When I was a kid and my mom told me news I wasn't going to like, she always prefaced it with "Now don't get mad, but" but that just made my mood worse because if she was telling me that, it primed me to think it was going to be something I really didn't want to hear
When I was a kid and my mom told me news I wasn't going to like, she always prefaced it with "Now don't get mad, but" but that just made my mood worse because if she was telling me that, it primed me to think it was going to be something I really didn't want to hear