Tag Archives: noah issue

{heavily filtered} Triggers

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Can I say that I'm getting fucking sick to death of how the word triggers is used?  Mostly I hear it mean: 'So this person is crazy and reacting to ghosts… it's not my problem that they are over-sensitive but I guess I can give a lame-ass "I'll try to respect your 'triggers'" line.'  Fuck you all.  No really.

I'm kind of tired of having people throw it in my face that they are trying to be "sensitive" to my "triggers".  Bitch you don't even know what the fuck that means.  By the way, I'm kind of angry.  Apparently having a trigger means that someone does the same asshole thing to you that someone else has already done.  Or at least caused you to think hard about the previous time and consider how you want to react this time.  People are so dismissive of "triggers" because it is a good way of saying, "You were already hurt here so it's not my fault you are hurting now."

Actually, an asshole act is an asshole act.  Lying is lying.  When you negotiate extensively for activity A and you instead engage in activity B… that's not a miscommunication and that's not about me being triggered.  

You want to know the "trigger" part?  My gut-level response to this behavior is to go sleep in a different bed and cry and assume there is nothing in the world that will change it.  Because that kind of lying is something that people just do.  I should stop listening to what people tell me.  There isn't a point.

Things that were effective coping mechanisms during your childhood are hard to abandon as an adult.  When someone lies to me, I have to withdraw trust.  Fast.  I have to shut down affection towards that person.  I have to stop being vulnerable because if they smell blood… I'm dead.

I suppose that triggering me means acting like my family.  So that I have to act like I do with my family.  It's not about a set word or phrase or experience.  If you act like my family… I have nothing for you.  

My family would set terms on who you can know.  If you had the audacity to want to be friends with someone they didn't like… well… that's going to result in nastiness, name calling, threats of abandonment (that aren't followed up on because the piece of shit bully is dependent on having you around to kick), and of course threats of suicide.  

Wow.  That all sounds like what I say and do when I tell Noah that I don't like him dating.  Ironic.  No wonder I feel like I shouldn't be saying no, no matter what.  Because I have this gut reaction of not wanting to be like them.  It's bad to say, "Actually this behavior is toxic to our marriage for 'x, y, and z reasons.'"  Because then I'm trying to control him inappropriately.  My adult spin on not wanting to be this person is to think that I should start shutting my mouth and putting my head down.

My family would rewrite history.  Oh, it's not that anyone lied.  We just miscommunicated, that's all.  No one ever has to be accountable for their actions.  That's why I have a scorched earth policy.  Someone who is going to lie to my face and then go behind my back and do something else all the while maintaining a dialogue with someone else that perpetuates a lie… wow.  I need to run, not walk away from that.  You want to know what a trigger is?

It's the sure knowledge that a liar is poison.  Someone who will lie to me… I can't know.  I can't be vulnerable with.  I can't pay attention to them.  I can't worry about what they want.  I know it will be a facade and I'll never know them anyway.  As soon as you lie to me, and then tell someone else that we "miscommunicated" well…  Yeah.  Ok.  The solution to this "miscommunication" is for me to assume you are lying going forward.  Sounds great.

I lie too.  I lie compulsively sometimes.  I say things in the heat of an argument that aren't true no matter how you look at them.  And I hate myself for it.  That makes me want to run too.  Because these topics are things that I can't be honest about.  So I'd rather not discuss them.

At any other point in my life this kind of behavior would be cue for an abrupt turn on my heel and exiting the premises permanently.  I would much rather leave than try to fix something like this.  My life is complicated now.

I understand a lot of things differently as life goes by.  I think about why women stay in domestic violence situations.  I think about why my mother and my sister are the way they are.  Why do they lie compulsively all the time?  They were taught to.  That's what hanging out with liars will do.  It teaches you to lie.  

The problem with being married to a sociopath is I am never sure if his vision of enlightened self-interest lines up with mine.  My best-interest is considered to the extent that he wants to manipulate the correct
behavior out of me, preferably while volunteering as little as possible.  Because the less he volunteers, the more control and power he has.  There are cracks in my Stockholm Syndrome.

It's hard having such extreme opinions about Noah.  Mostly I feel better about/toward/with him than anyone else on the planet.  And then sometimes I don't.

(ETA: the formatting is weird and I don't know why.)

{the girlys} Why I married him.

