Let it go, man. Just let it go.
I actually hate that advice (regardless of how true it may
end up being), because it downplays the effect things have had on someone, and
it doesn’t do anything to actually help anyone. If it was so easy for that
person to let go of, then they ALREADY WOULD HAVE! Who on this planet ever
heard someone say “Don’t worry about it” or “Just let it go” or “Don’t let it
get to you” and went “Oh cool. All better. Thanks!”? Apart from saying it with
sarcasm, I mean.
There have been so many things in my past, connected with relationships
that would have been so much easier on me if I had actually had the presence of
mind to distance myself from the overwhelming emotional reactions. But I
couldn’t figure out how to “just let it go.”
It’s like every challenge needed to be met and overcome. Why did the anxiety of a situation overwhelm me? Why
couldn’t I just have let something slide?
Some believe it’s because I’m a guy and guys just have to
fix stuff. Trust me: a whole lot of women do too. So I don’t think it’s just
that.
Some think it’s a Virgo thing. Like there aren’t any other
control-freak signs in the zodiac?
Some think it’s because I have a disorder. I actually do,
probably more than I have discovered. But I let so many things in my life just
go on by. Somehow in close relationships it’s different.
I didn’t need to fix each situation. I needed to fix the
person, and each issue that came along seemed to be yet another crack that
needed patching. It wasn’t that I was trying to be mean about it. In fact, I
thought I was being a good, helpful, dutiful partner.
“I was just trying to help.”
“Yeah? So at what point did I inform you that I needed your
help?”
Ouch, that’s the hard truth right there.
It’s funny, because I was busy proving the truth of the
Biblical admonition: don’t be trying to focus on removing a tiny splinter from
someone’s eye when you’ve got a big old honking roof support beam in your eye.
My cracks were the ones I should have been working on patching up. But of
course, without the perspective of distance, I couldn’t see that.
Here are some examples of moments I wish I had had this
Perspective Distance:
The Other Person Is
Angry!
The comedian Louis CK made a perfect observation when he was
talking about how men nowadays don’t really know how to be in a relationship.
He mimicked a young man who was so stressed over the fact that his girlfriend
was angry with him.
“Well, later she won’t
be!”
So this is almost like a hiccup in the philosophy of being
Present, living within the moment. In this case, the person can become myopic,
short-sighted, only aware of what’s happening right in front of him without
having the insight or understanding that moments pass. “The moment” should
never be interpreted as being how things will be forever.
I don’t think I assumed that a girl would be forever angry
at me once she started being angry at me. But I did see her mounting
frustration or sharp edges during moments of anger as a threat to me and the
relationship. I saw her anger as being the harbinger – the herald – of
Relationship Armageddon. If she was angry, it meant the End was Nigh.
Totally ridiculous, of course, but that’s how I felt. And
now I understand why.
My mom and dad.
Kids (and many adults) sometimes see things in a very
Cause-and-Effect way. In fact, it’s how superstitions and misunderstandings start.
“A crow flew into Mabel’s house, and the next morning she
was dead.” Never mind that Mabel had a
heart condition, her arteries were so congested that they were featured on
local traffic reports, she had an undiagnosed and untreated medical issue, or
that her family had a history of heart failure at a young age. All we know for
sure is that one does not experience a crow flying into one’s house every day.
Since that very unusual event was observed the day before Mabel passed away, it
follows that the two “were connected.” So, stay away from crows!
All your cattle died, so start looking around the village
for the girl with the unusual birthmark, wart, or hair color. Burn her as a
witch, and then all will be restored to normalcy. Never mind that the cattle’s
water or feed supply was tainted, or they got hoof-and-mouth. It was all a
witch’s fault! And if the tainted water that killed the cows was partly due to
the drought that caused your crops to wither, maybe there are two witches!
A kid walked into his school one day and killed many of his
classmates, and he had been listening to that awful heavy metal/rap/rock and
roll/whatever. Obviously we need to protect our impressionable youth from such
demonic music. Never mind that the kid had an undiagnosed chemical imbalance
(because “no kid of MINE has a problem like that!”), his parents never spent
any quality time with him (“Yes we did! We drug him to church every Sunday like
good families do!”), he felt estranged from his friends as he grew in a
different direction from them, or he simply succumbed to a mental or emotional
tipping point and fell into the abyss. Nope, it had to be the music he was
listening to. Granted, the music may not have helped and may have contributed
to the problems, but he was probably now listening to music that mirrored how
he felt rather than listening to music that influenced him.
Cause and effect. Of course, in my case, I see it now: Mom
and dad used to be happy around me, then they started being unhappy around me,
then they were angry at each other, and then they split up. Let’s see, they
were together when they were happy, and they split up when they started being
angry and yelling all the time. Anger = family and relationship break-up.
It totally did not help me that my parents tried to hide it
all from me. I know that it’s not great to fight around your kids, but there’s
no reason for them to grow up with this ideal that married couples always smile
and get along and are just happy all the time. When that kid grows up and he doesn’t
experience that fairy tale that was so carefully placed around him during
childhood, he might well wonder what’s wrong with him, or more likely what’s
wrong with his partner.
So it would have totally helped me if I could have had some
perspective about anger within relationships. Maybe I could have stepped back
and seen that the issue was the other person’s. Maybe I could have seen that it
was not only her problem but also her responsibility to deal with whatever the
problem was and get over being angry.
