It comes out sideways

The drive home: why the people you love get the worst of you

You know the drive I mean.

The day was wall to wall. You went from spot fire to spot fire, meeting to meeting, going, going, going, and you handled it, because handling it is what you do. And now you are driving home, and there is nothing left. The person who walks through that front door is tired, flat, and one small question away from sharp.

The people who get the worst of you are the ones you love the most. You know this. It is one of the quiet griefs of successful people, and almost nobody says it out loud.

I want to tell you what is actually happening on that drive, because it is not what you think. It is not that you are working too hard, although you might be. It is that you are carrying a day's worth, in truth usually years' worth, of things unsaid. And the unsaid does not stay put.

The pollution: what the unsaid does to trust

Here is the mechanism, and once you see it you will see it everywhere.

Every time something true goes unsaid, it leaves a residue. One instance is nothing, a molecule. But nobody swallows something once. The feedback you have softened into meaninglessness. The resentment about the workload you never renegotiated. The thing your brother said at Dad's funeral. Each one leaves its trace in the space between you and the other person, and the traces accumulate, the way pollution does: invisibly, gradually, and then unmistakably.

And then we wonder why we don't trust each other.

We tell ourselves trust was broken by some event. Usually it wasn't. It was eroded, molecule by molecule, by everything both of you knew and neither of you said. The relationship did not break. It silted up.

Energy trumps words: why careful wording keeps failing

"But I never said any of it," you might tell me. "I was careful."

I believe you, and it did not work, and here is why. We communicate in energy before we communicate in language. Beneath the words we choose are the shoulds, the labels, the quiet verdicts we have already reached about each other, and human beings read that layer with unnerving accuracy. It is why the impeccably worded email still lands badly. It is why your team goes quiet when you say "any thoughts?" in that tone. The room hears the verdict under the sentence, every time.

Energy trumps words. I have watched it for twenty-five years and there are no exceptions. Which means the polish you are putting on your sentences is solving the wrong problem. The problem is not the words. It is the place they are coming from.

“What we don't acknowledge comes out sideways anyway.”

— Shari Elle, CNVC Certified Trainer, teacher of more than ten thousand people

Where the unsaid surfaces: a field guide to sideways

Denied a front door, the unsaid finds a side door. You will recognise some of these.

The meeting after the meeting. The real conversation, held in the corridor, in DMs, in the car park, everywhere except the room where it could change something.

Sarcasm and the joke that isn't. Truth in a costume, delivered with a laugh so it can be disowned on landing.

The withdrawal. The colleague who used to argue passionately and now says "fine". Hear that word for what it usually is: not agreement, surrender. The best people don't go quiet because they stopped caring. They go quiet because they concluded that caring out loud doesn't work here.

The proxy war. The fight about the dishwasher, the calendar invite, the seating plan. Ferocious, recurring, and never once about the dishwasher.

The drive home. The day's swallowed truths, arriving at your front door in the only form they have left: exhaustion and a short fuse, handed to the people who least deserve it.

None of this is a character flaw. It is physics. Pressure without release finds the seams. The question is not whether the unsaid will surface, only where, and at whose expense.

Faux feelings, and the vocabulary that keeps us stuck

Now for the trap that catches nearly everyone who tries to fix this with honesty.

You decide to speak up. You say: "I feel dismissed." Or "unacknowledged", or "disrespected", or "steamrolled". It sounds like courageous emotional honesty. It is actually an accusation wearing a feeling's clothing, faux, as in the French for false. "Dismissed" is not a feeling; it is a verdict about what the other person did, and they will respond to the verdict, not to you. Now you have a second conflict layered on the first, and you conclude that honesty doesn't work.

Honesty works. That wasn't honesty yet.

Underneath "I feel dismissed" is something truer and more human: I feel hurt, and being heard matters to me. Notice the difference in your own body as you read those two sentences. The first one points a finger. The second one opens a door.

That is the difference between vocabulary that keeps you stuck and vocabulary that gets to the heart of things, and it can be learned. Most of us were simply never taught. For years, I myself had four feeling words: mad, sad, glad, bad. It is a short alphabet for a whole inner life.

I once watched an HR manager at one of Australia's largest utilities, a woman who had spent her career being professionally composed, weep quietly in a training exercise. Not from grief. From relief. She had found, in her fifties, accurate words for things she had been feeling across thirty years of working life, and the finding of them was like putting down a weight she had stopped noticing she carried. That is what an honest vocabulary does, and no one is too senior, too composed or too far along to acquire one.

The ninety per cent move: self-connection before self-expression

So what is the way back? Not, as you might now fear, a life of exhausting disclosure where every irritation gets a summit meeting.

The way back is one move, made early: self-connection. Coming home to yourself before you try to meet anyone else. In my experience, around ninety per cent of clear communication is exactly this, and it is the ninety per cent nobody works on, because we are all too busy drafting the words.

Self-connection is simple and physical. You slow down, you come back into your body, and you ask yourself one question, honestly: what is it I care about in this situation? Not your position. Not your case. What you care about. Sometimes the answer surprises you: underneath the fury about the missed deadline is caring about a client relationship you have spent nine years building; underneath the coldness toward your sister is missing her.

Speak from that place and your words will mostly organise themselves. The judgment drains out of your tone because it has drained out of you. This is why one self-connected person changes an entire room, and why the skills are identical at work and at home. There is no work-you and home-you. Who we are at work and at home is one person, carrying the same unsaid things through both doors.

The cup of tea

Let me end with a man in his eighties.

He came to a training, the oldest person in the room by decades. Partway through an exercise on feelings and needs, he went very still, and then he said, to no one in particular: "I have never once asked my wife how she is feeling."

Sixty years of marriage. A good marriage, by every outward measure. And this question, never asked, not from coldness but because nobody had ever shown him it was his to ask.

He asks now. Their whole conversation changed shape, he told me later, and it started with something almost embarrassingly small: he brings her a cup of tea, sits down, and asks. That is the entire technique. The unsaid of six decades, coming home through the front door at last, in a teacup.

Whatever is riding home with you tonight, it can come through the front door too. It is smaller than it feels, and it is more welcome than you think.

Your forward step

Tonight, before you walk in, sit in the car for ninety seconds. Ask: what is it I care about, and what am I still carrying from today? Name it to yourself, feelings first, in better words than mad, sad, glad, bad if you can find them. Then walk in and, before anything else, ask one real question of the first person you see, and stay for the answer.

About the author

Shari Elle

Creator of The Living Work and CNVC Certified Trainer. For twenty-five years Shari has worked with Australian leaders, boards and family enterprises navigating succession, high-stakes conflict and the conversations that decide a legacy.