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walkitoutLast night, I was watching some TikTok with A. I should not have been. I was tired, and my judgment was poor. I needed to — and eventually did — explicitly turn over all further parenting responsibilities for the evening to R., go for a walk and then go to bed. This is an expectable result of moving my clock earlier in the morning — I’m just a lot more tired earlier in the evening (desirable! Really! And also).
Anyway. On TikTok, there was a marriage counselor. She presented the tale of clients, a tale that would “really resonate”, and I totally believe that it would and did. Clients showed up in the middle of a huge argument. The argument involved the drive _to_ the marriage counselor. Driver was complaining about bad behavior by others’ driving (with swears, intense affect — you know, distressing to be around). Passenger was Why Can’t We Just Talk. Fight ensued. Driver is like, can’t I just complain? TikToker is like, you did, so obviously the answer is, “Yes, you Can”. But what are the consequences of complaining. A. is nodding along. I absolutely lost all of my shit.
I spent a lot of time explaining a variety of things that were wrong with that TikTok, and I will start to go over them here, but I expect to be adding to this for a while, because everyone I’ve talked to _since_ that has gotten an earful of And Another Thing, and honestly, I’m not repeating myself much.
Not Rules are Stupid
Let’s just start with the role issue of the marriage counselor. She’s got clients walking in in the middle of an argument, that happened _on the way to the session_. She’s decided — and this is a choice — to use the argument that they are in the middle of to try to teach some important lessons about interacting with each other. The particular lesson she has chosen is a Not lesson. “I’m doing a thing. It is upsetting to someone else. I should NOT do the thing.” She didn’t say any of that explicitly, but the message was unmistakable. In general, Not lessons have a couple of general effects. First of all, in order to remember the rule, you have to front-and-center in your brain the thing that you are NOT going to do. That’s kind of a problem! Second, something _motivated_ you to do the thing you are now NOT supposed to do. If we don’t investigate what the motivation is, we have now created an impulse / thwarted impulse situation. Ego is there intermediating between superego and id, and it is exhausting.
I watched the whole TikTok (3 minute rule! They are never That Long, even when they feel interminable). She did NOT go on to explicate the _other_ half of the couple’s perspective.
Why Do Drivers Complain So Vehemently And Extensively While Driving
Now, let’s dig into the Driver Bitching motivational issue that was not investigated. A LOT of drivers talk and complain and play the radio and whatever, and a certain number of passengers prefer quiet. What’s going on here? Well, let’s go have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_driving.
The passenger in this TikTok story wanted to Talk About Something Else, when the driver was Complaining Vociferously About Other Drivers.
The passenger wanted to _interfere with_ this defensive driving rule: “Being alert and distraction free.” If a couple is _on their way to couples therapy_ and the passenger wants to talk about _something unrelated to driving_, I think it is safe to assume that whatever the passenger comes up with might well be distracting. I mean, when they came up with a complaint about the driver’s mouth hole noise, it was probably pretty distracting.
Here are more principles of defensive driving:
“Looking ahead and being prepared for unexpected events.”
Technically, that should be “looking around”, because someone advancing on you from behind at a substantial speed differential is something a defensive driver needs to be attentive to. Or someone merging from the side, or coming out of a side street, or pulling out of a parking spot along the roadway or whatever.
“ Preparedness for all sorts of actions and reactions of other drivers and pedestrians.
Not expecting the other drivers to do what you would ordinarily do.”
A driver who is bitching about other drivers doing stupid and/or illegal and/or dangerous shit is a driver who is _attentive_ and _responsive_.
Was the Driver Even Talking to the Passenger, Or Was The Passenger Interrupting the Driver’s Self-Talk?
https://www.healthline.com/health/why-do-i-talk-to-myself#benefits
This Healthline article discusses how common it is to talk to oneself, and how useful and beneficial it can be in terms of staying on task. A lot of people find riding in, including while driving, a car to be very, very, very restful. As a result, they may fall asleep, even if they are ordinarily alert enough. This is why many drivers need some amount of non-driving stimulation _while_ driving. They may chat, play the radio — or complain about and/or narrate what’s going on around them.
