Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)
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Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>, a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing feelings = things have gotten really bad.
But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and even started doing the same thing back.
Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first, just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.
Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
But I guess it can be weird to be used all the time and maybe without explicitly talking about.
In particular, an example of how using "violent communication" could ever address scar tissue.
My wife, “it pisses me off when you don’t do the dishes on your night like you did last night!”
Me, “oh shit, I completely forgot. It’s not intentional, I’ll set a calendar reminder.”
Scar tissue isn’t from “aggressive” or even “accusatory” words. It’s unrelated.
> Notable concepts include rejecting coercive forms of discourse, gathering facts through observing without evaluating, genuinely and concretely expressing feelings and needs, and formulating effective and empathetic requests.
Other than my wife saying “it pisses me off”, which is expressing a feeling, none of it is NVC. There are no needs or requests expressed. There is no fact gathering. Crucially, there is no empathy building.
I think that could be considered violent but it really depends on metaphors here.
It's physical in the way that the body remembers trauma I suppose. Words might not break your bones but they sure could lead to auto-immune disorders, memory disorders, hormonal imbalance, stomach conditions, blood pressure conditions, thyroid conditions, not to mention mood regulation issues and other issues etc.
If your body is conditioned to be in a tortured/stressed/powerless state it won't understand how to regulate properly later leading to further issues. So you could say it is a physical force here in this way damaging and changing your body forever.
There are a fair amount of things out there on this topic.
I started getting autoimmune disorders in middle school due to stress in my home, unfortunately my family didn't actually realize I was sick then due to stress in my home lol. But that was just how it was and life got considerably worse because the yelling further escalated in other members to eventual violence. This lead to quite a lot of other issues in my early 20's compounding so when people are like it's just words, you don't know much and how fast words can escalate. Words have a lot of power, don't dismiss them too easily. My family always liked to and it sure left damage.
https://themighty.com/topic/trauma/trauma-chronic-stress-aut...
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ccf42ef3560c3...
As you said, If you can get the other person over the shock of talking about feelings it’s a very useful tool to keep a relationship running well or even repair a damaged one with scar tissue.
I'm a brutally direct communicator (and I justify myself by saying "I'm honest and expect honesty from people") but I also tend to damage relationships (surprise! communication is not about 1 person's preference but 2). After many relationships that didn't work out, I decided to take a step back and ask myself what I could be doing better, and one of the things was learning to communicate in a way that others found less alienating, without compromising my own style. I stumbled upon the Imago technique and it has worked really well.
One of the major takeaways for me that it is important to validate people and be curious, whether you agree with them or not. I used to think this was a contradiction, and that bad ideas need to be corrected immediately, but I've since learned that it's possible to validate people without agreeing with them. The point is to make them feel heard first, and then I can present my own view. Here's an example of how validation works (without agreeing): https://www.onsolidgroundcounseling.com/post/2015/08/31/crea...
Most young folks can't imagine having been an asshole and they call themselves emotionally intelligent without realizing their feelings are a tyranny. They've unsubscribed from anything that ever brought them even minor discomfort. Their social contract basically amounts to "lie to me and I'll lie to you." They are huge wusses.
If a friend asks you if their hair looks nice, it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust. If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut. Modern day stoics IMO. They're smart enough to know how to be like-able, they understand the fluff-each-other's-shared-delusions game, they just don't want to play. When they tell you something kind, you know it was real.
Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible. They want that from others too. It can be super off putting, especially if you need to believe certain things about yourself.
People claiming to be "brutally honest" is usually a red flag because they are almost never consistent about it. Its usually a phrase used to self-justify brutality with little regard for honesty.
Its sort of like the whole "if you dont accept me at my worse you dont deserve me at my best". There is nothing wrong in principle if it is taken literally - everyone has bad days and its unreasonable to expect perfection all the time; humans make mistakes, etc. But pretty much everyone using that phrase uses it as a self-justification to do what they want without regard for who they hurt.
Idk, im always wary of any phrase that can be twisted to justify behaving badly towards others. Some people hurt other people, and they'll take any turn of phrase, twist it, in order to self-justify to themselves that what they are doing is ok.
Would the apology not be more effective if it didn't include the attempt at excusing one's behavior?
> Most young folks [...]
Would your argument not be more effective if you made an attempt to avoid unnecessarily painting a broad, diverse demographic with one brushstroke, especially given that your argument doesn't actually hinge on the people being young specifically?
> If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut.
What about the things you don't realize you're sensitive about? Is it possible your friends are merely the same brand of insensitive as you, and therefore insensitive in a way that is acceptable to you? Is it possible that you're demanding that everyone around you have precisely the same flavor of insensitivity as yourself?
> Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible.
Isn't this a really ineffective and imprecise way to communicate? Won't this lead to a pile of followup questions from folks who don't understand the implicit social cues you share with those you're close with?
Being honest doesn't have to mean being unfiltered and brash. Being an effective communicator means taking into account how your message might be received and tailoring it so it's not easily misunderstood.
And calling people "wusses" for merely not subscribing to your brand of communication is itself an ironically cowardly act, a running away from the responsibility you might have for the words you say. It is exactly the kind of thing someone who needs to believe certain things about themselves might say instead of growing up and treating others with respect.
Honestly, you seem extremely naive with a very basic take on this situation. Your friends can say this stuff to you, _because_ you trust them, not the other way around. If a stranger were to make that comment to you, it would be unbelievably silly to take it at face value and not assume they are trying to sabotage you or get one over you in some way. And what exactly is the point of the insult, do you just go around assuming that everyone has the same sense of humor as you, and everyone who doesn’t is wrong? Haha.
Just take my comment for example. Am I being constructive or simply being condescending to you to make me feel better? Hard to tell because you don’t know me, isn’t it?
The people you responded to spoke about conversations where they didn't attack their friend/partner ("you're being an arsehole"), they spoke honestly about how they felt ("Whoa, that hurt"). Both are honest, but yours is defence through attack. Their's is laying themselves bare. It's very different.
You probably like people with thick skins because they are the only people that stick around you.
...and yes, I realise I'm attacking you, but hopefully you'll take it as a friendly gesture.
Brutal honesty is just being an asshole. You can also be an asshole dishonestly. The part that makes you an asshole is the brutal bit.
I can tell you this much -- of all the things I've done in my life, and all the various types of pain I've suffered, the "active listening" part required of Imago is the very hardest thing I've ever done. And probably the most important.
In fact, it would have been perfectly fair for you to respond and tell her that. It definitely sounds like not every time she brought these things up, it wasn't resolved mutually satisfactorily, and PLENTY of scar tissue built up instead.
You get to advocate for yourself just as much as she did for herself. And sometimes during these conversations, you uncover irreconcilable differences, sure. Some relationships just aren't meant to be. But boy is it ever nicer when you discover these differences earlier, after honest and reciprocal conversations, as opposed to years later when all the suppressed argument come bursting forth at once. (Speaking from personal experience.)
This is a dangerous thing to tell people dealing with an abuser/a psychopath/BPD whatevertheyrecalled. I'm willing to state many people's feelings are not valid.
(Stronger statement: true selves don't exist and other people's opinion of you is often more correct than your self-identification.)
The feeling is valid, but the action could be inappropriate or damaging and that’s not okay.
“I feel Z so you need to stop X or do Y for me” is not okay.
1. You feel what you feel
2. It is not a moral failing to have a particular emotional reaction in the moment since these are not within our control (acting on the emotion is)
The word "valid" ends up granting connotations that the rationale a person applies to why they're feeling their feelings is somehow reasonable or correct. Many emotional reactions are not reasonable or justifiable and the most reasonable course of action may be figuring out how to repress that emotional reaction in the future - phobias are an excellent example here.
I think you're seeing that exact miscommunication here, others are reading "valid" in the normal use of the word while you're using it in this more colloquial fashion.
What I mean is you don't get to choose what emotions you feel. So making someone feel wrong/bad for feeling them isn't useful.
> two fairly incontrovertible things
You say this, but neither my wife nor I took either as incontrovertible until the last few years.
I don't have a better way of discussing it or bringing it up though. Do you have a phrase that works for this, but isn't prone to misunderstanding?
Not a single phrase because there's a decision matrix around the reaction:
1. Do I think I understand why the emotional reaction is happening? 2. Do I think the emotional reaction is healthy? 3. Do I think the emotional reaction is reasonable?
And how I respond depends on the answers to these questions. When the answers to the questions are "no" I fall back to building a space of emotional safety things like:
"Thank you for sharing your feelings with me", "it's ok that you're feeling that way", "feeling that way doesn't make you a bad person". These statements tend more conservative if I'm feeling it's important to remove misunderstanding.
However, does this claim not fly in the face of "identifying as" a particular gender, race, tribe, etc?
And what of opinions formed on the basis of incomplete and/or insufficient information?
Yes, but it also implies people identifying as cis might be wrong about it, so it's a pretty equal if unpopular standpoint. Nevertheless.
There are a lot of real life self identification situations that aren't accepted by society - mostly ethnic groups. Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren[0], Europeans who get mad when Americans claim to be sixth-generation Irish, are different cases here.
