Thanx NYSurvivor - W's LL is physical touch, which is alien to me so I need many reminders to just touch her. I actually only talk about W's actions when she brings them up, and have been very careful to share "I" statements. But now that I think about it, we usually aren't touching when we talk. Now I'm wondering how that would have made a difference with what happened this morning.
This morning I saw a letter to W from a lawyer she contacted concerning her malpractice suit. They declined her case, but gave her a referral number for the local Bar Association to find a different lawyer. I asked if she had called the contact number, because the lawyer she is using right now is in Pittsburg.
W became immediately defensive and upset and told me it was none of my business and I was shifting all the blame for this onto her. I tried to ask why she felt I was blaming her by just asking why she was using a lawyer more than 5 hours away, but she started yelling at me to shut-up. I asked her if we could talk about this later and she sort of agreed, but when I tried to ask when we could talk, she kept telling me I was blaming her. She even threw in a comparison to how what I was doing is the same reason I am having trouble with my boss at work.
W finally pushed me out of the way to get a cup of coffee (she was standing in the hallway and had me cornered in the kitchen) and I walked out to my car. I forgot my coffee so I went back inside and W was by the door with the kids waiting for the school bus. As I walked in she said to me, “Look at that,” pointing to something on TV, and laughed about it, as if our argument of 20 seconds ago had never happened.
I recognized three things. 1) W had to have the last word. 2) W had to be in control – I was trying to agree on a future date and time to talk about this and W simply would not even acknowledge that was an option. We would talk about this when and IF she wanted to. 3) I was trying to control the situation and allowed myself to get upset when I recognized I did not have control.
