Posted by sunny10 on May 23, 2005, at 10:42:15
In reply to Re: long.......(take 2). » Damos, posted by Damos on May 23, 2005, at 2:11:23
Yes, I was just getting at being true to ourselves and asking for what we want in ways that our SO's/spouses/kids/bosses understand. That's what the book is about.
Being a good conversationalist starts with knowing the person you're speaking to, right? So, like you say, if your roommate would even TRY to communicate with you in a different manner, maybe you WOULD respond differently. As you say, if I ask you to do/act like "x", but you have no idea what "x" means to US, there's no way you can do as we ask, is there?
But here's a real life example of two people miscommunicating because they are not paying attention to the needs of the other party...Both parties guilty... I've mentioned that my SO is living at his mom's and stepfather's house until his moving day, June 1. Well, they just left on Friday morning to go away for ten days and left my SO to dogsit for them. So he invites me over for "dinner and a sleepover", and whatever we decide to do for the evening- you know what I mean; not just a booty call- a "trip to our vacation home". We did this last year, too..
I arrive and he is just so giddy that I get nervous. Is he doing coke again? (My fault; I jumped to conclusions, but I haven't seen him giddy since the night before we went away and before that the coke incidents- none of those times ended very well for me.) So I decide to just see what happens. I tell myself to calm down and go with the flow.
A little later on, I am chatting while he is making dinner (I'm very lucky; he feels preparing food is very "Zen" and has become a really good cook. Much better than me, that's for sure!) I ask him for a favor. I ask if we can coordinate him dropping me off at the hospital on his way to work and picking me up when I call after recovery on August 11th. He just says, sure, he's been at this job long enough now that it will be no big deal. I am going to get my tubes tied- I know I don't want anymore children- and we have discussed it, but now that I have actually set the date, I expected him to ask me if I was nervous, or how I felt about it or something- anything...I was hurt that he didn't acknowledge ME, just acknowledged the date.
We took the dog out for a walk and when he noticed how quiet I was being, he asked me why. I told him that I was hurt that he answered the logistical question, but didn't say anything about how I might be feeling about it. He just said that we'd talked about it before; he didn't know that I needed to talk about it again and told me I should have just said so at the time instead of beig upset for an hour more than I had to. I am still guilty of needing him to TRY to see things from my point of view, but had to concede the point that I should have just said so at the time.
Then a little later, we were sitting around after dinner, the dog had been walked and fed, wine had been consumed and we started taling about our current geographical area. My SO has travelled a lot all over the US, I haven't. He were comparing the Philadelphia area to the Indianapolis area. The key here is that I've never BEEN to Indy. I was relying on him to explain the differences so I could learn what Indy was like. And I was getting confused because I thought he was comparing city AND suburbs here to just the city there, so I started asking questions about what he meant by "Indy's city limits", and that it sounded like he was including where he had lived as city, but sounded like a suburb to me, like we live in the suburbs outside of Philly, because it was the only concept I could get in my head based on what he was saying about cornfields and stuff. I was trying to understand the contrasts and comparisons he was making because I really wasn't clear on WHAT he was comparing and contrasting. All the sudden he told me he was starting to get insulted. I was floored. I thought I was insulting myself (or at least admitting to my ignorance of US geography) and HE is insulted?!? And I told him that. Then he "explained" that in my ignorance I was asking insulting questions and that I shouldn't ask questions the way that I do. I'm not sure I understand in what way I worded my questions badly, but I felt that he was treating me like a child. I told him that he didn't have a right to treat me like a child and "correct me". He told me I was being ridiculous, that he had insulted many people in HIS own ignorance at times. And I left- I was stupid AND ridiculous?!? I called him from my cell phone as I pulled away and told his voice mail that when he wanted a relationship with an equal, he should call me back. In the meantime, he was calling ME. I switched over to incoming call and let him speak. He was saying that we did have problems communicating and that we needed to work on it, but that I shouldn't have just left. (I have explained that I am a "runner", haven't I? And, yes, I know it's not a good way to be...darnit, I'm working on it, but it gets a little scary now to argue that bitterly since the New Orleans debacle... it will take me some time to get over it.)
Anyway, I'm turning around and driving back because he's still trying to tak to me on the cell phone and he is breaking up, so I tell him I'm hanging up and that it's because I can't hear him and am coming back to the house. He says ok. It's two minutes back to the house and when I get there, the front door is closed and locked- it was open when I left- and when he answers the doorbell, he is stepping out of the bathroom behind the front door. I finally ask him, after wondering all night, if he's been doing coke again, is that why he's so agitated and why he was so giddy when I first got there.
He tells me that if I have to ask that I should "get the f*ck out." I ask him if he doesn't think I have the right to ask at this point, he's yelling over my voice and goes into the bathroom and sticks his eyes under the light and is yelling, "do they look dilated to you? Didn't you watch me eat dinner? Get the f*ck out." So I say that no, his eyes don't look dilated and I try to calm him down, admit to being paranoid, but he's yelling- and telling me not to come any closer to him and telling me to "please leave if that's what you think of me. You know where the door is and I'm asking you to leave. I want you to leave right now". So I do, I walk out saying sadly that I didn't want a relationship with someone who treated me like a child, anyway. He's still yelling, really, so I doubt he heard me.