[0] her situation is not that unique btw - it's actually very common for white people in Oklahoma to believe they're part Cherokee. Since they believe this because their parents told them so, I don't think they're doing anything wrong, but it's the kind of unpleasant surprise you get when your 23andme results come back.
That sounds a bit demanding and maybe even blaming. I think the point is to tell about your emotions, and just lay them on the table. Nothing needs to be done directly, first you both want a conversation. If anything would need to done or changed, you might agree on something. But demanding sounds wrong.
Sometimes we have to help other people co-regulate, especially young children. It's a useful skill - basically table stakes any time you're talking to someone having a hard time.
But if you're spending a significant amount of energy co-regulating a partner, check out YouTube videos related to codependency and speak to a therapist about the situation if you're able.
That's just basic manipulative technique.
They way my wife and I do this is we dig into the why’s of the feeling to understand where it's coming from and to work though past issues if needed. We do this by talking about how we reacted and using the other person to calibrate wether a reaction is useful or over/under-reacting. Then talking through what we think a healthy response would look like. As a simple example.
Otherwise this is avoidance and putting all the burden on you which turned into what you mentioned walking on eggshells.
Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating we put all the bad partners in a camp somewhere. They are fundamentally in a state of suffering, and benefit from help and support. But the way to deliver that support is not by being in a romantic relationship with them.
If you are good partner material, consider the following asymmetry: A good partner can be in a relationship with a poor partner, but two poor partners will almost never be in a relationship together. This means that being a good partner increases your chance of ending up with a poor partner.
Your comment and the OP have taken me a bit by surprise, in how closely they match my own experiences. It's kind of validating! Thank you :)
Without sounding callous, I have to say I prefer a relationship where we don't do this and let the little things go. I'm an extremely self conscious person and already rather hard on myself and this would drive me away from the relationship due to feeling like walking on eggshells or being controlled in detailed ways.
(Married 20+ years btw)
Sure, this could be done badly and could backfire. But it could also be done in a once a week session where partners share what they feel to each other. This is what I'd like actually and I admit it is not easy. I personally get over the small things fast and tend to forget them till their next occurrence, and at some point of this repeating I end up just spitting it out on the spot. It doesn't help that my partner dismisses everything I say as a kind of being oversensitive. If it wasn't for us having a child together we'd most likely go our separate ways.
Talking about every little negative thing vs. using every little negative thing for control are very, very different things. But they look similar on the surface.
I mean even within 1 generation, from my father to me, the difference is massive. Not sure on what to pinpoint it exactly, we saw and see massive transformations of our societes at neck-breaking speed. When my late grandma saw how I hold and hug my then-girlfriend, she just sighted 'why cant I have a bit of that', and said similar stuff about my father (aka her son just to be clear).
In fact, I used to be like you describe when young, quiet till explosion, rinse and repeat. Something when growing up changed in me, I was growing up slowly till my mid 30s, even redefined who I am by diving into mountain/extreme sports, handling one's fears ie of dying quite regurarly has quite an effect. Plus a lot of backpacking around the world in 3rd world countries, I cant be xenophobic or +-racist like many former peers even if I tried hard after that. My parents lived in communist eastern block, this kind of adventure stuff was unheard of, so I dont blame them.
My advice to anybody and everybody out there - expose yourself to intense experiences, cultures, understand how everything works (schools made me hate those topics, took a decade+ to find my own way back to them). Everything changes you, imprints on you, makes you richer and better person, the more intense experience the more profound effect. Just stay the fuck out of comfort zone for as long as you can.
And then it put the lotion on its skin?
When we're defensive, it's easy to invalidate the other person's feelings. Validation is setting aside your own world-view to make someone else feel seen, heard, appreciated, and understood.
When you break open "scar tissue" early and often, you have a chance to practice validating someone else's feelings (and having your own feelings validated in return).
Yes, i felt bad, yes it was caused by your actions and you're responsible if it happens again. But: You didn't know and didn't intent to hurt me, so you're not a bad person.
I would not want to be in such a relationship, to be honest. Just learn to accept each other's small flaws and try to be kind. Little things only build up if you let them. Verbalising everything and putting negativity into focus is actually one of those ways that scar tissue can build up. The best way for it to not build up is to let the little things go.
I thought I was this way before. I realized that it's not true, I am bothered by the little things and they do add up over time. I may not remember exactly how many times some little pet peeve has annoyed me, but you can bet by the fourth or fifth time my physical reaction to the peeve will be much stronger than the first time. It's feels like indigestion, a really unpleasant sensation in the gut. Once I notice I am having an unpleasant physical reaction to something I try to get it out immediately if it's something that I feel we should talk about.
