As we drove back to the city after a camping trip, the woman sitting next to me, who had been grumpy with me since a disagreement over breakfast (although the preceding night together had been very pleasant) suddenly announced that I was ‘going too fast!’ I did slow down, a bit sulkily and then managed to stay in rather a bad mood for the next half hour or so. Looking back I can see it was a classic passive aggressive response; to do what she wanted (partly to prove how ‘reasonable’ and morally superior I was) while at the same time secretly trying to get some small revenge by being distant. Oh the games we play!
It was exactly the same reaction I remember having towards my father when I was about six, after he sent me to my room for some misdemeanour. I was thinking: “I’m not going to speak to him for the next week, or maybe never again, and then he’ll be sorry!’ Of course ignored my bad mood, and I soon forgot my resolution; although with hindsight, I do think I unconsciously built up a wall of resentment against him because of all this lack of communication from him, which was part of the reason there was virtually no communication between us during my teenage years.
‘I think I can imagine how that must have hurt you, and I regret that I had to do it,’
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I think now that if I’d been able to share my feelings with him, and had a response along the lines of: ‘I think I can imagine how that must have hurt you, and I regret that I had to do it,’ or even possibly, ‘with hindsight I think maybe I overreacted and could have handled it differently, and I’m sorry, but here’s why I did what I did’, that would have instantly built a bridge of understanding and trust between us; I would have felt loved and forgiven him everything. Sadly, nothing like it ever happened, although we did have a reconciliation of sorts on his deathbed, when he looked me in the eyes with a soft glow of love on his face and told me that he was proud of me and he loved me. That was the first time that any such words had passed between us. Until then, his messages to me felt like either how disappointed he was in me, or a kind of exasperated acceptance of what a hopeless case I seemed to be – so I have always valued that better-late-than-never acceptance from him.
But back to our car conversation!
When she made that comment about my driving speed, my partner was already angry with me for something I’d said which offended her, but which she didn’t feel able to tell me about …yet. So a part of her underlying intention at that moment was not just to get me to slow down, but to find something to criticise me for; to cut me down to size, as she saw it. I found out later that I had spent to he in a way that reminded her of how her father used to speak to her, and she had reacted to me with the anger and frustration that she’d felt then as a powerless and unloved child.
I try not to carry grudges (even though I confess to sometimes stockpiling what I perceive as criticisms and ‘slights’ until the point where they burst out in a fit of anger) so as soon as I felt I’d sulked enough (I know, I know – any sulking is already too much) I came back to her with what, to me, seemed like a reasonable, detached not-taking-it-personally kind of analysis of what I thought was going on for her with the speed thing. A completely wrong approach, I found out, which she said later, felt infuriating. I discovered that, for her, the best way for me to clear the air with her after an angry outburst was to respond in an equally emotional way. But this was hard for me; I was used to reacting with a silence, or detached analysis, two highly ineffective strategies, the use of which I put down to the result of being conditioned as a child to believe that anger was ‘bad’.
Here is what I came up with from my dissection of her angry statement about my driving.
The grown up me could see that her inner ‘little girl’, needed to express anger towards me playing the father role she’d allocated to me in her internal drama; and if I could have been detached enough from the process, i.e. not reacting with my small boy memories of feeling undervalued by my father, I could have paid more attention to how she was feeling, asked her to share that with me, so she would have felt ‘heard’, and I would have understood her feelings better.
There were some facts: I was driving at 80 in a 70 speed limit, so therefore from a legal perspective, I was definitely ‘going too fast’. But…it was a clear day with little traffic on the road. In my opinion, taking into account my driving experience and the conditions, I was not going ‘too fast’. So we had a difference of opinion. She believed (and a ‘belief’ is just a more entrenched kind of ‘opinion’) that sticking to the speed limit was important. And her bad mood with me made it especially hard for her to feel much empathy towards me at that point. I understood this, but her apparently low opinion of my driving skills, which also implied that I was too selfish to take looking after her seriously, hurt my feelings.
In fact we could have used this little altercation, about something relatively trivial, as a step to building a better trust and understanding between us.
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I realise now that, if we’d not confused feelings, and opinions with ‘facts’, we could have responded to each other much more clearly, with no need for anger, defensiveness or frustration. In fact we could have used this little altercation, about something relatively trivial, as a step to building a better trust and understanding between us. An outcome that’s possible with all ‘disagreements’ if the different parts, and our reactions to them, don’t get confused. Because we didn’t do that, what actually happened was a rather prolonged argument, which more or less spoiled the rest of the morning. What a waste.
If she’d been able to say, “You’re going too fast…for me”, i.e. expressed as a feeling rather than a fact, I wouldn’t have felt any implied judgement of my capabilities, so it wouldn’t have elicited a defensive response from me. And as a man who cares about her, much more than wanting to travel at a particular speed, I would have have happily shown that care by slowing down. Then when the time felt right I would have taken her hands and asked her to share with me how she was feeling, in a non-pressurising or expecting way, and without trying to ’fix’ her. That would have allowed her the space to reflect and, if she trusted me enough, talk about the memories that were coming up about her father etc, perhaps realising that it wasn’t really ‘me’, on that occasion, that she was upset with. We could have supported each other to work through that and maybe some other ‘unfinished business’ that we’re carrying from the past (there never seems to be a shortage), and would have ended up with a huge bonus of additional trust and closeness.
I could have been the caring and loving man that she wanted me to be all along. Result! And hopefully next time anyone tells me I’m doing something ‘wrong’, I’ll ask them to check whether they’re really stating a fact, offering an opinion or sharing a feeling. And respond accordingly.
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