Archive for the ‘relationship’ Tag
ME: YOU GOT A PROBLEM? I GOT A SOLUTION!
I could share many troubles that jumped Kimberly and me because of conflicting needs. One of the most painful and intractable is based on her focus on acceptance and my focus on improvement. Because of our families, personalities, and experiences, we have each fine tuned our coping strategies to survive threats to our emotional well-being: she is a people pleaser and I am a people fixer.
BERLY: I AM HERE FOR YOU
In relationships, she provides emotional support and I provide practical solutions. I am pretty good at empathizing, but that is not my goal. My goal is to help folks find a way forward. Kimberly is encouraged to see folks move forward, but that is incidental since her goal is to “be there” for others. I seek change, she seeks stability; I want action, she wants presence; I need hope, she needs patience.
Naturally, when our coping mechanisms do not “work,” do not protect us, we each feel deeply threatened at our core. You can see where this is going. I feel loved when someone understands my struggle and adjusts to my needs; I feel rejected if my friend does not change. Kimberly feels loved when she is accepted as she is; she feels rejected when her friend asks her to change (i.e. is not okay with her as she is). 
The message she regularly heard from me was “You are not enough” and the message I regularly heard from her was “I don’t care about your needs.” Each of us, by trying to defend our needs in relationship to each other, simply hurt the other one more.
If I were to write my real thoughts about these particular differences while dating, I would say, “I want to change for the better, she does not; I seek improvement, she seeks stagnation; I am an optimist, she is a pessimist.” In my younger years I would have pointed out the many Bible verses that support my perspective and shamed the other person into compliance. I am quick to blame, Kimberly is quick to accept, so she probably did not have these thoughts, but she would be justified in thinking, “I accept others, he rejects others; I am patient, he is impatient; I see people as individuals, he sees people as projects.” Thankfully, Kimberly and I respect one another and highly value honesty, understanding and acceptance. I see real benefits in her perspective and see how I fall short in those areas. She sees real good in my strengths and is grateful for it.
However, this does not change decades of reinforced feelings. When these dynamics popped up, it was very painful for both of us. For a long time, her perspective made no sense to me and my perspective made no sense to her. When our needs were not in conflict, we freely expressed our love and acceptance, and so over time we became more trusting of each other. That gave us the emotional space to slowly learn each others’ languages. Most of this happened before marriage, and though our feelings still smarted a great deal, we understood our issues and were committed to working through them. In fact we realized that in an amazing way, even our conflicting emotions were a great benefit to us and our relationship… but more on that later.
Pain Opens the Door to Love
When I last shared about Kimberly and me, I left an important point untouched. Are there not certain responsibilities that are moral in nature? Is my wife not required to be monogamous? Is it ever right for me to hit her? For the relationship to work (any relationship), do we not need some moral standards on which we can insist, a moral code of conduct?
Let me begin by saying that I believe all intentional acts are moral. Everything we do and how we do it is affected by our faith, love, humility, and the like. Even things we do with no apparent moral content are choices to do this and not something “better.” So perhaps the question is rather: are some moral choices “beyond the pale,” so significant that the relationship cannot simply absorb the behavior and continue on more or less as it was but must be addressed and worked through. To reorient the question in this way, however, moves it from a legal question of right and wrong and rather asks what will hurt or benefit our relationship. Relationship becomes central, and law becomes its servant (as Jesus said). 
Instead of saying, “You must stop this because it is against the law,” or even, “You must stop this because it hurts me,” we simply say, “When you do this it hurts me,” because if we force or manipulate them to change, it will undermine the genuineness of our connection. For important relationships, this step is just the beginning of an ongoing discussion and a doorway into deeper mutual and self understanding, acceptance, and trust. That is not to suggest I have no recourse if I am being hurt, but if relationship is primary, the solution does not lie in controlling the other person.