Most notably, my conversations with close ones are no longer irrelevant small talk or about details of the day which don’t matter. It feels like I can have conversation with true substance now.
From a scar model perspective this is like a papercut/superficial injury which isn’t leaving you with a scar (or at least a very minor one).
> they don’t actually matter if the core stuff is still working.
Being stabbed in the heart (literally and metaphorically) will leave bigger and deeper scars that can impair core function and your heart will never pump blood as effectively again.
The analogy of scar tissue could work for symptoms, though: the presence of scar tissues in a relationship may/could indicate that conflicts never get fully resolved because deep in the relationship, there is a fundamental misalignment of values, and that's what creates scar tissues when conflicts emerge.
For me, the real thing that tends to explain my long relationships is the authenticity of someone to her/his own values. Which is not to be confused with sharing the same opinions, I can easily be friends with people who vote differently than me, but what I can't stand is dishonesty (e.g., inventing theories or excuses to put the blame on the "others").
The reason I think it works that way is in part due to my own character: I don't hesitate getting into conflict with other people and more particularly with those dear to me when I disagree or when I feel disturbed by something. I can have intense arguments with some of my friends, my wife, my parents, my boss, but it never damaged our relationship because I think deep under, our values are aligned.
Now, what do I mean by "values"? Those are things I characterize as values: - how you negotiate internal conflict - how you respond to being wrong / corrected by someone else that presents a good argument to you - how you treat people of lower socioeconomic level (e.g., disdain, disrespect,neglect vs. empathy/consideration, etc.) - how you treat people of higher socioeconomic level (e.g., jealousy, envy, ass-licking vs. admiration, respect, inspiration, etc.) - whether you behave differently with co-workers situated "below" you vs. "above" you vs. those who can affect your career advancement - whether you are faithful to yourself and your opinions (aka, whether you can stand the cost or implications of your opinions, or if you change your mind and invent yourself another stance just to avoid any discomfort) - whether your respect everyone's right to privacy or assume you can invade your spouse or child's personal space - etc.
So, in summary, yes a very interesting article but I can only disagree with the premise: I don't think that scar tissues make relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.
Sometimes it can also be a character flaw.
While I believe our values were aligned, my partner was very critical about almost everything I did. She was not supportive of my goals. She dismissed my interests, and she often criticized how I did things. We were from two different cultures, but we strongly agreed on many important points (including how to raise children). It was the little things that bothered her. This was bad enough that even friends who visited us noticed and admonished her for treating me like that. A therapist friend also noticed and tried to help her. Probably due to how I was raised, it took me years to realize myself that there was a problem, and it took a few more years for her to acknowledge the problem herself. It was when she realized that her mother treated her the same way. Unfortunately she felt that she was unable to change. I credit it to our shared values that I stayed with her as long as I did. This issue would have almost destroyed our relationship if it hadn't been ended by cancer instead.
Long term is like 30 years, not 5.
What makes real long term relationships work isn’t common interests. It’s commitment.
Notice, I did not use the phrase "common interests"; my use of "interests" is in the sense of exchange: you get something and I get something in return. Equivalently, this same exchange can be described as an "alignment of values" or "alignment of outlooks" since sharing a value or a lens on the world with someone is a special pleasure and is something you get out of a relationship.
I think two people committing to each other and valuing their commitment certainly qualifies as "alignment of values" contributing to the positive side of the relationship ledger.
How are you talking to yourself?
Most people have a hard time tuning into this part because self-talk usually starts in early childhood and by the time one can be made fully "aware" of it, it has already faded into the normal background noise of being oneself, so it rarely gets openly interrogated. The self-talk doesn't have to be sophisticated, it can just be a constant pink noise of: "This is just dumb." ... "I'm miserable" ... "It's my fault" ... "I'm not worthy of love" ... "I'm disgusted by myself".
And, here, I'm still very polite with the wording.
Of course this inevitably bleeds in how you communicate with other people and especially the people in your life you really care about. If you never cultivated to encourage yourself, be kind, patient and forgiving toward yourself at some point you can't sustain the illusion (e.g. "nicest, loving ... person") and eventually it will leash out.
There is a solipsistic aspect in communication worth exploring: I often find that communicating with one another openly and freely is also making one aware of each other's (hurtful, embarrassing ...) self-talk and can make way for the kind of primordial empathy buried deep in oneself and by extension make it easier to fully connect with the feelings of other people.