The passenger was disrupting this.
Compatibility is Worth Discussing
Now, the passenger may have _also_ been feeling relaxed by the car ride, and the hostile-toned, aggressive narration by the driver may have absolutely been a buzzkill. It’s a bit of a cliche that people should travel together, even go camping together, before joining their lives together as a couple (whether that involves paperwork or not). I kinda feel like riding around in a car together is something that lots of people do _without really consciously thinking about it_. They don’t think, hey, when I’m in a car, I like to …. Or I hate it when… But you know, wouldn’t it be helpful for a couple arguing in a car to have a therapist assign some homework to them to thrash out what they feel and find supportive while driving in or riding in a car? And wouldn’t that make the road a bit safer for everyone, even if it _did not_ actually help improve a relationship, even if it led to a larger discussion that revealed extensive, intractable incompatibility in the couple?
But But But
I know, there are silent drivers out there, who insist on a silent car so they can focus. I’ve met them! They are uniformly terrible drivers. I watch them do unsafe things. And then I insist on driving next time, or I find other ways to never ride in a car with them. Also, they all have anxiety, and only some of them have diagnoses or, really, any insight into their anxiety at all.
Fight me. I will enjoy it. You will learn from it.
Tone Policing
I was shocked and appalled that my daughter, who generally understands that Tone Policing occurs when people otherwise have got no decent argument for their position, fell for this particular TikToker’s presentation. My daughter, with a completely straight face, asserted that there wouldn’t be any harm in Just Not Complaining. See above _and also_ there are basically three ways to have a long-term, intimate, successful relationship.
The first way is to Just Always Be Compatible On Everything All the Time, Forever. If you want to go down _this_ path, you have to be super picky going into the relationship, to ensure that you _start out compatible_. And then everyone involved has to be extremely cautious about every change they make in life, so that all changes are always made in a way that preserves compatibility. Not easy! But definitely a thing people appear to pull off for years and occasionally decades at a time. I’ve never seen this work through the entire child-rearing process, so think long and hard before having kids.
The second path is to Negotiate Absolutely Everything Proactively. This is time consuming. Decision making will be slow. And you kind of have to do the absolutely hard core kind of negotiating (you should anyway) where everyone clearly understands everyone else’s preferences pro and con, feelings, etc., and be pretty creative in identifying what to do so that no one in the group can imagine any solution that is collectively better. And everyone has to really _care_ about everyone else’s preferences. It’s a lot of work. It is beautiful when it works, altho wow, it can make me kinda bananas how long it takes. And you have to be prepared to revisit every decision whenever someone has a new idea.
The third path is to Fight. I don’t mean enter the Octagon or whatever (altho if you do, I hope you get video, because that could be Hot). But basically, y’all basically go about doing your own thing, and you respect each other doing your own thing and you try to figure out when you are enjoying doing your own thing together and do more of it and when you are NOT enjoying something, you Complain, and then you thrash it out. This is sort of an Interrupt Driven negotiation strategy, versus a heavy-weight pre-emptive negotiation strategy. You can sort of see how most people, whether they know it or not, are running their relationships in this third way, while imagining that they are doing things in the compatibility way, and horrified by people around them who are doing it the second way. And it’s not _that_ hard to recognize just how bad suppressing complaining is in this situation.
Mechanical Complainers
Buildings are required by law (okay, not all buildings, not everywhere, but generally) to have smoke and/or heat and/or gas and/or water/moisture alarms. Alarms are mechanical Complainers that tell us, loudly, annoyingly and persistently, that there is a serious problem that must be responded to.
Think about that for a minute.
