Less Chess, More Mess

I wasn’t much for organized team sports when I was a kid. I still remember the icky inside out feeling I had when I was five and a teammate on my peewee soccer team yelled at me for kicking the ball out of bounds in a panic. It was all just too much for my sensitive, people pleasing self.

I turned to gymnastics and found home in a sport that required self-discipline and where I had the sense that I was only competing with myself. 

When I wasn’t training in the gym after school, I’d put on an old sweatshirt and jeans with holes in the knees and play backyard football with my older brother and the boys from the neighborhood.

It was in these games that I discovered I LOVED playing defense. As an empath and a pleaser, I was well-practiced at watching people and anticipating their next moves. As a girl who was much smaller than all the boys on the field, my skills (at least at first) were underestimated. 

It was second nature for my mind to run possible scenarios and know just where I needed to be. I might not have been scoring the most touchdowns, but I sure had a knack for making big defensive plays by being on the kid I was covering in a nearly psychic way.

This is the memory that came to mind when I was talking with a client the other day. “It seems to me,” I said, “that you’re constantly playing chess in your mind while you’re around other people.” 

He  was recounting yet another scenario in which he had analyzed all of the angles, tried to figure out everyone’s motive and what they needed to be copacetic, and then walked the tight rope of what wouldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers. 

He, too, had grown up as a people pleaser and an anticipator of other’s needs. In his childhood home, any form of disharmony was swept under the rug. Nice. Tidy. 

“Look,” I leveled with him, “I think you could use less chess and more mess in your life.”

I told him how it made sense that he played so much social and emotional chess—because it was never modeled, he had no evidence that if a mess was made it could be effectively cleaned up. He was committed to keeping things tidy and harmonious because he didn’t have a skill set for how to repair disharmony in a loving, healing way. 

My client isn’t alone. How many of us grew up in a household where the unspoken rule was to make sure everything was copacetic? A lot. 

How many of us witnessed or experienced genuine apologies where people circled back to uncomfortable experiences and talked them through, or were curious about how something landed with us and what we needed because of it? Not too many. 

My client chuckled at the idea of less chess and more mess. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I can see how if I used more of the tools I’ve learned from you for regulating myself and communicating in a relational way, I wouldn’t have to front load every interpersonal scene for harmony.”

“You got it,” I nodded. “And what would that feel like?”

“This tight feeling in my neck and chest would be gone. It would feel more open and fluid.” 

Yep. 

What we practice is what we get good at. And if what you’ve practiced is running defense or playing chess you simply won’t have the skill set of speaking and acting from the inside out in a fluid way. 

All the wishing that you could do things differently in a relational way doesn’t change the fact that you simply need new skills and a new language to do that.

This is what one of the modules in Yours Truly is all about—practicing moving through the inevitable cycle of harmony-disharmony-repair in a way that allows for the inevitable mess and lets you play a little less chess.

Do you long for less tightness and anticipation and more openness and fluidity in your relationships? Join me in Yours Truly.