An injury can take only a moment, but recovery and healing takes much longer. If you address it sooner rather than later, and if you take care to avoid similar injuries, it’s more likely to heal well. If it’s neglected, if you half-ass it, etc., it may never heal properly.
A nitpick, but only because other than that it’s not a bad metaphor.
This is also a medically incorrect statement for similar reasons to scar tissue, the resultant trabecular disorganization always results in weaker bone, even for “perfectly” healed fractures.
I think the original metaphor (and even fractures) still holds but in a different way than you described.
I highly doubt any of those couples (and from personal experience myself) wanted the turmoil however one feels after the fact, “made us stronger” is often a combination of dissonance and a statement that other areas of the relationship strengthened to compensate (in the fracture analogy: if you break your left leg your right one will strengthen from increased mechanical load to compensate).
One would not break a bone in an attempt to make it stronger, but a broken bone can heal to near full strength and other bones in the body get stronger to compensate. If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that is considerably weaker than what you started and will break from a minor injury.
If you substitute bones for relationship I think this holds.
With effort it’s possible to recover from and compensate for relationship trauma and thrive as an organism/couple, but it’s still better to avoid emotional trauma to begin with (assuming it’s possible) as with physical trauma.
So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don’t get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm?
And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too?
Stress from repetitive microtrauma is not the same as a fracture (stress to failure). Increased mechanical loading (hitting a concrete pillar, exercise) can absolutely strengthen bone in a similar mechanism to decreased load weakening bones (little old lady, astronauts).
Breaking a bone completely disrupts the internal architecture and what is deposited is unequivocally weaker than what was there before.
> And “what doesn’t kill, makes you stronger” is false too
I have no professional opinion on this aphorism. I do have one on bone healing.
It's absolutely false. Nearly everything that hurts you makes you weaker, not stronger.
I think this is, at the very least, highly variable from person to person.
It is true that with early attention, proper wound care, etc scar can approach normal skin but even in the best of circumstances it will still be “slightly weaker” rather than as good or better.
Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of thought encounters the intent modulation. What does she believe I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought?
To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both parties.
What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.
The build up of small cracks over a period of time can lead to any system getting brittle and fragile over a period of time. That said, resolution or letting go are both viable techniques to make it anti-fragile. Sometimes we have to realize, all of us have some shit we come along with and it's never perfectly matched to someone else. And it would be mad if it were too!
Much like you make the best of life and the world around you think of making the best in the relationship by investing into the right things. Sometimes it's ok to let go - at other times it's necessary to draw boundaries and expect resolutions.
To keep a complex system running, we also need to keep working at it.
At some point you just have to let shit go if you don’t want it to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the “price of admission.” It’s important to have good communication skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit there’s still some underlying pattern that you know is going to come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not?
The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I’ve spent years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but it’s better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it’s going to drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can’t just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in its proper place, etc.
High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of their life. This is not the norm.
Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a cleaner who packs the dishes the way you need them to be packed!
Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues underlying them.
> And that's really hard to do; I don't have any perfect answers for that; it's communication and compromise.
But I generally agree with you. There's a big difference between compromise and letting things go. The author kind of implies that they can't do the latter, and that it's bad to do so ("Well, that seems generous, but it's a really bad idea."), and so to make up for that, they rely on communication instead.
Truly letting things go is harder than outright communication (at least, for me). How do you determine what's small enough to let go? I have to make a gamble every time I think "Well, I'll just let this little thing go", because I need to make sure I've actually totally gotten over it. If I don't, then it becomes another paper cut.
My guess is there is a balance. Where little things can be overlooked, yet if they accumulate then it's best to talk about them at the point it's clear they can't be "let go". Ideally before things have gone on too long.
Having a qualified, independent third party can also help provide some perspective. Of course all this assumes there isn't evidence folks are just petty and manipulative. Compromise does take two and ideally both will feel there is an equal amount being sacrificed or gained by all.
Also I would recommend avoiding faith based counseling. IME their faith often taints their objectivity and generally pollutes both their advice and critical thinking skills. Even for couples who are of the same faith it can be helpful to get help outside the bubble.
The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?
Every young person she helps with always start a list of qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not “100%”, they can’t let that go even before dating starts. And then you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama that comes of it, and they have not even married yet.
I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that’s obvious. Glad I know better.
But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn’t end at the dating. Your partner wasn’t “100%”, and as people grow and change, they are not “100%” different ways, over the years. There are different things that comes up in which to let shit go.
It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything else when there are bad actors)
They aren't trying to live in a Disney movie or Goethe novel.
My understanding is that Goethe and romanticism really messed up our views in the West about romance. We have unrealistic beliefs from trying to live up to fiction.