I am ultimately not accountable for their choices, but for my own. I am responsible to see that my own needs are met in a healthy way, whether my friend supports me or not. My needs determine where I draw the boundary line in our relationship, and my friend’s needs determine where he draws the line. If he cannot respect my boundaries, then I will take measures to protect my boundaries because I must respect myself and my needs whether he does or not. This is not a judgment of my friend’s inadequacies or of my inadequacies (as though he doesn’t care enough or I am too needy). We may both be doing the best we can, but not have the capacity to make the relationship work.
This was the huge distinction between my (former) perspective and Kimberly’s. I thought the only legitimate basis for boundaries was the law. If you lie to me, you are wrong; you must stop it, end of story. If you cheat me, you are wrong and must stop it. If you hurt me, you must stop it. I would use my relationship to blackmail their compliance, communicating with my behavior, “If you want to feel good with me again, you must change.” With this approach, determining who was at fault was fundamental to resolving relational conflict.
Basing such boundaries on my own personal needs was just selfishness. But when Kimberly did, I could very clearly see she was not selfish. She cared very much for my needs, whether she could accomodate them or not, and this confused me. Every selfish person I know subtly or blatantly shows disregard for my needs. Kimberly was saying in essence, “I do not have the emotional resources to care for all my own needs and all yours as well. If any of your needs go unmet, it is very unfortunate, and we will try to find the resources of support you need, but I can only give from what I have. You cannot ask me to go into debt in order to pay off your debt. I cannot ultimately take responsibility for your unmet needs.”
Of course, this was not one straightforward, simple talk we had. We both agonized over the emotional turmoil that sprang from our conflicting needs. Let me give an example that plagued us for years… in the next post.
Oh, the bumpy ride out of the marriage gate! Kimberly and I both came from families that saw the world divided into right and wrong, but I bought into it and she didn’t. She valued understanding and accepting each other as is. I valued changing to meet one another’s expectations: decide what is right and do it. But how would we decide what is “right”? The only guideline that made sense to me was to let fairness determine basic expectations, and then each of us could feel free to be “more” than fair as an exercise of grace. How could I even understand grace if I did not start with fair expectations? If we agree that we both should do 50% of the dishes, then my doing 75% is an extra 25% of grace, but if fairness (all things considered) expects me to do 75%, then I have only done my duty and nothing more. Have any of you married folks tried to decide what is fair? What I thought was straightforward proved to be indecipherable.
A PRECISE CHART OF FAIRNESS
Consider our budget. Take something as simple as grocery shopping. How much should I buy of what I like and how much of what Kimberly likes? 50-50? But being a good bit bigger than Berly and having a faster metabolism, I eat more than she does. Should we factor in how much we each love, tolerate, or hate a certain item? How do food allergies or dietary necessities weigh into the mix? If one of us does the shopping and/or cooking, do they get an extra slice? If one of us brings in more income, do they get more of a say in the spending (or is it based more on hours worked… only occupational time or household chores….)? If 9 brownies are in the frig, how much can either of us eat before the other one feels cheated? (Yes, this has been an issue.) Even I could see that my views of fairness smacked of legalism.
You may find all of this a bit silly, even childish. Shouldn’t each of us simply choose for the sake of the other person? This is the way I was raised, but you can imagine how poorly it works when I believe we are each responsible for the other’s needs and Kimberly believes we are each responsible for our own needs. From my perspective, the only way to resolve unmet expectations is to “encourage” Kimberly to meet them (or live at a deficit). But from Kimberly’s perspective that is imposing my wishes on her and making her take up what she feels is my responsibility. From my viewpoint, we should focus on expectations, what ought to be done for the other. From Berly’s viewpoint, we should focus on what each of us needs to do for ourselves. For her, self-care must precede other-care just as a mother must put on her airplane oxygen mask before she puts one on her child. I said, “I have expectations. They are reasonable. If you don’t meet them, my needs will go unmet. I will feel you don’t love me. I will become hurt and resentful.” She said, “I have no expectations for you to meet my needs. I take full responsibility for my own needs, and I do not want you to neglect your own needs so that you can satisfy mine. I want you to take care of yourself, to take care of your emotional needs as you do your physical ones. I wish you would do the same towards me. Your need does not establish my responsibility, nor mine yours.”
