The last time I blogged, it was about hitting. Don’t Hit! Today I would like to talk about something that I am sure everyone has done and has had done to them in their life.
Let’s have a scenario. Say your child just said something that pissed you off so much that you stood there yelling at him or her until your voice was hoarse. Your child is standing there crying their eyes out because they had no idea it was wrong until now. Does yelling really teach them anything? Perhaps you spent an hour yelling at them and they do it again. They knew it was wrong because you told them, but they do it anyway because they want to get a rise out of you, or because they just don’t care. Do you think you should yell at them some more?
I just wonder, what good was yelling if they didn’t learn from it? Isn’t there a better way to get your point across to them without yelling? You could just sit down and explain to them the consequences of their actions. Do you think if they had a back story of why it is important to you that they never do that thing again, that it might help them learn not repeat the same action?
Here is a good example. When I was a teenager, my step father yelled at me, and I was actually the same height as he was, but I was starting to tower over him. I stood there looking into his eyes, but I honestly wasn’t listening to a word he was saying. You know how when you are getting yelled at by someone and you look at their left eye, then their right, then left, then right etc.? That’s what I was doing. I had no idea what he was saying to me because by then I was so tired of being yelled at on a daily basis that all I heard was blah blah blah blah. I didn’t learn anything because I was yelled at for the most trivial things. If he had just calmly spoke to me like I was a human being, I probably would have paid attention to every word he said.
Yelling at people is not going to change the fact that it happened. So something stupid happens, so what, get over it. I don’t like the fact that my back-up hard drive crashed and I lost 1/4 of my back-ups. I got over it. I was glad that I managed to copy 3/4 of the files to my new hard drive before it crashed. There isn’t anyone to yell at and I know I didn’t do anything wrong, and even if I did do something wrong, there was still nothing I could have done to prevent the hard drive from crashing. Shit happens! Life’s a bitch, get over it.
I used to get so angry because my partner Chip would jump into the room and surprise me and scare the piss out of me. The first couple of times I laughed it off, but the next 200 times it would make me so angry that I would literally slam my hands onto the desk, rip my glasses off my face and throw them across the room and yell at him at the top of my lungs to stop. But he obviously didn’t learn from that because he just laughed it off and he kept doing it, and I fell for it day after day, sometimes several times a day. I scare easily, but that’s not his fault or his problem. Him doing that to me and not learning from my yelling at him didn’t teach him to stop doing it, but it did teach me to stop yelling at him because it doesn’t do any good. When I calmly explained to him that I don’t like being scared on a daily basis, he stopped doing it to me.
We hardly ever fight because we have both learned that when life hands you lemons, make some lemonade. I’m just saying that life is too short to spend it yelling at the world. You aren’t wasting anyone’s life but your own. Yelling is pointless, so just stop.
Diary of a Gay Nerd 