Looking for rocks to throw

Gosh, it has been a long time since I posted anything much. Let’s see if I can do something to bring the story up to date.

After Wife and I met with Counselor (this is back in early April ), and after my subsequent conversation with D, I decided to try a couple new tactics. Neither of them is exactly rocket science, but it had been too long since I had done either. The first was simply to try to be nicer to her, without waiting for her to do it first – just out of generosity. What I told myself was, “When she says something irritating or accusatory, don’t take the bait; just hold her instead.” The second was related: to pay a little more attention to our interactions: what I feel like saying and doing, what I actually say and do.

The plan was simple enough. But it turns out that there is a cost to paying attention to what is going on inside your own head, namely that you may not like what you see. You’d think that marriage counselors would have racks of little pamphlets in their offices, warning about the risks of sudden resolutions like this.

So a couple of days later, Wife and I were talking about something inconsequential, and I caught myself scanning the conversation as she spoke looking for things I could find fault with. And all at once I saw myself doing it, and I thought, "You know how Wife says I am always criticizing her? Well, maybe I am.” This was a very unpleasant thought, although I realized even at the time that I wasn’t planning to say any of these things. But I started picking this observation apart in my mind, to try to understand it better. And I realized that often (maybe not "always") when Wife and I are talking about anything that might have some practical consequence in the real world, I am on the lookout for ways in which she might be made wrong ... not necessarily to use them all, but to have them in reserve as tools for self-defense, just in case I need them. Now if I am collecting these rocks as I find them on the ground in front of me, ... how can I suppose that she is never going to notice? Wife may not follow intellectual arguments as well as she used to (what with the effects of illness and a certain “hardening of the categories”). But it does not stretch credulity to suppose that she is still very perceptive where something could affect her own emotional well-being. So yeah, she probably sees me pick these rocks up and pocket them, even when I was obviously unaware I was doing any such thing. And what is she going to think, in that case? That I'm picking them up out of compassion? Out of antiquarian interest? Or that I'm planning to use them against her? Again, that's not a stretch. And so we get to one of the core things she believes about me.

This was a really uncomfortable moment, as I pieced it together in my head; and it was not exactly easy for me to write D about it later. On the other hand, I think the self-awareness has to be valuable, because now I can watch myself do this (when I do it. Maybe some day I'll even be able to stop it, but being aware is the first step. It also gives me a little insight into how Wife might have gotten where she is now. I am pretty sure that I started looking for openings like this, where criticism could be possible, as a preparation for self-defense against Wife's almost unremitting criticism. Well, back up a generation: if Wife, in turn, grew up getting such unending waves of criticism from her mother, what should I suppose she was going to learn as a self-defense technique? Obviously, it would have made sense for her to learn to be hyper-critical, ... which in the event is exactly what happened. So since I understand how it came about (and can see the process at work in myself too, if not – God willing – quite so far along), maybe I could bring myself to be a lot more charitable about her hypercriticism of others. Again, awareness is the first step.

There is nothing here to be proud of, but I hope it may show a way forward.