IT JUST LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT FROM MY ANGLE
I think my trouble has always been connecting expectations, reasonable expectations, with responsibility. If my expectations are legitimate in a given relationship (clean up your own messes, repair what you break, do your fair share of the work) and you don’t meet those expectations, then you are simply wrong, and need correcting. What else could it mean to be my brother’s keeper if not identifying the problem and urging the right path to take? Only… the real reason I am pushing this is not for your sake, but for mine. I feel inconvenienced, disrespected, hurt, unheard, overburdened, and it is because of your negligence. I need you to change so I can feel better and our relationship can smooth out.
Clearly for relationships to work at all there must be some standardized expectations. If my friend may respond to a dinner invitation by punching me or turning in circles three times or offering a breath mint, then I am at a loss to know how to relate. His behavior does not make sense to me. If he reacts in an unexpected way, I think him odd or worse (based on whether he seems to know or not know what is expected of him), and this starts us right off in the wrong direction since I believe he is the one who needs changing. What we really need is mutual understanding, talking through our differences, but if either one of us assumes our own “rightness,” things are likely to go awry, and we may part ways with less clarity and an extra helping of acrimony. I have understood him, and what I understand is that he is mistaken. So I will do the “loving” thing and “forgive” him, which means I still think he is to blame for the tensions in our relationship.
I lived the first 40 years of my life with the assumption that if someone had a need I could meet, I was obligated to meet that need. No matter how much I gave, I was still being selfish if I had any resources left for myself. Such a view leads to spiritual and physical self-destruction. In grad school I knew that 12,000 people a day starve to death (no doubt that figure is higher today), so how could I spend any more than the absolute minimum on my own needs? If I used resources for myself that would cause one more person to starve, was I not killing them? Was I less responsible because they were half-way around the world instead of on my doorstep?
With this thought I calculated the cheapest possible way to survive so as to give more money to relief agencies. Since tea or coffee had no nutritional value, I thought drinking it was simply a sin… so was jelly on toast (although it was so dry I used margarine sparingly, or rather a cheaper margarine substitute, and felt guilty for it). I must eat nutritionally, for which my mother gave me the simplest advice as I left for grad school , “Eat one green and one red or orange vegetable a day.” I knew I also needed protein, starch and fruit. The cheapest fruit was to drink orange juice each morning with a piece of toast (starch).
I prepared my dinner one month at a time. The cheapest protein was a chicken whole fryer (39 cents a pound), and the cheapest green and orange vegetables were beans and carrots. At the beginning of the month I would cook one whole fryer, one bag of string beans and one bag of carrots. I then mixed a bit of each into golf ball size clumps, twisted six into a row inside my used bread bags, and froze them, making a month’s supply. I would warm one of these up to put on rice each evening when I came home from school.
I saw time as another resource to share, limiting my sleep to a bare minimum. I lived in Chicago for six years and never visited the famous sites, which seemed an unconscionable waste of time. But I could not strip myself of every resource, so I lived with a pervasive undertone of guilt for not living on less and giving more. That person’s need constituted my responsibility, and the needs of the whole world lay before me to meet at whatever cost to myself. 
Something was deeply wrong with this picture. Whose needs am I responsible to meet? If I shave it down to the bare minimum, I would say I am responsible to meet my spouse’s needs… but is even this true? Doesn’t my wife have many needs that I cannot fulfill? After all, no individual has all the spiritual gifts for meeting another’s needs. The problem lies here–whether I took on the needs of the world or of only one other person, I was still trying to play the role of God, and it was crushing me.