Why would you _suppress_ complaints? Shouldn’t you instead _address_ complaints? They are alarms in our relationships. Pay attention to them and take them seriously. Don’t just take that smoke alarm down and put it in the trash. If you do, next thing you know, you’re suffering from smoke inhalation and hour relationship burned to the ground, or it hasn’t but all your belongings are water damaged from what the fire department had to do to put the fire out.
OK And Now Why I Should Not Have Watched That TikTok
I know everyone likes to say, Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover. As aphorisms go, that’s one of the worse ones. _Absolutely_ judge a book by its cover. It’ll have a title, an author, maybe a picture, some cover text, possibly reviews. A _lot_ of people put a _lot_ of effort into that cover design to help that book find its appropriate market. Are some of those books worse for you than the cover will lead you to believe? Sure. Are some of those books _better_ for you than the cover will lead you to believe? No doubt. Which is why you are better off finding books to read based on some other standard than picking them up and looking at them. Don’t read a book because you picked it up and looked at it. There are _so many better ways to spend your time_. If the only thing you know about the book is its cover, why even bother? Oh, wait, that’s not what you meant, was it? The aphorism advocates for putting _more_ time and effort into something, not less. Ha ha ha ha. Look, I know what this world is like. That aphorism barely exists any more, and no one using it reads books anyway, because I’m one of the last people on the planet still reading books.
In any event, I’m a big believer in judging a book by its cover, and if it looks promising, doing some further vetting before committing to it. Saves a lot of time and effort all around, and if I’ve got a trusted source saying, oh, hey, it’s great, and the cover looks terrible, I’m not here to judge the book by its cover. I’m here because the source told me it was great and I’m investigating the contents before proceeding.
The Correct interpretation of judging a book by its cover is basically, don’t watch unfamiliar TikTokers. So, so, so, many of them have Unholy Takes that are absolutely not worth the damage to your peace of mind, or, even, if we are being honest, your ability to calmly make it through the next 24 hours. Complacency has far more going for it than some troublemakers would like you to believe. This TikToker was unfamiliar to me, AND ALSO:
Long, flowing locks of “natural” grey hair
A slender, even skinny body
What appeared to be a very time consuming No Makeup Makeup “Look”
A very carefully thought through camera focus and focal distance
Clothing and jewelry that goes with that presentation
If there is a TikTok appearance I associate with Please Comply Or I Will Make Your Life a Living Hell, Smiling All the Time, it’s this.
I should have swiped as soon as I saw it, but I hate-watched it instead. It would have been _fine_ to hate-watch it by myself — I could have blogged about it! But I hate-watched it with my daughter, and was horrified to learn that she was susceptible to this kind of emotional skulduggery. [ETA: I _keep_ checking the spelling, because I am convinced there should be 2 ls in that word and yet, apparently there is only the one.]
I mean, I knew it was inevitable, and arguably, it is less annoying than my son’s Trump-y years, but still *sigh*
ETA: Did you make it all the way down here? You must really love me. I love you, too! Unless you are hate reading, in which case, I hope you enjoyed it and I’m happy I was able to supply you with some good hate-reading material.
Who Started the Fight … and Why Doesn’t the Marriage Counselor Care?
The passenger in the car on the way to the marriage counselor is very likely socially ept enough to know that saying, “do you have to complain all the time why can’t we just talk” is likely to have the response that it got. Given that the passenger in the car _knew_ they were headed to a marriage counselor, shouldn’t the marriage counselor wonder why the passenger was so committed to starting _this_ kind of argument on the way to the appointment? What was the homework from the previous meeting with the counselor that the passenger _really wanted to make sure was completely forgotten_ for this meeting? Did it involve the passenger, perhaps?
If the passenger — or if you sympathize with the passenger — is going, but but but but. Maybe dig around and do some shadow work. Because I can _guarantee_ you that a person who starts a big, unrelated fight on the way to a marriage counselor is absolutely trying to avoid finding something out about themselves that they don’t like about themselves.
