Counseling 31

We got a bit of a slow start today. Counselor asked, "What do you want to talk about?" and Wife said, "I don't know ... we haven't had any big fights in the past week."

Then she added, "Well, except that Hosea yelled at me about the banking Monday." Followed the story. Wife had to go to the bank to set up a couple extra accounts for, ... well, this and that. The details aren't very interesting. She pulled money out of the checking account to do it, and I completely failed to follow up with her to find out how much. So Monday evening, as I was paying bills, I checked our account balance and found out (to my surprise) that it was $1000 less than I thought it was. I was shocked, and proceeded to yell for several minutes about the situation. Why hadn't Wife told me she had pulled $1000 out of the checking account? Why hadn't she set up these accounts in a different (lower impact) way? And so on. Of course, none of what I said made much sense. Obviously I should have asked her for the details the day she set those other two accounts up, and she set them up in the only way the bank would allow. But really I was just blowing off steam because I was so startled to find out that the checks I was writing that night weren't backed by the money I thought we had there. And once I settled down it was an easy problem to fix (by moving some money from savings to checking to cover the difference).

Counselor asked Wife how it felt for me to yell at her. She said that for the parts where she felt she had done something wrong, of course she felt guilty; but for the rest of it, .... Counselor stopped her there. Guilty? Are you sure? Yes, Wife replied, guilty and sorry. Counselor wouldn't let it go. He said he understood feeling sorry, but where does "guilty" come from? After probing a little more, he suggested that "guilty" is the way a child might feel; but an adult would be more likely to realize that people make mistakes, and so making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person. In other words, the issue of guilt-vs-innocence really doesn't matter.

We would come back to this question of guilt-vs-innocence, but first we talked for a while about how Wife feels about the yelling itself, when I yell. The answer is that it scares her.

Then Counselor asked me how these situations feel for me, and I explained that when I yell it usually isn't even directed specifically at Wife. But if something happens to alarm me or make me upset, I do this to blow off the steam that builds up inside me so I can think about it more clearly.

So Counselor asked Wife, Now that you know that this is just something Hosea does which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you, is there something he could do to make you feel better when this happens? She wasn't sure. Maybe apologize.

Hosea, could you do that?

Yeah, sure. But. Sometimes I try to apologize, and I get the clear sense from Wife that the damage is already irreparable. This just makes me feel trapped, and so my internal tension gets worse and the drama escalates. When that happens, it makes me not want to apologize the next time.

Is there something Wife could say that would help de-escalate instead?

Maybe. It might help if, when I apologize for yelling, she said "OK, I understand." But I can tell you for sure what she has to avoid saying.

What's that?

She has to avoid bringing up the original subject. She has to avoid saying, "OK, thank you for the apology. But you know, I really was innocent of that thing you were yelling about ...," because if she does that I feel like she is just starting the fight all over and I'll get mad again. And I'll start yelling again.

At this point Wife objected, "But I have to clear my name. If you are willing to apologize for yelling at me, why can't you also apologize for accusing me unjustly? Why can't you admit that you were wrong to accuse me?"

I am telescoping the discussion a bit for clarity, and there are a lot of answers to this question. One answer is that I might not even know yet whether she is "guilty" or "innocent" of the original issue, whatever it was -- nor does it even matter! The important part is that I shouldn't yell at her. I know that, and I can apologize for that. Re-opening the original argument just rubs in salt, and it is immaterial anyway.

But Counselor pointed out that for Wife it is not immaterial. For Wife, this is fundamental, it is life-or-death. And he asked her to think about what it would take to be able to live with "being guilty" and not care ... to be able to value the dynamic of the relationship over who can be proven judicially right or wrong in this or that petty argument. Because, he added, most of the issues you two "go to court" over in this way are really pretty trivial and not worth it.

He's right. I know he's right. But somehow Wife didn't seem to have any idea what he was talking about.