And then there is the story of Krishna and the cow maids.
When you watch the “Indian matchmaking”, you see the parents of the current generation letting their kids find their way, even though they themselves did not. But you also hear about how the older generation met — it’s an arranged marriage, but their parents typically let their kids choose from a small pool of their choosing.
I think this is a very important point that is not addressed in the article. The article basically describes avoiding scar tissue as resolving conflicts so there is "zero lingering animosity". And sometimes (actually quite often, I think), only one person of the two in the relationship is prone to feeling any animosity about how a particular conflict got resolved. And in most (if not all) such cases, the best way to avoid the scar tissue is exactly what you say: let it go. Is it really worth feeling even a little smidgen of animosity towards this person, with whom you have a relationship lasting many years or decades, because of this one little thing? At the very least I think one needs to ask oneself that question, before embarking on the kinds of conflict resolution that the article describes.
This is one of those moments where someone is theory own worst enemy. The expectation for people to bottle up their feelings and sit there in annoyance is silly. There are only two basic scenarios here. The cause of the annoyance mainly sits with...
1. Jim.
2. John Ousterhout.
3. Some unidentified cause.
The proper approach is to think carefully about whether it is case 2. If it is, stop feeling annoyed - the annoyance is harming the self and the relationship for no reason. It is an illusion that can only cause trouble.
Most of the time that is the end of it. However, sometimes it is a case 1 or 3. Then it is perfectly fine to sit down with Jim and talk feelings. Just do it. Learn to make it sound natural and stilted and people only notice that you seem really easy to talk to. Figure out whether it is case 1 or 3 and whether it can just be resolved on the spot. Nobody is helped by bottling even minor things up. Learn to live a comfortable life.
It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through.
Plug for Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. This stuff really can be reduced to an algorithm as long as it accompanies a relentlessly nonjudgemental mindset and a tolerance for not getting your own way.
I've been around a lot of NVC practitioners. Many have been active NVC educators.
Maybe they've all been Doing It Wrong, but...I find that when presented with the "NVC way" of discussing a problem, my brain always translates it to the emotional symbols I understand, which are nearly identical to the symbols generated by an overt criticism.
That said, I recognize that could simply be a "me problem." Which I won't dispute. I'm not entirely neurotypical. And generally if something I'm doing is bothering someone, I try to deal with it; I don't make everything into drama. I just don't parse the NVC words appreciably differently than a normal, polite request. (Overt hostility does push my buttons, but short of that, it doesn't seem to matter.)
Just saying that NVC isn't magic. If the person making the request has a reasonable point, I'll acknowledge and do what I can to adjust my behavior. If they seem to be asking something less reasonable, wrapping it with NVC language doesn't change the request materially for me at all.
> It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and talk it through.
Agree that people should generally be open about issues. But there's appropriate context for everything. I really don't want coworkers coming up to me and asking to work through an emotional issue for an hour because something I suggested was different than their suggestion, and my suggestion bruised their ego. Close friends? Sure. I probably have higher than average tolerance for such conversations among those I care about. But I choose my close friends, and largely don't get to choose specific coworkers, and so demanding that level of emotional work seems outside of the job description.
Also: Totally agree about telling the contractor that dust got everywhere and letting them know that's a problem. But for me, it wouldn't be at all about "my feelings." It would be about a request to a contractor to adjust their behavior or that of their subs based on reasonable expectations. I would personally feel foolish taking an NVC approach with a contractor in that situation, TBH. Not "It makes me feel disrespected when dust gets all over the place," but something more like, "Hey Jim, someone didn't seal the plastic around the construction area and we had a bunch of dust we needed to clean up. Can you be sure that everyone knows that it's important to keep the dust seal closed? Thanks." Heck, the latter is even less confrontational than the "you left the plastic open" in the OP's comment.
Scar tissue really is permanent. Resentment in a relationship can be permanent, but doesn't have to be. The analogy that every unresolved grievance leads to a monotonically increasing amount of perpetual relationship weakness is, I think, wrong.
I think of resentment more like foreign bodies. When I was a kid, I got a chunk of pencil lead stuck in my hand without realizing it. The wound healed over it, but it was still in there. I could see it as a dark spot under my skin. Many years later, my body gradually migrated it to the surface and eventually it came out. (This was definitely a weird experience.)
When there's some sort of grievance or unresolved conflict in a relationship, I think of it as leaving a little chunk of foreign body or poison in the person's symptom. Some amount of this is natural, and you will just build up a little scar tissue and get by. But if you keep accumulating them, they'll make you less and less healthy.