If you would like to point out that the driver may very well have _also_ been trying to start a big, unrelated fight on the way to the marriage counselor, I absolutely concur. And also, probably they know that already. But asking them _why_ they wanted to start a fight on the way to the marriage counselor would result in some really interesting conversation so definitely ask that question.
The big difference between the passenger and the driver in this story, is that there’s a _chance_ the driver is forthright on one level (defensive driving, stay focused and alert), or another level (I want a fight, I bet this’ll get it done). There is almost _no_ chance the passenger is forthright on any level. In what circumstances is siding with the Not Forthright person in couples counseling beneficial? There are absolutely varied and excellent responses to this that are not, “None”, and none of them comport well with making this TikTok.
ETA still more:
Still here? Awww, you are a dear!
Somebody Has a Change Project Here And It Is Not For Themselves
Are you feeling like I am just not validating -enough- how traumatizing the passenger found the narration / vociferous cursing out of other drivers for their driving actions? Well, they got validated in the initial TikTok. And _you_ are validating them! Good for you!
Also, is this the _first and only_ time that this kind of complaining about other drivers has happened? Is it worse than before? Did it start _after_ the couple became a couple or before? Do answers to these questions influence how much validation you feel the passenger deserves?
If the passenger entered this relationship while the driver was busy being meticulously polite and well-behaved while driving, then boy, howdy am I sympathetic. They got bait and switched! Fraud has been committed! And definitely spend some counseling time on that.
If the behavior was present in the getting-to-know-you period, and the passenger thought this was a Fixer Upper type relationship, how do you feel about the passenger and the counselor siding with the passenger then? Who, exactly, is being invalidated and how much?
I think there is a case to be made that the driver actually _has_ an anger management problem, and that the driver’s rage is getting worse and that is a legit target for counseling resources to be directed at. But should that happen in couples counseling or in individual counseling? And why was the escalation or background anger management issue not included in the depiction?
Honestly, the way it was presented, I could not tell if the offending behavior was narration or vehement cursing. Narration can include cursing. Was the _cursing_ the issue? Again, see above: is that a new thing, was it concealed, is it escalating? Did they used to curse out drivers merrily together and the passenger is working their own anger management program and is lashing out at the partner for messing up their first tentative steps? There are so many possibilities here!
Does stopping the complaining — anyone’s complaining — help figure this out?
But Complaining Is So Irritating!
I know complaining is irritating.
_That is the fucking point of complaining._ We make _extremely irritating_ mechanical devices to do our irritating for us, when we are asleep or tired, or can’t detect the problem in order to complain about it. There are forms of complaining that are useful in some circumstances and not so useful in others, so _improving skill and repertoire in complaining_ is wonderful! People who join a street protest should definitely also learn about any available voting opportunities, petition and referendum opportunities, public comment periods, pro bono legal services that can help defend or sue. People who have awful bosses need to be aware of services to help them find other employers, HR procedures for making a company aware that they have awful management, tip lines to news organizations, government services to support labor in disputes with their employers, legal services that may be willing to take on a case pro bono on a class basis or for a cut of the proceeds. Everyone should know that there is a non-emergency police line that you can call and talk to someone about what your options are if you experience something that you find upsetting but doesn’t feel like a 911 call. There are self-help books, videos and all kinds of counseling services that can help you move from complaining to more specific problem-identification and -solving processes.
Why NOT take all that great energy and redirect it to something positive, rather than just saying DO NOT DO THAT THING THAT IS SO NEGATIVELY ENERGIZING TO ME.
I have so many feelings and thoughts about NOT-ing people.
Anyway. On TikTok, there was a marriage counselor. She presented the tale of clients, a tale that would “really resonate”, and I totally believe that it would and did. Clients showed up in the middle of a huge argument. The argument involved the drive _to_ the marriage counselor. Driver was complaining about bad behavior by others’ driving (with swears, intense affect — you know, distressing to be around). Passenger was Why Can’t We Just Talk. Fight ensued. Driver is like, can’t I just complain? TikToker is like, you did, so obviously the answer is, “Yes, you Can”. But what are the consequences of complaining. A. is nodding along. I absolutely lost all of my shit.