Over time I came to the conclusion that if someone has a need, it is God’s responsibility to meet that need, and he may or may not use me to do it. He is not dependent on my help. It is not the other person’s need which constitutes my responsibility, but the invitation of God to become involved (and he does invite, he doesn’t force). If I choose to live by grace rather than law, then someone else’s need is a potential opportunity rather than an obligation. But whether or not I get involved (and to what extent), it remains completely God’s responsibility to meet that person’s need.
My own wife must ultimately look to God and depend on him to meet her needs. If she makes me the final point of responsibility for her needs, then her needs are going to regularly go unmet and she has no recourse. She is trapped in a life that is unworkable and has no means of escape because she is dependent on me, and I am a flawed creature. She and I must receive the grace of God for ourselves, either directly or through whatever channel he uses. We cannot restrict his grace for us to one channel, not even our spouse. No human relationship was designed to bear such a burden.
Over a long time, I was able to shift the weight of the world (and every individual in it) onto God’s shoulders and off my own. I still struggle to let the burden go, and tend to blame myself if another person’s needs go unmet, but I now know that to carry such a weight will break me. I discovered that I can care without taking responsibility, that mourning the loss of another does not require me to jump in and “save” them. In fact, when I am always in “fix-it” mode, I tend to be distracted from loving and caring, especially if I am pushing myself with obligation rather than letting my involvement flow from a deep settled nest of God’s grace.
Given the India diversion in blog postings, I will need to recap the story of my re-education that I was sharing.
1) I thought people and circumstances outside of myself were the reason for my feelings in a direct cause and effect dynamic. In order for me to feel better, I needed them to change. In other words, I was trying to “fix” my feelings instead of learning from them, and I was doing this by pressuring the other person to change.
2) I divided feelings into good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate. If the person “causing” my feelings were at fault, then my negative feelings were justified, and they should stop doing what they were doing so as to relieve my bad feelings. If the person “causing” my feelings were not at fault, then my feelings were illegitimate (wrong), and I had to talk myself out of those feelings.
NO WORRIES, I'M HERE TO FIX YOU!
3) If I can manage okay with the other person’s irritating behavior, then I should say nothing and just endure. If I could not handle it, I should tell them how their behavior was affecting me and ask them to stop. Again, my feelings were being controlled by the other person, which put me in bondage to them emotionally, and required them to change to maintain a good relationship with me.
4) Kimberly insisted that I had a right to my feelings, all my feelings, and that all my feelings were legitimate and true… not a true reflection of the guilt of others, but a true reflection of my own perspective and experience of life. My “bad” emotions were telling me something valuable about myself, not about the other person. If I listened to this emotional message empathically instead of with shame (accepting rather than rejecting the feeling), I could discover important things about my own woundedness.
5) Kimberly encouraged me not to hide my unhappy feelings from those I love, because sharing them is an avenue into deeper relationship. But if I shared my feelings as a means of getting her to change, it would push us farther apart and ground our relationship more on legalism, encouraging her to believe that my love is conditionally based on how she behaves.
6) I thought genuine care always led to accommodating behavior. If the other person cared about me, they would change what they were doing. If they didn’t change, it proved they didn’t care. Since these two were inextricably connected in my mind, when the person did not change, it proved they didn’t care. I didn’t realize my real need was for her to care about my feelings, not for her to take responsibility for my feelings by changing. As I thought, “My need + your love = your accommodation (and vice versa). How could you possibly say you care if you make no effort to ‘improve’?”
Each step of learning came with a great deal of pain for both Kimberly and me. Kimberly kept insisting that she was not responsible for my feelings, that regardless of how I felt towards her, this was not an indication of her guilt or responsibility. She felt deeply hurt when I blamed and shamed her, even if it were simply a sideways glance, pause, or lifted eyebrow to suggest that she was failing to meet my expectations. I kept believing that if she did not change, she did not care, and that hurt me deeply. This whole perspective of hers blasted my mind with questions. Are all expectations in a relationship unhealthy? Is accommodation or compromise a bad idea? Can a person truly care and still not change something that is hurtful to another? Are my emotions really completely independent of your behavior towards me? It still did not make sense.
