Friends: Season 2--The air has cleared

[Meredith]

We have approached that discussion, though the location of it would be hard to pinpoint! We’ve also taken a stab at the question of whether crazymaking was a passive-aggressive behavior. The outcome of both questions was ‘no’.

Crazymaking means drama addiction. Creating drama and chaos is our drug. We do it when we’re bored. We do it when we need to achieve control. We do it when we aren’t receiving what we need from our partner. We do it when we’re fearful. We do it when we’re under stress. Control is a bullet point that falls under the crazymaking header for sure, but it isn’t a synonym for it.

Control for me was one of the main things that I stopped to examine, because I too have a controlling personality. So one of the largest challenges in this battle was to end the control. But, ending control won’t end crazymaking until we end the drama.

I could easily control my H into telling me that he loved me by walking up to him and saying, “tell me you love me”. If that didn’t work, I could try saying, “tell me you love me or else ____”. But crazymaking is not that direct. As a crazymaker, I wouldn’t TELL my husband to tell me that he loves me, I’d create some drama and some chaos in effort to force him to see all that I do for him and that, in fact, he loves me. It sounds silly and irrational, and in practice, it usually was. Because you don’t generally feel a lot of love for someone standing in front of you screaming to high heaven!