Beating up on the victim?

Does anybody else do this?

My e-mails with D over the last weekend have reminded me of one of my truly disagreeable habits -- one that makes almost no sense when I try to put it in words, but which is absolutely normal for me. I wonder if I am the only one.

This habit, this behavior, can take a lot of different forms. With Wife, it became one of those boilerplate fights that we used to have. It disturbs me to see the same pattern starting to emerge with D, and yet I don't catch that it is happening until too late. In outline, it went something like this. [Almost none of this is literal reporting in the sense of being a quote from our e-mails back and forth. Rather, I am inventing dialogue in order to explain a type of interaction.]

Something was wrong this weekend with the server that handles my e-mail. Incoming mail was processed just fine. Outgoing mail was stopped completely. I have no idea why. The result was that I wrote three different messages to D over the course of Saturday, but she never got any of them. And Sunday morning I woke up to a message from her that said, rather hurt, "Gosh, you never e-mailed me at all yesterday. I hope you were having a good time and just got busy. It would have been nice to hear just a word or two, though."

Seeing this, I immediately replied, "I did too e-mail you -- three times, in fact. What are you talking about? You're the one who never answered me."

Of course, that didn't go through either, and a couple hours later she wrote me again asking, "Have I done something to make you mad?" Somewhat irritably, but trying to take my cue from her letter, I replied, "Nothing except assume that I haven't written you when I've been writing you all along."

And an hour or so after that she posted a third time, saying, "Maybe you just can't write me at all this weekend." At this I lost my temper and wrote back words to the effect of, "Damn it, I did too write you! Maybe the problem is with the crappy e-mail system not delivering the damned messages, but it's not that I am fucking ignoring you! Will you stop being so damned sullen and hurt, and consider that maybe -- just maybe -- I'm not bloody at fault in this?"

That too got stuck in non-delivery mode, and then ... hours later ... all the messages came unstuck at once and all landed in D's inbox in a heap (and not even in order). And of course D was shocked at how savagely I had attacked her. She said she couldn't even bring herself to write to me today, beyond letting me know that the mails had all arrived. But for heaven's sake, what was that all about?

It's a fair question, because logically my behavior makes no sense at all. Surely if I had had even half a brain, I would have figured out right away -- on reading her very first e-mail -- that there was a problem. Right? Because obviously she wouldn't have written that first e-mail the way she did if she had been getting my letters from the previous day. Armed with that knowledge, you would expect that I'd cut her some slack when I got her second and third letters, since -- again obviously -- I should have been able to tell that from her perspective nothing was arriving. How was she to know I had written? And so I should have been, if anything, ever more solicitous because obviously she was really suffering from a prolonged silence with no explanation. (And let's not even get into the fact that -- again, if I had had half a brain -- I could have used another e-mail account, or even telephoned.)

In other words, logically almost any other response (besides the one I actually chose) would have made more sense. And yet, in the heat of the moment, not one of those responses ever occurred to me. All I could feel was the sorrow and disappointment that dripped from her letters, and the seeming blame that this was somehow something I could control and was doing on purpose, ... and it maddened me to the point that I was thrashing about irrationally like a wild animal, looking to strike back at whoever it was that was inflicting this pain on me. It became, in fact all about me. And any awareness that she too might be worried or depressed or insecure or just unhappy, any awareness that maybe I should have some sensitivity towards how she felt in all this (especially since I say I love her) -- all this went straight out the window.

I have done this many tmes before, generally with Wife. If anything it was more common with Wife, because we spent lots of time together and because she clings to her griefs and resentments rather than letting them go. So it is very hard to console Wife over anything; she will keep being sad long after you have run out of things to say. And it drove me bananas. Confronted with a total inability to make Wife feel any better, confronted therefore with the prospect of having simply to live with the pain she was feeling (over any of a hundred possible problems) and of being totally unable to alleviate it -- confronted with all this, I would turn on her. Why did she have to be so damned hard to console? Why did she have to hold onto her suffering like it was a precious possession? And why -- if she was going to hold onto it -- couldn't she suffer in silence rather than inflicting it on me too? What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? Why couldn't she just snap out of it and be happy? Huh???

I hope I don't have to explain that these rants of mine never worked, in the sense that they never achieved what I wanted. They never cheered Wife up, naturally enough. What happened instead is that she decided that I am cruel, and that I enjoy seeing her suffer. Why else, after all, would I kick her so viciously when she is already down? It makes no sense.

And it did no good for me to insist that I don't think of myself as cruel.

But if it is not cruelty, then what is it? What name can I possibly give to this complex of emotional reactions that makes me lash out at a suffering loved one, precisely because she is suffering? Isn't that crazy? How do I fit that into a coherent narrative about myself without making the narrative into either "Hosea is cruel" or "Hosea is a nutcase"? Is there a way? Or are those the only two feasible options?

Heck, maybe it's both at once.

But does anybody else do this?