I try to call him again when I get home and get the couple of rings before it goes to voicemail. I ask him if the past month was all just a set-up (That "going along with it for now" thing you mentioned). I told him that I don't know that I believe that he ever meant to follow through with the therapy that HE suggested in the first place. I drink more wine (I am depressed, all I can think is that I've done it again- picked another person that's no good for me. I become convinced that this will never change. I want to die. I can't believe that he wanted me to come back to talk, but that when I tried to talk about how paranoid I was, he threw me out of his life. I was shocked, yet, somehow not.) I started fantasizing about hot baths and razorblades. About never having to go through this again. I call his voice mail back and tell him that I understand that everything is all my fault and that I always pick the wrong people to love. It has gone straight to voicemail this time- he has turned off his phone.
Then he starts calling me... telling me that he loves me, telling me we just need to learn to communicate better, then that he is afraid that my messages were becoming "dark"- to call him back if I needed to talk. He is calling from the house phone now. I call his cell phone back and tell his voice mail that he can stop calling me and pretending to care- that if he loved me he wouldn't treat me the way that he did. I know that, by then, I sounded tired and emotionless. But I also know that it's past his "bedtime". I know that he has to work Saturday morning, so I correctly guess that his lastest message was the last. I drink enough wine to be too tired to kill myself. I go to sleep.
The phone wakes me in the morning. I let the voice mail get it again. When I get up- not long after that- I listen to the message and hear him saying that he got my message to stop calling him and if that's really what I want he will, sadly, stop calling me. That this will be his last call. But he's unhappy about it and hopes that I will call him.
I am so emotionally drained at this point that I call him back and ask him why he wants to keep calling me, anyway. That it was pretty obvious after the night before that he doen't even LIKE me. We can't even have a conversation anymore. That he threw me out of his life the night before, so why does he care if we stop speaking? I say.
So he told me that we DO need to learn to communicate better. That he threw me out because the conversation was only going downhill and that he threw me out because he was afraid of really losing his temper again. He said he was afraid of how much worse it could have gone if I had stayed and if the argument escalated. That he was afraid of hurting me again- and he absolutley did not want to hurt me again- that he was afraid of himself. So I told him that he should have SAID so at the time. I told him that he said it like he never wanted to see me again- EVER. And he thanked me for bringing that to his attention. He said that wasn't what he had meant at all and that he was glad I brought it to his attention because he needed examples of how he was miscommunicating while angry. He apologized. I told him that if he really wanted to have examples, that he could have hugged me and said, "oh, I didn't mean it that way" when I got upset in the first place about being told that I insulted him. I had been so shocked that I couldn't think straight. I had TOLD him at the time that I was so shocked that he took my questions that way, and now I explained that instead of giving me a hug when he heard that he had shocked me, he had proceeded to tell me how NOT to insult him next time. And that only made me feel like he was treating me like a child. He sighed and said that I was right, things COULD have gone a lot differently from there if he had gone with taking care of my feelings instead of trying to point out what I had done wrong. He said that we are both bullheaded and we need to go to the therapy. That we both need to learn how to hold on to our sense of self (and right to opinions) without hurting each other in the process. He asked me if I was still willing to give it a try. He told me that he realized that a lot of what I was feeling for the rest of that evening was because he didn't recognize my need to talk about how the surgery would affect me- that he should have taken into consideration that he had already bruised my feelings and should probably have tried to be a little nicer and a lot less argumentative. He knew that he was wrong for not looking at my face at the time and seeing that I needed him to at least acknowledge the fact that I was having a surgery for the BOTH of us! That he was probably trying to "be right" to make up for being wrong earlier and that if I thought about it, I would recognize that I do it, too. That it's something that we both need to work on because we're both used to others treating us like dirt in the past, and trying to "be right to stick up for ourselves", but that we need to learn to communicate "in the moment".
He is right- we both do it. And then he asked me if I would "please consider trying last night over again tonight". Starting fresh, just trying to enjoy each other's company. That he had to go back to work (and he did- he had been speaking with me for about twenty minutes and he only works 8-12 on Saturdays; I knew he had work to do), but we should please consider keeping last night in mind, and try to be kinder to each other today. He asked me to think about it while he finished the last few hours at work. He told me he'd call me back when he was finished work. When he called to ask again, I told him I was willing to work on it if he was.
And we had a really good rest of the weekend until last night. We went to a wonderful concert last night. Alison Kraus and Union Station with Jeff Douglas. It was amazing (I love Alison Kraus- especially singing her stuff), but I fell back into paranoia about the whole drug thing. Concerts were always a big drug time for him in the past and I just got paranoid. So you see, we fought, talked it out, made up, and I'm STILL paranoid. Gosh, I just hate it... He didn't do anything wrong. He just got excited about the music (which is his "thing", music) and was much more awake at "past nine" at night than he usually is, and happened to be at a concert where we could smell that occasional joint being smoked.... That's all it took to spark me. I can't stand me this way.
Yes, I understand what you mean about how I have to feel about MYSELF to have ordered the drug test...
I think I truly hate myself... before I think I just didn't think very highly of myself. Now I'm beginning to hate myself. Good thing I have an appointment with my "me T" tomorrow, I guess.
I don't know how to begin trusting again. But I know I can't live not trusting anyone for the rest of my life. I'm just not hard-wired that way. It's not who I AM. It's not who I'm comfortable having become.
poster:sunny10
thread:496008
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050513/msgs/501661.html