Tangentially, you could ask: Are you addicted to being useful or to being recognized as useful.
One is your own need, the other often a covered contract where you lash out or silently resign if you don't get the recognition that you think you deserve.
Next time, maybe ask her to come up with solutions, e.g. do a brainstorm session.
If she then says she doesn't really want a solution, you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
Or maybe nobody is? Why does someone has to be “at fault”?
> you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
Sometimes people just want to be heard. There is value in recognising that.
“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”
My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battles.
Relationships must be two-way streets, always.
I have made quite a lot of concessions for my wife for the current rented flat -- simply because I did not care about 99% of the things she wanted to change. I only gave her a rather loose framework: "this must fit these physical dimensions as you yourself can see here in this corner" and "I am not willing to spend hundreds to change something that is currently performing to 90% of the standards of both of us" and "how difficult it is to ship and install this?" -- and she has been mature and considerate enough to understand the boundaries and nailed them every single time so far in our 11.5 years together. And she still got almost everything she wanted and is visibly happier with the environment.
When both sides have preferences they feel safe sharing but are still reasonable above all, then things are going smoothly and flow naturally.
Of course there are the rare exceptions where I just gave up and said to her: "OK, I am leaving this to you, figure all the details out and I'll just pay it at the end of the process". I was not unhappy but she did not want to budge on a few things and I ultimately just stashed the old thing in the garage in case she understands she made a bad deal or the new thing was underperforming.
I agree strongly with "pick your battles". You have to be able to read the person in real time. It's actually much easier than most technical people think.
Which, clearly, I struggled to find a useful compromise on.
I am definitely not saying that all relationships can work out. Sometimes you have to be right and happy. I meant more for trivialities
The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solutions the first time you hear a story, but it's much harder when you hear the exact same story, with exact same underlying emotion, dozen+ times in the span of a few months. The other side is clearly not really processing their emotions - so if not that, and not practical advice, then what's the point of even talking about it?
It's really draining and in some cases I'm not in a position to disengage either.
What helps me in situations where people talk about it for the umpteenth time is trying to drill down and find the root cause with carefully worded questions. I think I might be ready to become a therapist, lol. Though my fuse is quite short due to my own stress so I don't put myself in the "I am your emotional trash bin" kind of situations.
So to me even the situations you describe can be made use of. Think of it as a long-running background task with many steps; after each retry you get a new exception stack trace. F.ex. during conversation #7 you might understand one or two causes of the problem but at conversation #12 you might already have a nice root cause and you can then try to gently nudge the person towards addressing that.
Of course you are not mandated to. It's all about what you need in this current phase of life as well; you don't have to be people's therapist. It's just what I find super interesting the last year or so -- root-cause analysis of human problems.
But when I understand that somebody just wants to whine and be a constant victim, I mentally check out. Not worth the joules that my brain would spend on that person.
And there's no solution. Nothing you can do, say, or not do or say will help. Even just listening will be perceived, after the umpteenth time, as condescending; and voicing your opinion is obviously a no go. It's lose-lose.
But if people only reach out to drop their toxic waste and leave you without the chance to get rid of your own toxic waste you feel not good afterwards. Like where you have conversations and then afterwards notice that you were not able to actually speak about any of your own problems and worries.
That's what I really like about the kids and their words of the year: They used "aura" and at first I thought what a bullshit term is that, but after a while I came to understand it. It's totally fine to listen to your stomach feelings, if someone's aura is negative or their vibes are off you don't need to give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave.
We've been trained to be helpful and nice to everyone but then wonder why we feel drained at the end of the day. It's because we're spending emotional bandwidth on people and things that don't give us any energy back.
The word "aura" for all of this is extremely nice. If you see a spooky person approaching you on the street at night you also don't need to explain to them what exactly put you off about them - you just switch sides.
I can only recommend to trust your feelings.
If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection. There are other ways to not feel drained even after listening to the most horrible (or boring) stories that don't cut people (and thus yourself) off. You gain options, not lose any. You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort, and become more independent from what people around you are saying or doing, instead of turning your problem into their wrongdoing. Instead of having your world suddenly be full of energy vampires you need to protect yourself from.
No, none of this is comforting. For some people it is a big step to not drop everything just because someone is waiting for the bus and wants to have a 15 minute phone call in order to de-stress their own day.
> If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection.
Not every human connection is a net positive.
> You gain options, not lose any.
Please let me complete the options I already have before putting more options on my TODO list.
> You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort
That's ableism.
People are unique, and while I appreciate you taking the time to write these lines you might be coming from a very different place. To be a bit snarky, maybe you are more on the energy consumer side of things than on the energy producer side. People have a magic radar for others who make them feel heard, but there is a certain bandwidth and it's limits must be respected.
It's OK not to want to be in connection with others whose behavior you don't agree with, but it's not necessary and from my perspective counter-productive for yourself and society as a whole to turn that into a permission to act in hostile ways against them, especially if you're not providing clear feedback. In fact, unless you provide that in an open way, they will not change their ways around you, so you're losing a lot of chances to influence people around you in situations where you simply cannot decide to avoid them altogether. You're not in control over which humans you interact with, and you're turning interactions into exchanges of aggression unnecessarily.
How would your mental health be if you listened to someone like Trump for even half your day?
No matter how much one meditates, they will still die if set on fire with gasoline.
That said, I do tend to get upset, when I’m taken for granted, but that’s really my own fault. I know it, rationally, but my inner brat still wants to throw a tantrum.
I, like yourself, cannot override my engineering mindset. I ALWAYS WANT TO HELP. But at one point I reframed it as an energy budget problem and how efficiently are my time and energy spent... and then it clicked.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, in my case, manifests as not being very comfortable, when people give me attention. That's why I like working on "infrastructure" stuff (and also why I used to be a bass player[0]).
[0] https://cmarshall.com/MulletMan.jpg (That hair was in style, back then. I no longer look like that).