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He came home from work early for reasons not having to do with me. I proceed to start babbling/crying at high speed all the stuff that has been in my head since last night. I explained the sheer overwhelming magnitude of how many ways and to what degree I am giving up *my* indpendence. I asked him if he has ever stopped to consider what I am giving up. He hadn’t. I asked him if I have complained or whined or railed at the gods about how unfair it is. He said I haven’t at all. He then sat and thought about this and said, “Well it is starting to sound like there are a few things I need to suck it up about.”

We then discussed in more detail that if he wants to take the charity of Tao money and blow it on other things then he just doesn’t have the money to give to friends or political organizations or whatever. But he can do it. This seems to be enough for him.

When he has been a butthead in the past few hours I have a hard time remembering that he is ever not a butthead. But then he goes and acts like the complete opposite of a butthead and I remember why I married him. Thank you all for listening to me vent and not overreacting along with me.

{the girlys} More festivity.

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First: thank you all for the comments. I really appreciate the acknowledgment right now.

Last night ended up being one of our Marathon Processing Nights. The nights I use as evidence that I married a Berkeley dyke. Most of it went reasonably well. I finally got him to see the difference between saying, “I don’t like it when you are nasty about Tao” as opposed to, “Why are you ALWAYS so nasty about EVERY girl I know better than you do?” The latter just makes me feel defensive and angry because it isn’t bloody true. I came up with a huge laundry list of names to prove that it isn’t true. He had a lot of trouble accepting it at first but eventually grudgingly saw the difference. Then we turned to talking about his frequent loud pronouncements that EVERYTHING he tries to do to deal with problems fails. Uhm, that isn’t true because we are not having many of the problems we had two years ago. Obviously things have been fixed. The problem is there isn’t one big one size fits all solution to all problems that can be set down on problem after problem and that pisses him off. He hates that each individual problem has to be dealt with as a separate case. I finally yelled at him (in a Denny’s, so classy “I’m not one of your fucking computer programs where you can fix a dozen bugs by fixing one line of code.” Strangely it helped.

So that was all incredibly festive but actually lead to resolutions so it was ok. We had agreed yesterday morning before work that we would do the “What does money mean to me” exercise my therapist recommended after work. So we got to come home from about two hours of processing to that. At first it seemed like the exercise wasn’t going to be very helpful cause we already know most of what we wrote about. I was torn between being amused and being irritated that he described my set of expectations/experiences about money as looking like someone who grew up around Columbian druglords. Dude, is that your only understanding of poverty? Don’t you see how money is power and control fucking everywhere?? Eventually the conversation became focused on how he sees having money as having independence. This lead to a huge battle in which he wants to have money set aside for him to spend however he wants without consulting me. Because he feels like he is losing all of his independence if all of the money is “ours”. Well, bitch, you are the one who wanted me to start thinking of it as “our” money. You have pushed and pushed and pushed. I have given up my personal claim to the part of the money that I am bringing into the household right now as preparation for when none of the money will be mine. He wants to set aside money that will be “his” and that will be “mine” for us to spend in whatever ways we see fit. Uhm, we already spend this money. Why do you need it to be specifically labeled and set aside? What do you gain from that? He gets to not have to consult me anymore–he gets his precious independence. Let’s ignore the fact that the basis of my independence since I was 14 fucking years old has been that I support myself. I get to give that up to stay home with our kids, but he doesn’t give up any of his independence? Oh–he will *choose* to *let* me call part of his money my money and that will make it all better? Fuck you. That isn’t my god damn money. I didn’t earn it. So he said that taking care of the kids and the house is work we would pay someone else to do so why not pay me to do it. I almost turned around and said, “Some people pay someone to get laid. Are you going to start paying me every time we fuck so I can be your whore as well as your nanny and housekeeper?” I didn’t say it. I started crying instead. I left the room and cried in the guest room for a while. Then I took a bath and cried so more. I had a really hard time not cutting. Then I slept in the guest room all night. That bed is the one thing in this house of any serious value that is *mine* so if he wants to fight about indpendence that is the closest I have to any of my independence left.

Before I left the room crying I realized that at this point I am pretty trapped because of the baby. I could keep working even with the baby, but I really don’t want to do that to my kid. So I told him that I never thought I would ever regret getting pregnant. That’s when I left. I haven’t talked to him since. I stayed home today. My head hurts so bad it feels like it might explode. My stomach is in knots. My throat is tight and achey. What in the fuck am I doing?