Oh, and on looking up the “You Just Don’t Understand” book on Amazon, there may be better books that cover the same content in a more-up-to-date way. I, however, found it very useful and not at all derogatory to men (some men seem to disagree, though I’m not sure why - but then, it has been ages since I read it). It is still worth a look, because it introduces the idea that the goals of your conversations may be utterly different, and that the unspoken messages can make a real mess of the outcome of a conversation.
One of the rules, by the way, is that if you don’t say it, you didn’t say it. epeepunk and I worked out that if I needed sympathy, and he offered me advice, but I hadn’t specified that I didn’t WANT advice, just sympathy, the problem was on my end, not his. I had to realize that as a human, his automatic response would be to do what he would want done for him… male, female, whatever, we tend to think of others as like ourselves, and are often wrong. Given that, we have to pay attention to our responses, so that we don’t act on the assumption that ‘you are the same as me’ in all cases.
Over time, we’ve grown accustomed to each-other’s styles, so his response to my bad day commentary is more like ‘that sucks’ and less like ‘if you did X differently, it wouldn’t have happened’. (for example) We still mess up, but we also are willing to accept culpability when we weren’t clear about what each of us needed from the conversation. Now, many of our ‘arguments’ start out with things like, ‘Hey, you forgot to say something nice about all the work I did today before you pointed out the things I didn’t do or didn’t do right.’ Followed by ‘oops - my bad, I really think the X looks great, and I am grateful you have the skills to do it. I guess I wasn’t clear enough about my priorities, though, because I needed Y done today - is there some way I can make that more clear next time?’ … We used to start with, ‘you don’t appreciate anything I do, why are you so critical, don’t you understand how hard I’m working right now?’ and it would go downhill from there. Granted, I still forget things (mommy brain!), and he still has to stop himself from ‘helping’ me when I’m struggling and just want encouragement rather than help. But with the majority of the conversations in the right realm, the errors often become cause for humor. And when they do not, we also realize that there are issues on both sides, and we both mess up sometimes. We’re human, in other words.
Specifying the style/approach problem before the ‘you hurt my feelings’ part of it is very helpful for keeping the conversations positive and kind - and useful, to boot. If we start from the rules every time, we can release hurt feelings or conflicts before they become personal wounds, and we can apologize for our ACTIONS instead of our thoughts/feelings. No shame, not a personal flaw or failure, but an error - and one that can be remedied. Well worth the effort. And way less stressful once you try it a few times.
Did any of your therapists detail how to use ‘I’ statements? (never ‘you’ - always ‘I’ - it defuses so much…)
