Last night W calls me at the office asking me if I had any thoughts about dinner. I told her tortellini appealed to me. She told me that that wasn't really appealing to her. I said "ok." I didn't say anything else. She sarcastically told me that calling me had done her a lot of good. She told me that she had called me so I could make her feel better about dinner. Then she hung up on me.
So she was upset because I didn't start rattling off solutions to what was essentially her problem. I also think she was being dishonest because she asked me what I wanted and I told her what I wanted, yet she really wanted something else. She should have asked me directly. Had she taken responsibility for her feelings by saying something like "I really feel at a loss about what I want for dinner. Would you help me figure it out?" would have honestly expressed her feelings, identified the problem and allowed the two of us to find a solution together. Instead she didn't identify the problem, she asked me about something else trying to get me to take ownership of the problem for her and then got angry at me for not responding to the real problem when I directly answered her question.
I'm frustrated with this sort of interaction, but this is where my boundary work comes into play. She's used to me taking responsibility for her problems. If she's got a problem, she's unhappy and miserable, she takes it out on me, so it's my problem, I've got to fix her problem so I can solve mine. No more. If she's miserable about her problem, it should be incentive for her to solve it on her own and grow as a person. My problem is responding to her abuse in such a way that I neither am abused nor respond to pressure to fix her problems for her.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