I spent a lot of time explaining a variety of things that were wrong with that TikTok, and I will start to go over them here, but I expect to be adding to this for a while, because everyone I’ve talked to _since_ that has gotten an earful of And Another Thing, and honestly, I’m not repeating myself much.
Not Rules are Stupid
Let’s just start with the role issue of the marriage counselor. She’s got clients walking in in the middle of an argument, that happened _on the way to the session_. She’s decided — and this is a choice — to use the argument that they are in the middle of to try to teach some important lessons about interacting with each other. The particular lesson she has chosen is a Not lesson. “I’m doing a thing. It is upsetting to someone else. I should NOT do the thing.” She didn’t say any of that explicitly, but the message was unmistakable. In general, Not lessons have a couple of general effects. First of all, in order to remember the rule, you have to front-and-center in your brain the thing that you are NOT going to do. That’s kind of a problem! Second, something _motivated_ you to do the thing you are now NOT supposed to do. If we don’t investigate what the motivation is, we have now created an impulse / thwarted impulse situation. Ego is there intermediating between superego and id, and it is exhausting.
I watched the whole TikTok (3 minute rule! They are never That Long, even when they feel interminable). She did NOT go on to explicate the _other_ half of the couple’s perspective.
Why Do Drivers Complain So Vehemently And Extensively While Driving
Now, let’s dig into the Driver Bitching motivational issue that was not investigated. A LOT of drivers talk and complain and play the radio and whatever, and a certain number of passengers prefer quiet. What’s going on here? Well, let’s go have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_driving.
The passenger in this TikTok story wanted to Talk About Something Else, when the driver was Complaining Vociferously About Other Drivers.
The passenger wanted to _interfere with_ this defensive driving rule: “Being alert and distraction free.” If a couple is _on their way to couples therapy_ and the passenger wants to talk about _something unrelated to driving_, I think it is safe to assume that whatever the passenger comes up with might well be distracting. I mean, when they came up with a complaint about the driver’s mouth hole noise, it was probably pretty distracting.
Here are more principles of defensive driving:
“Looking ahead and being prepared for unexpected events.”
Technically, that should be “looking around”, because someone advancing on you from behind at a substantial speed differential is something a defensive driver needs to be attentive to. Or someone merging from the side, or coming out of a side street, or pulling out of a parking spot along the roadway or whatever.
“ Preparedness for all sorts of actions and reactions of other drivers and pedestrians.
Not expecting the other drivers to do what you would ordinarily do.”
A driver who is bitching about other drivers doing stupid and/or illegal and/or dangerous shit is a driver who is _attentive_ and _responsive_.
Was the Driver Even Talking to the Passenger, Or Was The Passenger Interrupting the Driver’s Self-Talk?
https://www.healthline.com/health/why-do-i-talk-to-myself#benefits
This Healthline article discusses how common it is to talk to oneself, and how useful and beneficial it can be in terms of staying on task. A lot of people find riding in, including while driving, a car to be very, very, very restful. As a result, they may fall asleep, even if they are ordinarily alert enough. This is why many drivers need some amount of non-driving stimulation _while_ driving. They may chat, play the radio — or complain about and/or narrate what’s going on around them.
The passenger was disrupting this.
Compatibility is Worth Discussing
Now, the passenger may have _also_ been feeling relaxed by the car ride, and the hostile-toned, aggressive narration by the driver may have absolutely been a buzzkill. It’s a bit of a cliche that people should travel together, even go camping together, before joining their lives together as a couple (whether that involves paperwork or not). I kinda feel like riding around in a car together is something that lots of people do _without really consciously thinking about it_. They don’t think, hey, when I’m in a car, I like to …. Or I hate it when… But you know, wouldn’t it be helpful for a couple arguing in a car to have a therapist assign some homework to them to thrash out what they feel and find supportive while driving in or riding in a car? And wouldn’t that make the road a bit safer for everyone, even if it _did not_ actually help improve a relationship, even if it led to a larger discussion that revealed extensive, intractable incompatibility in the couple?