THE MORE I THINK, THE MORE CONFUSED I GET.
Like most men, I want a fix. When I am agitated or discouraged, I want help to escape, and I expect this to come not from empathy but from fixing the problem that is causing those feelings. If I am afraid of losing money, help me protect my money, and my fear disappears. If someone is irritating me, get them to stop, and my irritation will fall away. I didn’t wait to ask myself with compassion, “Why am I afraid, what is going on in my heart?” That was obvious… the situation was causing my bad feelings.
When my wife shared her feelings with me, I offered solutions instead of empathy, just like I wanted for myself. But in trying to offer solutions, I was making her feel worse. When I said, “There is no reason to be afraid because_______” I was trying to relieve her fear, but she heard me say that her feelings were illegitimate. It took me forever to change my approach, and I still struggle with it. It seems to me that if I empathize with her feelings, I am giving her more reasons to feel sad or fearful or bad, and I want to rescue her from those feelings. But as I tried to understand her perspective more, I gradually realized that I too needed empathy for my feelings rather than solutions to “fix” them. I needed it as much as she did, because empathy invites me to be compassionate to myself, and with this active self-support, I discover the wound that underlies my feelings. But I didn’t want discovery, I wanted relief.
DIDN'T I SAY I COULD FIX IT?
I am a very good fixer, and when I fix situations so that my unhappy feelings are lifted, I feel better, but I learn nothing about myself through those negative emotions. As a result they came back just as strongly when the situation returns. Instead of emotional renovation, I was constantly working on repairs… the same fixes over and over.
Here was the sticking point for me in receiving Kimberly’s compassion. I could not imagine genuine care that did not result in her help or accommodation. If she truly empathized with my situation, she would surely act–help with the dishes, refill the gas tank, spend more time with me. If she didn’t give tangible assistance as able, she was simply uncaring no matter what her words said. If she did not help meet my needs, it proved she didn’t really care. And her lack of care stoked my fear that I was not worthy of care. My only option was to pressure her into acting to resolve my feelings and renew my sense of worth, and I usually did this by shaming her for not doing more. Kimberly reacted to this, as you might expect.
Over a great deal of time sharing and thinking I slowly realized that what I really wanted and needed was her love and genuine concern, and I was closing her down to that by blaming her and demanding that she change. When folks pushed in front of me or cut me off in traffic or ignored me, I thought I needed them to change, but my real underlying need was simply to have someone care about my feelings. That made all the difference. If my wife bangs the cupboards because she slips or thinks I’m downstairs or finds the door sticking, I feel no agitation. Knowing the whole context makes me realize that her behavior does not result from a lack of consideration for me. I may be irritated at the situation, but not at the person.
But what if the person knowingly kept doing those things that troubled me? I simply refused to believe they cared if they didn’t change. My need + your love = your accommodation (and vice versa). How could you possibly say you care if you make no effort to “improve”? I felt bad and it was their fault, they were responsible for my feelings. But if others control my feelings, I’m in trouble because I am then their emotional slave (or we are mutual slaves, which is the essence of co-dependence). Kimberly finally broke through this block in my thinking, but the process was very painful for both of us.
These reflections are just my thoughts, things that have helped me. Please forgive me if I sound dogmatic. I don’t mean to be. If these thoughts don’t help you, then by all means dismiss them; or if you disagree, argue with me in a comment (though remember my tale is not done).
It seems we all try to control others in various ways, and we are usually blind to what we are doing. We think, and even say, that we only want the best for them, not realizing that if they are pressured or forced to make better choices, those new behaviors will not nourish their heart, but shrivel it, because they are not freely choosing out of a loving relationship with God and others.
Sometimes, especially with children, control is necessary for their own safety and health, so that they can live long enough without significant damage to grow into understanding. But if this is the default teaching method, the greatest life lessons the child will learn are that her feelings don’t matter, that she must live from obligation (another word for bondage or lack of freedom), that what she does is more important than who she is.