Of course, my mom and dad were angry at their partners prior
to their breakup. Because they were so wrapped up in their own heads and
trapped in the straight-jacket of how they were raised to believe relationships
worked, they just knew that they were both angry and it was the other person’s
fault.
So instead of having the distance, it followed in my head
that if she is angry, I must do whatever I can to reverse that, for her sake,
my sake, and our sake. It didn’t help when she was angry at me particularly,
because that’s what I learned as a kid:
Step 1) Mom is angry at dad
Step 2) Mom ends up kicking dad out.
True, I couldn’t have grasped my parents’ problems, so
having them sit down and explain it all to me would have been a waste of time.
This is especially true since I’m pretty sure they never understood why the
train was so severely off the tracks for them to begin with. They knew down to
the tiniest detail what the other person was saying and doing that was so
frustrating and wrong, but they didn’t know where the problems really were.
They saw symptoms, not the disease.
But that doesn’t mean it was fair to keep me, the child,
completely in the dark. When my marriage was on the brink, my kids totally saw
it. Hard as it was on them, they saw the stress all over me and felt it in the
house. So my wife and I sat down with
the kids together and separately to explain things as best we could. By not
springing the separation and eventual divorce on them as a total surprise meant
(in our case) that the children were prepared and somewhat armed with the
ability to deal with it.
So now I need to step back and examine a woman’s anger with
understanding. I understand now:
·
A mood will pass.
·
Anger is an emotion, not a reality. No, not even
when you’re “really angry.”
·
My parents split up because they worked to
control each other instead of resolve their issues.
·
My parents were angry because they would not
behave the way the other one wanted them to.
·
My parents had unrealistic expectations of each
other, so disappointment was inevitable.
·
My parents could not accept each other as they
were, could not force the other to change (even through violence), and could
not escape the prison of what they believed “relationship” really was.
·
My partner can be angry, even with me, and she
has the right to her emotions.
·
If my partner is angry, I do not have the right
to try and “correct” her mood. The same holds true of she is sad, happy, or
anything else.
·
My relationship does not have to suffer like my
parents’ did, because while a child is shaped somewhat by his or her parents’
example, he or she is not condemned to repeat it. We have choice.
Knowing that a mood will pass, even a bad mood is valid, and
just because someone is angry with me does not signal the end – this allows me
to have the distance to see the mood as a thunderstorm; a lot of wind, a lot of
noise, a lot of stress. But it will pass, birds will chirp again, and blue
skies will return.
Alcohol.
All I can say is alcohol was a primary factor in shaping my
early life and views. But since it loomed so large in the bad things that I
remember early in life, it took on a mythic stature. It was the fabled monster
lurking in the darkness, waiting to bring you to ruin. So it became my policy
to avoid alcohol studiously. I convinced myself I was allergic to it, to the
point that I had a terrible reaction to even tasting it.
The only problem for me was that I had no objective
viewpoint. I did not understand that alcohol in moderation was not something to
fear. Mostly I didn’t understand that because there was no such thing as
moderation, from what I saw. People drank to get drunk. Drunken people did bad
things.
When I found myself in a relationship with women who did not
have the same problematic past with alcohol abuse in their families, they did
not really understand my panic over the notion that they wanted to occasionally
drink socially. And crud, did I ever panic over that! Remember what I said
about anger being the herald of the end of a relationship? Well, alcohol was the
catalyst of that end.
Wine coolers in the house caused me to scowl every time I
looked in the refrigerator. How many nights did I spend lying awake waiting for
someone I cared about to leave a bar or club, after all the anxiety I felt upon
finding out that was their plans for the evening in the first place? Not to
mention that some family friends used to pity me mightily because I did not
partake. They actually hoped one day I could have the freedom to drink. Yuck!
It didn’t matter if these people in my life explained that
they would be fine with their alcohol consumption. My mom said she was fine
after she drank all morning then crossed the median into oncoming traffic as
she drove me to a book store (I was too young yet to drive). Drinkers lied a
lot, I learned early on. They could not be trusted. Therefore if I cared about
a woman and she had plans to drink socially, I automatically got angry because
my insecurities teamed up with my past experiences to tell me I could no longer
trust this person.
Children of alcoholic parents have a lot of these issues.
They can also find themselves in failed relationships, co-dependency, or even
trapped in a bottle (alcohol or pill) themselves. Again, what I grew up with
was the only reality I had access to as I grew up, so I internalized the idea
that that was how things were for everyone everywhere all the time. It’s sad,
as cosmopolitan as I was in many ways, I was so backwards and ignorant in many
others.
I have two people whom I can credit with helping me come to
grips with my fear of alcohol: my psychologist for explaining how alcoholic
parents shaped my viewpoints, and a certain young woman who proved that even if
she got very inebriated, she was still a mature and responsible person whom I
could trust.
I still cringe around alcohol. But I have the emotional
distance now to realize that it is a reaction to deeply-rooted trauma in my
past and not a reflection of reality in every case. So if someone I care about
wants to go to a club and have some drinks with friends, I no longer stay up
fretting. She isn’t going to behave badly, she isn’t going to abandon her morals
or common sense, and that margarita isn’t going to bring everything I care
about to a painful end.
But I’m still going to stick to water or soda.
In large part, my fear of anger and alcohol has
been moderated because someone helped me have faith that my past experiences
aren’t the only experiences. So it seems only logical that we turn our
attention to the pillar of Mindfulness that might make folks a bit wary: Faith.
