emotional dialects?

Sometimes I feel as if my ability to communicate is like a car with a broken steering wheel, or trying to drive with a linkage that's been tampered with. You turn the wheel, but the car goes some other direction entirely. Who's steering this damn thing anyway???

To some degree I think it's just human nature: Even though many of us nominally learned some form of 'English' as children, we each learned our own peculiar variant or emotional 'dialect' from our families. And if as many families are dysfunctional as seems to be suggested by the shrink literature, then it's no wonder so many of us can't communicate with each other.

What compounds the frustration for me is when the other person not only doesn't seem to get what I'm saying, but doesn't seem to be aware of any miscommunication. They walk away, perfectly content (or so it seems), while I'm left with this slightly sick feeling in my stomach from being unheard yet again.

It seems that the only thing to do is to try as hard as you can to *only* allow people in your life who 'get' you, and you 'get' them. Because otherwise the frustration level is phenomenal, and severely impedes forward motion of any kind. It's like trying to run with 50-pound weights around your ankles. Or something.

I think I must have written something similar to this a thousand times, but I guess it can't be said often enough. And maybe, since I was the 'odd woman out' in my family, I'm so used to fighting to be heard and swimming upstream and all that, I almost don't feel at home unless there's a certain amount of friction going on. Is that true? That seems like a really stupid and counterproductive thing to have happening. But maybe it *is* true. Hm. So: Should I fight it, tooth and nail, or just do the old 'radical acceptance' thing? My gut says to go with the latter. Notice it, try to pay attention to it, but don't try to change it particularly, one way or another. Sometimes just observing, as if from outside of oneself, can be enough to begin to shift the pattern.