Looking backward but only to move forward FIVE

[sage]

Slowly! well, I sort of made up for it last night...went to bed around 9:45 and slept pretty much straight thru! Hooray!

h and I had a fight last night. It was a small one (largely because it happened right before we went to bed and he doesn't seem at all interested in continuing it this morning!) and I probably would have said it was over something "trivial" if I hadn't really thought about the importance of it.

See, h got mad at me because when I was going to bed last night I opened the door to our bedroom, saw that one of our cats was in there, and I kept the door open while I was trying to will her out (literally...I was standing by the bed going "leave, leave"). h came by and got pissed because the air conditioner was on and I was letting all the cold air out. As context, you should know that yesterday was a very hot day here and our old, old, old house doesn't have central air, holds heat like a, well, I don't know what, and our bedroom air conditioner is h's lifesaver.

he was quite irked and while explaining to me why he was so mad (which, as I think about it, is quite a change from pre-DB'ing to actually hear WHY he was mad) he said "and I keep thinking -- she KNOWS how important this is to me and she does it anyway".

Ah. that's really the jist of it, isn't it?

Yah, it's the leaving the door open or the dish in the sink or the towel on the floor in some small way but what it REALLY is is when we think that our spouse is ignoring something that's important or when we ASSume that they are doing it intentionally to hurt us.

I KNOW it's the thing that trips me up and keeps me locked in a cheeseless tunnel -- when I interpret h's activities and say "why does he put his cereal dish in the sink every GD morning instead of in the dishwasher? he does it because my time isn't valuable to him" -- or the like. It's that "story" that I tell myself that gets me madder and makes me react and stomp around and ooze resentment.

I do pretty well when I don't personalize. And it scared me a bit to hear how much h was personalizing MY behavior. I didn't try to talk him out of his interpretation but I did tell him that at THAT moment, my needs (my tiredness, my desire to just have the cat LEAVE w/o much effort on my part) got higher priority in my mind than his.

I think knowing this will help me a lot in the future. It'll be easier to see the stuff behind his "why do you load the dishwasher that way" crap if I can remember that he's probably thinking how he's told me a thousand times and I'm willfully ignoring him. I know it will help diffuse the arguments if I can honestly say "Yes, it's something that's important to you and I forgot that. I'm sorry."

I should note that h isn't teeming with this kind of stuff...physical comfort is a big one for him, respect for his privacy another. Things that I do that challenge those items are the ones that usually make him irked. And not having his needs respected overlays both. I KNOW I can bear that in mind.

Sage