Crying wolf

The other is a bit less obvious – Ask for what you need more clearly.
Crying wolf

BENGALURU: Have you heard the story of the person who cried wolf? I would be very surprised if you have not, but just for this column’s purpose, here is a super short version of the story. A young shepherd in a village somewhere much before the times of mobile phones and 4G networks often got very bored out in the pastures tending to sheep.

Every now and then, this shepherding kid would get so needy for some attention, that even negative attention would do and once had this brainwave of shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” knowing that would get some villagers running there and maybe one or two would keep company through the day, guarding jointly against the wolf. This happened multiple times, and the villagers once they understood there were no imminent wolf attacks, started to come a bit later each time, till finally they didn’t bother to come at all. In the story, wolves do attack one fine day, and this little shepherd who had used the card one too many times, could not get the attention when it was really needed, and lost many sheep that day.

The moral of the story, for relationships in any case, is really two-fold. One is the more straight-forward one: Don’t cry wolf unless there is actually one. The other is a bit less obvious – Ask for what you need more clearly. If the young shepherd had cried and wailed to the villagers about being terribly lonely and bored out in the pastures on their own, could there have been a possibility that the story would have ended differently? Maybe a kind villager would have kept company, or sent along some other kids to hang out with the shepherd? Or maybe some other shepherds would have shared their own experiences with loneliness and boredom, and helped learn a few new skills to manage those tedious hours of watching sheep chew grass? Did the young shepherd really need to cry wolf to get the attention needed?
We are often in the same shoes in our relationships. Instead of asking for what we really want, we often cry some variety of wolf.

When what we really want is to spend more time together, we might create some ‘emergency’ situation such as having forgotten the house keys or having gotten into a scrape with some person who dented your vehicle, or some such lame reason. Instead of saying want to be cuddled just because we really long for it, we might act as if we are falling sick or feeling faint, in the hope that our beloved gets super concerned, drops everything and comes to our rescue, cuddles us and babies us back into health, so to say.

Like in the shepherd story, we might get some attention to start with, but inevitably the stories wear thin and people start to disbelieve us, sometimes to the point where even a genuine need isn’t met. Can we then ask for what we want instead of crying wolf?

The author is a counsellor with InnerSight.

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