A good friend, Jane, recently called me to vent about her husband. She’s married, has three beautiful children and a full-time teaching job.
She said, “I was enjoying a yogurt after clearing the table, filling the dishwasher, and cleaning off the island, when Pete asked me if I was going to wash the kitchen table. I told him I would do it and he said, ‘now?’ I told him no, that I would do it after I finished my yogurt.”
All this sounded reasonable to me, except the part about him asking her if she was going to do some work.
“You’re not going to do it,” he replied. “You always say you’re going to do it, but you never do. When are you going to mail that package?” He gestured to a package that was sitting on the coffee table. “You’re not going to do that, either. You should just throw it out.”
Jane told me all this and my heart went out to her. I wanted to call her husband a jerk and tell her to tell him to shove it.
But would that help my friend? Not in my experience. So I went with my second thought, rather than my first.
“Wow,” I said, “the thoughts in his head must be really stressful if nagging at you like that makes him feel better.”
“What do you mean?” Jane asked.
“Well, can you imagine how bad you would have to feel–what story you would have to be telling yourself–that would make talking like that to someone you love the best thing you can do in that moment?”
“Hmm,” Jane said. We went on to talk about other things.
Jane and I caught up with each other the following week and she said I really helped her.
“How?”
“You said Pete’s thoughts must be stressful to make him talk to me like he did,” she said. “It made me realize what he was saying really had nothing to do with me and I was able to let it go.”
Cool.
It doesn’t matter what another person says to us—it’s always about them.
Last night my husband and I were talking about my son’s reaction to one of his toys breaking.
“He just put his head down and started crying,” I said as I rinsed dishes in the sink.
“I remember feeling that way when I was a kid,” my husband said.
“Me, too.” I said, “but I’ve never seen him react that way before.”
“Well, developmentally, he’s becoming more aware,” my husband said.
“I know that!”
Once again, my defensiveness rears its ugly head.
Was my husband making a comment about my knowledge of child development? I don’t think so. I reacted to my thoughts about not practicing medicine for the past two years.
His words had nothing to do with me, and my thoughts about his words had nothing to do with him.
Excuse me while I go apologize for over-reacting to my husband.