But anxiety is normal, dammit, part 2

Three months ago I posted a short note that should have marked an end to all my whining about low-level, undifferentiated anxiety by observing that, according to the Buddha-dharma, this feeling is just dukkha and it is a fundamental fact of existence. Complaining about it is no more productive than complaining about the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that's just how things are.

So far, so good. But I just stumbled on the note I made to myself (a month before writing the post) on which the post was based. I wrote it right after Sangha one evening, based on that night's dharma study, and it turns out there's a whole batch of thoughts I forgot to include.

The dharma study talked about how our natural reaction to unpleasantness is to try to escape from it, but this reaction ends up being a lot like scratching at a poison ivy rash: it just makes it worse. The author of the article (I think it was Pema Chödrön) had several examples of times she had tried to scratch the itch of unpleasantness when she felt it, and every time it just made things worse. And worse. Her advice, unsurprisingly, was therefore just to sit with unpleasantness when you feel it. Notice it, be aware of it, but don't try to do anything. Just wait it out.

And I realized all of a sudden that this is exactly what I had figured out to do on my own -- very belatedly -- as a way to deal with Wife's cyclonic tantrums. When she got in the grips of fear or despair (and for years that was pretty common, even after she went on antidepressants), she would lash out in fury at the world. Usually she would wait until she was safely home in bed before doing this, so that she wouldn't actually run any serious risks by lashing out at people who might hurt her. But that meant lashing out at me instead, regardless whether I had anything to do with the problem or was just an innocent bystander ... someone that it was safe to get mad at. And the more worked up she got, the less rational she was, the less sense anything she said actually made, and the less it had to do with me. (I was going to link one or two examples, but you know what? Just click "Wife loses it" and browse through the stories there.) 

At first when this happened -- and I mean over years, here -- when she shouted at me I'd shout back. I'd say this wasn't my fault, I had nothing to do with it, and she was being completely irrational. Bet you can guess how well that worked for me, huh?

So finally -- years and years into the marriage -- I decided to try something else. Bit by bit (and with regular backsliding) I forced myself to stop reacting. She would start screeching at me ... and I would just sit there and take it. Saying nothing. Or possibly going so far as to agree, "Wow, that really sucks." But saying nothing else. Not defending myself. Apologizing, if I could squeeze a word in edgewise, but otherwise sitting silently.

Did it work? Define "work." It didn't make her stop. It didn't shut her up. It didn't make her suddenly see reason. And it sure didn't make me feel good! It did none of those things. If "work" means that it stopped me feeling desperately, horribly shitty every time she went into a tantrum, then No, under that definition it didn't work. 

But another way to look at the situation is that that outcome was never on offer to begin with . That was never going to be available, no matter what I did. The alternative was not between my feeling bad and my feeling good, but between (on the one hand) my feeling desperately, horribly shitty and (on the other) my feeling even worse than that! And it that sense, ... yeah, it worked. I felt terrible, but at least things didn't go to the even worse place that they had gone to so many times earlier in our marriage. It's grim and depressing to look at one of those scenes in retrospect and say it represented progress. But yeah, it was progress. 

Coming back to my evening at Sangha, I think I actually commented on exactly this when the leader asked us if anyone had any reflections on the reading. And this is the story I meant to tell you when I posted on this topic last January, only I forgot.

Just remember: poison ivy. Don't scratch.

It sucks to suffer, but it sucks even more to make it worse.