Often, the best solution is to make sure the foreign body is removed before the wound heals over. When a hurt happens, take the time right then to work through it with the partner so that you aren't leaving anything in there and it can heal quickly and completely.
But, if that doesn't happen (and sometimes it won't), you can still dig it out later. It just requires re-opening the wound. The longer you wait, the more painful it is. When you re-open that wound, you will feel raw and vulnerable. It requires a lot of trust and care. Sometimes, this may happen years later, but it can be done.
If you find yourself doing this so frequently that you feel like you're never fully healed, that's a good sign that you aren't right for each other. Likewise, if you never feel that you're in an emotionally safe enough space to re-open those wounds and clean out the festering gunk in them, that's also a warning sign.
Practically, though… try having a conversation with chatGPT asking it to translate what you each want to say into “nonviolent communication”. Wow. AI seems way better than humans at human relationship communication…
1st draft
-> prompt “soften the language”
—-> review and revise output
———> prompt “soften again”
————> final draft
Enter more complex prompts or more iterations if you want editing for multiple things, e.g., prompt “suggest edits for clarity, brevity, grammar, and softer language”. You can iterate very quickly.
Next time, I'm specifically going to ensure another contractor is hired to ensure QC of the home during construction. No moving onto the next stage until the 1 foot hole in the subfloor caused by a falling drill from the 2nd story is fixed.
Anybody, and I mean anybody, can point out little things that are wrong in something. Especially in construction, by people that have never done it themselves but holds financial power. Also, I guarantee all the slight changes he thought were critical enough to warrant constant intervention actually weren’t, or could’ve been addressed later. The cost would have been significantly higher if the contractor factored in the time it took to satisfy him. He was getting what he paid for.
It's a cliche to say that relationships are about compromise but that's because it's true. That compromise isn't always spoken; sometimes it's done without the other person even knowing. If you're clear eyed or empathetic or just love the other person you can know that they do the same thing for you. If you're none of those things you can make the compromise painfully clear and create a zero sum situation.
Well, outside of end of year holidays.
Ideally, being able to go ‘now is a shitty time, let’s laugh about it and check tomorrow if it’s still an issue’ would be better. But emotions don’t always work that way.
On the other hand, it took literally years to come to a compromise between my very devout wife whose had it drilled into head that you should give 10% to the church as a family or we will never have a good life and we will be damned to hell.
The argument would always come up after we made a big financial commitment and while I was still trying to dig myself out of some bad financial decisions that I made before we even met. She was fully aware of them.
But one thing it’s almost impossible to square is a disagreement between two people when it involves religion or cultural disagreements.
When someone believes their actions will lead to damnation and burning in hell for eternity, no amount of logical argument will ever dissuade them from this. Faith is by definition not based on physical reality - and that’s not meant to be demeaning.
The compromise we came to is that she does what she wants as long as she stays within the overall budget we agreed to and I give what really amounts toward a “this is the price I pay for never having to hear mention of giving again”.
While I will say that my wife has her belief system. She is what I would consider a “liberal Christian”. She isn’t judgmental about other people and we have friends across the divide.
That means before getting out of debt, saving, paying your rent etc.
Dave Ramsey - a popular “financial guru” - is very opposed to debt of any kind except mortgage debt. But he’s also a fundamentalist Christian. He tells people that you should give 10% of your gross to your church (not his organization) even if you are struggling to get out of debt.
The church is very adamant about it.
I’m not here to debate theology. I’m just letting you know about the RFC for Christianity.
And tithing brings a blessing to the entire family and as supposedly the head of the family, I should follow those teachings.
Again, I’m just quoting from the “Christian protocol” or the “standard” and trying my best to argue from that basis. I’m not injecting my personal beliefs. Consider this an objective argument just like if you asked me why you shouldn’t have a body in a GET request.
> Giving money to the church (any church) would be a 1000% deal breaker for me.
It’s a minor nuisance in the grand scheme of things. I have my share of “deal breakers”. But that isn’t one of them.
I speak as a toxic person myself. Years of systemaric abuse and I was pretty much a marcissistic asshole.
100% a defense mechanism to avoid abuse. I had never learned what validation was. Also I isually assumed everyone was out to get me.
Took me years of living without a relationship to learn to learn what an absolute dunderhead I could be.
Sometimes other peoples actions are simply a reflection of your own attitide.
I look at it this way, if everyone around me is an ahole, the only thing they have in common is me. Maybe, just maybe, I myself may need to learn to communicate and validate those around me. And I need to do that without selling myself short.
Relationships have a "bank account of good will", and each incident/negative interaction withdraws from the account.
Positive interactions contribute goodwill to the account.
