Latest / Internal Insights / The Quiet Exhaustion of Agreeing When You Don't Believe It
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Welcome to Internal Insights, a quick, honest conversation about mental health in about five minutes or less. I'm your host Ted Tao, a licensed professional counselor, and the owner of Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Every episode, we take one idea from therapy, trauma, anxiety, relationships, identity, and talk about it plainly. No jargon, no fluff, just something real. Let's get into it. There's a specific kind of tired that comes from agreeing with something you don't actually agree with. Not loud, not dramatic, just wearing you down. That feeling happens to almost everyone. And most of us end up there for a pretty understandable reason. We think staying quiet is the kind thing to do. We think if we just let it go, we're keeping the peace. We're being considerate. We're not making things harder than they need to be. But here's the thing worth sitting with. When you're consistently holding back your point of view, you're not actually protecting the relationship. You're quietly shrinking yourself out of it. Think of a conversation like rowing a canoe with two paddles, one on each side. If one person stops rowing and lets the other person do all the work. The canoe doesn't glide along peacefully. It just goes in circles or even drifts off course. The other person ends up straining to keep over to keep things moving in a straight line, without ever knowing why it feels so hard. Then over time, the gap between what you actually think and what you say out loud starts to feel different, or the meaning is completely different than you intended, even if nobody meant it to happen that way. lot of people are taught to believe that having a strong opinion or disagreeing or asking for something different is somehow selfish or competitive. So the pattern that is formed early it was simple. Stay small, stay agreeable, and the things will be okay. That pattern can follow someone for years, showing up in work, in friendships, in marriages. Long after the original reason for it faded. What I try to help people see is that voicing your opinions isn't the opposite of caring for someone. It's actually a form of respect. When you tell someone what you really think, you're treating them like they can handle it. You're saying, I trust this relationship enough to bring my honest self into it. Not the version of me that's easiest to be around. I get asked about this a lot, actually. Someone will say to me, doesn't sharing my point of view mean I care less about the other person? Like I'm putting myself first? The question usually comes from a good place, wanting to protect the people they love. Here's how I think about it. Sharing your point of view doesn't mean you don't care about the other person. It means the two of you get to build something on solid ground instead of sand. When both people bring their actual thoughts to the table, you're not competing over who's right. You're giving the relationship more to work with. Their views get to sit next to yours, and together you build something neither of you could have built alone. And honestly, when you share what you think, you're sending a quiet message to the other person too. You're telling them their perspective matters enough that That you want to hear it fully. Not just a version that's been shaped around what you assume they want. Real respect goes both ways. It's not agreement. It's not silence. It's two people showing up as they actually are. So if there's if this has been a thought you've been sitting on, something you've kept to yourself or trying to vo Avoid the rocking the boat like phrase. Maybe this week you find one small low stakes moment to say that thought out loud instead. Not to win an argument just to let someone see what you actually think. You might find that that relationship doesn't get shakier it gets more real. That's it for this episode of Internal Insights. If this gave you something to sit with, or just made you feel a little less alone, that's the whole point. This isn't a replacement for therapy, but if you're looking for support, you can find me at Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Thank you for spending five minutes or less with me. I'll see you next time.