Posted by trouble on March 1, 2002, at 2:13:20
In reply to Re: Anger » trouble, posted by Dinah on March 1, 2002, at 0:04:38
>Those skills were hard won you know, by years of being the peacemaker in a very angry family. Imagine my dismay when they proved useless with my husband. He even saw what I was doing and informed me straight out that he's not my parents and I can't cajole him. (Good for him, wouldn't you say?)
> >
No, Dinah, I wouldn't say. I can't believe he is forbidding you to charm him!
(Anyway your relational strategies are your own business, if he doesn't like them he can lump it.)
But to be pragmatic for a sec, has he ever told you about the right way to approach him when he's bugging you? It's not your job to figure that out, but I do think we owe it to people to let them know when they've baffled us. Your husband strikes me as both highly verbal and non-communicative, this type interests me, the tough nuts to crack.You say you aren't shy about telling your truth, but you do it politely. Politeness is a principle, and I'll tell you straight out I hate principles (almost on principle, hah!) Hate 'em!
Here's what I'm saying-I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. Oops, sorry, Emerson said that. I agree w/ Emerson, I wish he was here.
Even Miss Manners, who promotes civility at any price, has said that etiquette exists b/c honesty and decorum are mutually exclusive. What it comes down to is this:
you can have the truth or you can have boiling rage hidden behind a placid facade, but chances are you won't have both.When I hear discontented women declaim their allegiance to polite truth telling my "seething pit of resentment" alarm goes off. Playing nice when one is pissed off is manipulative. And it doesn't work. Any agreements made in these circumstances will not last.
I don't agree w/ the conventional belief that our anger has to be valid, justified, legitimate and righteous. Anger is a simple thing, it either exists or it doesn't. We complicate anger when we build a case for it, make the other person "wrong" and ourselves morally superior, or, by contrast in "forgetting" the anger, trying to "understand", be strong, be fair, tolerate, forgive; all of which are lovely and virtuous ideas but anger is not an idea. Ideas about forgiveness are not the same as forgiveness.
When we repress our ongoing flow of experience for the sake of a larger principle we get lost in our own minds, people beat themselves unmercifully for this inablity to follow through on noble concepts, believing them to be the solution. They are not. They are the problem.If I can share one more gentle opinion please.
You admonish me that the man in question>> is not an S.O.B He is my husband.
All human beings are by nature moralizing self-serving, unfair S.O.B.s and it's worse than useless to pretend we aren't. I wish I'd said that but as usual, none of these arguments originate w/ me. I'm just a parrot.
trouble
poster:trouble
thread:19013
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020223/msgs/19040.html