Negative interactions withdraw at many times the rate that positive interactions contribute.
It's very easy to destroy a relationship - you can do it in minutes or seconds. It's very hard to build something positive, very very hard to rebuild damage.
(Emphasis mine.)
His compulsion to start every morning by enumerating through a list of grievances undermined a relationship. He systematically alienated the person doing an important job for him, apparently fully aware of that person's shortcomings-- i.e., the contractor getting defensive and not owning up to problems. Yet allowing the job to continuing through these periodic grievances was a tacit acknowledgement in the story that Ousterhout thought the work was decent enough.
Then, he uses hyperbolic metaphors to describe what he apparently sees as the only possible outcome if he were ever to slip up:
> Because if there's anything at all when you're giving in that you can feel bad about later, you're nuking the relationship - you're creating scar tissue with yourself, and that will build up to the point where you wreck the relationship.
(Emphasis mine.)
(And he ended up wrecking the relationship, regardless!)
Yikes! Who in the world could live up to this model?
I think a much more workable and reasonable approach would be to reflect on what fuels our own compulsions and shortcomings. To just make up an example-- if I were arguing a point with a contractor every morning in an attempt to convince the five year-old version of myself that I'm important enough to not be abandoned, I should be aware of the fact that I'm doing this.
Armed with that knowledge I'd be able to skip at least one morning and go treat myself to some waffles.
No static picture or dynamic model actually works for relationships. No "alignment" or polishing is guaranteed to work.
What works is commitment: deciding to do what's necessary to make it work. Not promise, or practice, or experience, or a wealth of emotional intelligence. Commitment.
If commitment translates to "avoiding scar tissue", fine. If "avoiding scar tissue" reinforces your commitment, even better.
But the main thing for your own identity and your relationships is the commitment.
And to realize: if it's not working, you're not committed. (And most likely, you have good reason not to be, and you're stuck half-in, half-out of something you can't stand but need, or with traits that both help and hurt you. Welcome to the real world of beings, which is... complicated.)
In my book, The Big Bucks I used some of my actual history with Jerry, my contractor, as the basis for Walt. I say "some" since Jerry was already married, and he never did an Eichler in Palo Alto. Plus we started in 1992, whereas in the book it was 1983. Jerry did about ten jobs on my house after that. I'm not giving a plot spoiler on what happens with Walt /s
I just found his traits endearing. He was just like an engineer in so many ways, and he'd even vacuum up rooms he hadn't been in. But basically it was consideration and respect for each other. A lot of homeowners treat contractors like lower-class servants.
I gave him a copy of the book and he loved it: he finished it in two days, and then gave it to a contractor friend, who also loved it.
Some manager does not care too much about documenting some area of the product, some IC does not care enough to dig into the code to understand it, etc. Week by week these people's trust on each other will be eroded by the disagreements that stem from what they expect from each other.
I may be a cynic, but I don't believe in fixing most if not all of these relationships. Life is too short, and the industry is huge.
Long term relationships work out of accepting limitations.
There’s also plenty of examples of long term collaborations in business, so I’m not sure the underlying premise is solid.
It's an important topic, I'm surprised (but happily so) to find out about this in a gist from a CS teacher.
Not much scar tissue if you see your partner your bff.
Not much of a relationship you have anyway if you withold things.
I'm even sometimes take pictures when I experience alone because I immediately want to share it with her.
It does make me laugh how hn appears to have a pathological need to come up with a new (and normally "science" based) metaphor for common folk wisdom.
1. Technical / misunderstanding -> talk about how you feel
2. You or your partner or your relationship is changing (or you feel like it is) -> talk about how you feel
I’ve experienced exactly this multiple times and felt this way. Thank you thank you for the words to describe it John Ousterhout.
I'm happy to let go and move on from most relationships, but some are holy and must be salvaged at any cost.
I disagree with this. Relationships with Cluster-B people can become very dangerous. This can even include parent-child relationships, for example, if the parent has NPD (narcisstic personality disorder). At the end you really need to look out for yourself and your mental health first (hence not at any cost).
"but _some_ are holy and must be salvaged at any cost"
My relationship with my mother is part of that "some" for me. For others it may be someone else, but I didn't say everyone needs to salvage relationships with their parents at all, I shared my personal experience.
Hopefully everyone has a relationship worth saving. Find that and fight for it, because a good relationship is worth any cost, up to including your life (eg. relationship with your child).
I'm not an expert but does your way of thinking about this not map to Cluster-B personality types?
Incompatibility obviously plays a role but I know I fucked up in not sharing enough when I get annoyed with my partner but I don't know why exactly.