Let me give a simple and common illustration from my own upbringing. My mom and dad naturally wanted to keep in close touch with their children when they “left the nest.” I was the youngest and last to leave, so their feelings were especially acute towards me. I was on my own for the first time and enjoying my freedom, and I didn’t keep in touch as much as they would like with letters and phone calls. Not only did they miss me, but I expect it made each wonder subconsciously, “Does he really love me?”
I Need You to Change!
Under the force of these emotions, they believed I was remiss in connecting with them. I was to blame for their bad feelings, feelings which I could so easily allay. It would cost me very little (so they thought) to keep in touch, and they pressured me in this direction. When I phoned them, their first statement was usually, “Well, we haven’t heard from you in a long time,” by which they intended to push me to show my love by calling more often. To the extent I bowed to this expectation, I was reacting from a “should” and not from compassion. In fact, the more pressure I felt, the less I was able to respond from genuine love. To my parents it felt like love when I deferred to their wishes and called more often, but somewhere deep inside they must have known that “loving” acts resulting from pressure do not mainly spring from love.
If they had shared their genuine feelings without making me responsible to fix them, it would have drawn out a natural love… I would have wanted to phone them instead of “having” to phone them. If they said, “We really miss you and miss hearing from you,” and genuinely did not hold me responsible for their feelings, but were only sharing their feelings, it would have made a world of difference. Of course, then they could not trust that the outcome would be to their liking since they granted full and genuine freedom.
Sharing your feelings with me without the assumption that I should fix them is a huge invitation into your heart and opens me up to welcome you and share my heart. But telling me about your feelings in order to get me to conform will make me resistant and closed. I will hear the message that I am bad unless I change and I will react to protect myself. If I do yield because of the pressure, because I believe I am responsible for your feelings, it will damage us both, and hurt the relationship. It may feel good, but it will encourage a legalistic view that love is conditional, dependent on my behavior.
I learned from an attractive friend of mine that insecurity does not only come to the daughter who is shamed for her looks, but also to the daughter who is praised for her looks in a way that makes her think her worth depends on it—she may seem proud, but is really filled with fear. The issue is not whether someone is valued, but why they are valued, and if they are primarily valued for conforming to our expectations (being a “good” child), they will always fear “misbehaving” lest they lose their parent’s love which appears to them very conditional and therefore precarious. The same is true in friendships and marriages.
If I am loving towards my wife when she does as I wish, and withhold love (act cool, snipe, act the martyr) when she does not, she will respond out of fear of losing my love. As long as she conforms, she will feel good about our relationship, but it instills a deeper insecurity. That isn’t to say I should never get frustrated or irritated or discouraged. That isn’t to say I should never express those feelings to her. Feeling all my feelings and expressing my feelings are key to good relationships.
But when I share my feelings as a means of getting her to do what I want or need, she feels unsafe with me, and she closes up her heart to protect herself. From my family’s perspective, why would I share an aggravation or disappointment unless it was to get her to change? If I didn’t need her to change, I would say nothing and just deal with it in my own heart and mind, I would silently accommodate. It is when I felt I needed her to change that I would share my displeasure, in order to get her to change and so free me from my unhappy feelings. It was her turn to accommodate. Let us just say it was a very bumpy ride for several years.
After dozens of conversations I started to understand that Kimberly believed feelings are neither good nor bad, they just are. “Excuse me, but haven’t you read in the Scriptures all the evil that comes from anger?” I respond.
“Well,” she says, “if God himself gets angry, it can’t be all bad.”
“Ah, yes, but everyone knows there is ‘righteous’ anger and ‘unrighteous’ anger. If you start feeling the bad kind, you are sinning, and must stop feeling that way. You can get angry for the wrong reasons or for the right reasons, and you should not get angry for the wrong reasons, so if you do, you have to repent.” She clearly did not believe the childhood morality I was taught.
