Saturday, December 03, 2005
Beware of Words: they can come back to haunt you
OK, so twice in the past 24 hours my own words/comments to others have gotten me into a bit of trouble. You never know where your words may end up... kind of like in the telephone game... where something you say gets passed along and changes in meaning along the way.
In one case, it was something that I said on more than one occasion about someone that I know. ie. "Betty has a history of suicidal thoughts. This is how you can deal with people who are suicidal". It is not like I put an ad in the paper, I just mentioned it to close friends and family members, in order to help them deal with Betty. In the other case, it was something that I said in an email to a close friend about a person at our church that is on a committee with us. "Cindy is upset about X".
In neither case was the comment mean or hurtful, just an observation about what is going on with someone. Anyway, I ended up having to explain myself (as did Eric actually) to try to smooth things over.
