Earlier this week, I was talking with my husband, and I caught myself doing something strange.

I was arguing 🗣 … his sister’s side.

I don’t agree with her. I was laying out how the whole thing looks from where she’s standing, which is a different exercise entirely.

We’ve been in the middle of a family situation for a few months now. The mess came from one place: 🙊 people kept secrets, and then made decisions based on what they’d misunderstood, and nobody went back to check.

She feels righteous about how she’s handled it. In her version of events, my husband is the one who’s misguided. 🫣

And there I was, making her case out loud.

Now the part that doesn’t sound very evolved. We’ve been angry. Genuinely angry,  more than once. 😠

We still decided early on how we were going to conduct ourselves. Firmly. 💪 And with kindness.

That word “firmly” is as important as the kindness.

Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God was quite influential in my early days of self-discovery, and the piece that stuck with me was this: speak your truth, 🎙️and speak it with kindness. BOTH halves, or it doesn’t work. Going quiet to avoid a confrontation is a different thing altogether, and it deserves its own name. Self-abandonment with better manners. Nobody has ever healed from that.

So has any of it worked?

On them, probably not. This is likely to land exactly where it was always going to land, no matter how well we conduct ourselves.

We feel better anyway. We feel good about ourselves, which I used to file under consolation prize. 🤗

Then I read the research.

Kindness lowers cortisol. It shows up in your inflammatory markers. And there’s one study I can’t stop thinking about: researchers put two groups into a deliberately stressful situation, and one group gave someone a gift first. The gift-givers’ pulse and blood pressure came back down faster afterward.

The stressor was identical for both groups. Their bodies just got over it at different speeds. ⏩

So the anger was never the problem. Anger arrives, it’s information, and it moves through you.

What costs you is the six months you spend rehearsing the argument while you wait for someone to admit they were wrong. That’s the part your adrenals pay for.

Women like us are exceptionally good at this particular form of self-harm. 🤕 We hold the line beautifully on the outside and run the whole case on a loop on the inside. At 2AM. For months.

So, I get it. Being kind to someone who’s been keeping secrets feels like handing them the win.

Try it from the other end. Every month you spend furious is a month you’re funding their behavior out of your own reserves. Your sleep, your cortisol, the whole account. They’re not making the withdrawals. You are.

Firm and kind at the same time is a skill, and almost nobody is taught it. It’s most of what we practice inside the StressLess Sanctuary, because the stress that ages you rarely shows up as a deadline. It shows up as a person.

It’s Sunday morning, and none of this is resolved. His sister still thinks she’s right. I’m still not going to pretend I agree with her.