“So,” she responded, “if emotions can be immoral, it means you choose them or refuse them. Is that how your emotions work? Because my feelings come without thinking, often without warning.”
“No,” I reply, “you can’t control your initial emotional reactions, but you can choose to hold onto them or to let them go.”
“And how do you let them go?”
“You tell yourself they are wrong and think of all the reasons why you shouldn’t feel that way, and you can talk yourself out of those feelings.”
“So, Jani, basically you should all over your feelings… you beat down your emotions with the law?”
Long pause as I think about this. I decided long ago that motivating myself with shame is a bad idea. Is that what I was doing? Wasn’t I just listening to my conscience, examining myself, and repenting? Should I not feel guilty for wrong feelings and stop myself from having them? I knew I didn’t have total control over my emotions, but I had enough control to force out the bad ones. I had done it many times.
“I guess I agree with you that my motivation should not be legalistic. So maybe I should work from the motivation of wanting good relationships, and everyone knows anger pushes people apart.”
She responded, “In my family, politeness was a much greater threat to true connection than anger. I have often seen anger bring people closer together because it forces honest communication and each person ends up telling the other person how they really feel. What do you think makes anger bad?”
“Well, you don’t like me getting angry at you!”
“It is not your anger that is a problem for me, but your blaming me.” Okay this REALLY does not make sense. If she was not to blame, why would I get angry? Getting angry over an innocent behavior is just wrong. How can you possibly separate anger from blame? If there is anger, someone is to blame! How could she say that all feelings are legitimate?
“So you think there is nothing wrong with being angry as hell at an innocent person?” I ask.
“Well, what do you mean by ‘wrong’?” she responds. “If you mean ‘are some emotions immoral,’ then I would say no. If you mean ‘are my emotions accurate or correct,’ I would say it depends on what you are measuring. Feelings are unreliable interpreters of someone else’s behavior (your rage does not prove that I’ve done something wrong). But feelings are great interpreters of your heart if you listen to them carefully. Emotions always tell you something about yourself rather than about the other person.”
Wow, that’s really a revelation to me. She is delinking my negative feelings from her culpability, a bond I thought inseparable. I could only imagine my anger being justified if she were truly at fault, but she is insisting that my feelings of anger are legitimate in themselves, even if she has done nothing wrong, nothing “deserving” of anger. They are legitimate for the very reason that they do not measure her misconduct… they simply alert me to what is going on in my heart, and do so quite accurately. If I merely shove my anger away or talk it down without considering what it is telling me, I can gain nothing from it.
After mulling this over for awhile I ask, “Okay, so maybe emotions are not evil in themselves and are just a gauge of my heart, but aren’t some of them a gauge of my bad heart? Doesn’t my anger or sadness or fear point to something that should not be in my heart, something for which I am guilty? And isn’t it possible to hold on to or nurse these negative feelings and so keep myself under their power? And doesn’t it matter how I express my feelings?” I was determined to prove my “negative” feelings were bad in some way!
When Kimberly said, “You are responsible for your own feelings,” I could only think, “If I am responsible, then I have control over my own feelings, and I should not be irritated. I lack self-control, I am not ‘walking in the Spirit,’ I am bad.” You can imagine that the continuing conversation did not go well as I tried to defend myself from the accusation that if I were aggravated, it was my own fault.
Mind you, that was not what she was saying. In fact, she might have used the words, “You need to take ownership of your own feelings,” but that sounded the same to me. She rightly perceived that I was angry and blaming her and expecting her to quit. No one likes to be blamed or manipulated with angry tones of voice, so she reacted in self defense, but a very gentle self defense. She was not returning blame for blame, but that is what I heard.
“Look, I was not irritated in the least until you started slamming the cabinet doors. You started slamming, I got irritated. If you had made less noise, there would have been no irritation. Cause and effect. If you don’t want me irritated at you, don’t bang the doors.” It simply made no sense to me to see it any other way. I had reasonable expectations, and if they were reasonable, she should meet them.
