session with Scott:
https://thehealingbarn.as.me/work-with-scott
If anything in this reflection around suicide has brought something up for you or you’re worried about somebody else, support is available. In New Zealand you can call or text 1737 at any time, and if somebody is in immediate danger call 111.
Next Speak Up Cambridge: Wednesday 18 November 2026. This one is a Wednesday rather than our usual Thursday as I’ll be away at my PreKure graduation.