“I’m not telling you that you can’t get irritated, you have every right to get irritated. I’m just not responsible for your irritation.” A long silence on my part as my brain cells tried to break the code: “I only have the right to get irritated if she is doing something obviously irritating, and if she is, she should quit. How on earth can you separate the two… if I am right in getting irate, then it is her responsibility to change. If I am wrong in getting irate, then it is my responsibility to change by repenting of my frustration.”
In my perspective, if there were tension in a relationship not caused by miscommunication, then someone was right and someone was wrong (or both were partly wrong). The way to resolve the tension was to determine who was at fault for what, have them apologize, and the other would forgive them. Over and done. That was always the way it worked in my family. Frustration is either legitimate or illegitimate, if legitimate, the offender repents, if illegitimate the frustrated one repents (“I’m sorry I snapped, I was tired… it was a hard day… I have a headache”).
My wife’s approach made no sense at all—first she irritated me, and then she blamed me for being irritated (as I thought). You can imagine how many rounds of conversation we went through as I tried to figure out what she meant, desperately avoiding her conclusions because they would only squeeze into my paradigm through the slot of shame—whenever I have unhappy emotional reactions, I am at fault and must stop feeling as I do. But she kept insisting I had the right to feel my feelings. Does she mean I can feel these things, but should not express my feelings? She wanted me to express my feelings to her… just not blame her. But if she had done nothing wrong, then wasn’t it my fault for feeling frustrated? I was lost, driving in a loop with no exit ramps.
My wife speaks Chinese to me… at least that’s how it seems when I know the vocabulary she uses but cannot make sense of the message. I love her and so I repeatedly, intently try to follow what she is saying. When someone’s presuppositions are entirely different from mine, they make statements and assert conclusions that are meaningless to me, like: “A subjective cucumber chairs England with pneumonia.” Where do you even begin to ask the questions? And if it is completely coherent to Kimberly, she doesn’t know what needs explaining.
Me: “Do you mean a green cucumber that you eat?”
Kimberly: “Of course, what other kind is there? Now do you understand?”
It has often taken me months and even years through scores or even hundreds of conversations to slowly grasp her meaning about relational things far more complex than cucumbers. Over my head is not a light bulb popping on, but a fluorescent “tube light,” shadowed on both ends from overuse: blink… dark… blink blink-blink… dark… dark. Presuppositions are stubborn things and lie hidden behind blind spots.
The issue I raised at the end of Response #4 actually has several entangled, powerful, and unnoticed assumptions. I mentioned the first—that I felt responsible for others’ feelings. If someone does not like what I am doing, then I should stop doing it unless I have an overriding reason to continue. I am responsible for their feelings. Your irritation is because of my behavior—direct cause and effect—and I am responsible to change my behavior so you can stop being irritated. Your irritation is very reasonable; anyone would be irritated over this; only a saint would not be affected. Your irritation is controlled by my behavior.
This is a society-wide assumption, so that if anyone says, “Stop doing that! You are irritating me!” the only proper response is to say, “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was bothering you,” and to stop. We have no sense of distinction between the statements “I am irritated,” and “you are irritating me” or “you are making me irritated.” When we say the first, we really mean the last two; we are not taking responsibility for our own feelings of irritation, but are putting the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the “misbehaving” person. Of course, we distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable irritation, usually based on our own perception of social norms, but that must wait for another discussion.
I, for one, completely operated by this principle—my behavior caused your irritation. It was so obvious and clear and universal a concept, and I never heard it refuted. When Kimberly said, “I am not causing your irritation,” it made no sense to me at all. “What do you mean you are not causing my irritation?! When you bang the kitchen cupboards, it irritates me. My irritation comes from the banging cupboards… where else would it come from?” Can you understand my confusion?
The message she regularly heard from me was “You are not enough” and the message I regularly heard from her was “I don’t care about your needs.” Each of us, by trying to defend our needs in relationship to each other, simply hurt the other one more.
Janathan Grace Reflections 