But But But
I know, there are silent drivers out there, who insist on a silent car so they can focus. I’ve met them! They are uniformly terrible drivers. I watch them do unsafe things. And then I insist on driving next time, or I find other ways to never ride in a car with them. Also, they all have anxiety, and only some of them have diagnoses or, really, any insight into their anxiety at all.
Fight me. I will enjoy it. You will learn from it.
Tone Policing
I was shocked and appalled that my daughter, who generally understands that Tone Policing occurs when people otherwise have got no decent argument for their position, fell for this particular TikToker’s presentation. My daughter, with a completely straight face, asserted that there wouldn’t be any harm in Just Not Complaining. See above _and also_ there are basically three ways to have a long-term, intimate, successful relationship.
The first way is to Just Always Be Compatible On Everything All the Time, Forever. If you want to go down _this_ path, you have to be super picky going into the relationship, to ensure that you _start out compatible_. And then everyone involved has to be extremely cautious about every change they make in life, so that all changes are always made in a way that preserves compatibility. Not easy! But definitely a thing people appear to pull off for years and occasionally decades at a time. I’ve never seen this work through the entire child-rearing process, so think long and hard before having kids.
The second path is to Negotiate Absolutely Everything Proactively. This is time consuming. Decision making will be slow. And you kind of have to do the absolutely hard core kind of negotiating (you should anyway) where everyone clearly understands everyone else’s preferences pro and con, feelings, etc., and be pretty creative in identifying what to do so that no one in the group can imagine any solution that is collectively better. And everyone has to really _care_ about everyone else’s preferences. It’s a lot of work. It is beautiful when it works, altho wow, it can make me kinda bananas how long it takes. And you have to be prepared to revisit every decision whenever someone has a new idea.
The third path is to Fight. I don’t mean enter the Octagon or whatever (altho if you do, I hope you get video, because that could be Hot). But basically, y’all basically go about doing your own thing, and you respect each other doing your own thing and you try to figure out when you are enjoying doing your own thing together and do more of it and when you are NOT enjoying something, you Complain, and then you thrash it out. This is sort of an Interrupt Driven negotiation strategy, versus a heavy-weight pre-emptive negotiation strategy. You can sort of see how most people, whether they know it or not, are running their relationships in this third way, while imagining that they are doing things in the compatibility way, and horrified by people around them who are doing it the second way. And it’s not _that_ hard to recognize just how bad suppressing complaining is in this situation.
Mechanical Complainers
Buildings are required by law (okay, not all buildings, not everywhere, but generally) to have smoke and/or heat and/or gas and/or water/moisture alarms. Alarms are mechanical Complainers that tell us, loudly, annoyingly and persistently, that there is a serious problem that must be responded to.
Think about that for a minute.
Why would you _suppress_ complaints? Shouldn’t you instead _address_ complaints? They are alarms in our relationships. Pay attention to them and take them seriously. Don’t just take that smoke alarm down and put it in the trash. If you do, next thing you know, you’re suffering from smoke inhalation and hour relationship burned to the ground, or it hasn’t but all your belongings are water damaged from what the fire department had to do to put the fire out.
OK And Now Why I Should Not Have Watched That TikTok
I know everyone likes to say, Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover. As aphorisms go, that’s one of the worse ones. _Absolutely_ judge a book by its cover. It’ll have a title, an author, maybe a picture, some cover text, possibly reviews. A _lot_ of people put a _lot_ of effort into that cover design to help that book find its appropriate market. Are some of those books worse for you than the cover will lead you to believe? Sure. Are some of those books _better_ for you than the cover will lead you to believe? No doubt. Which is why you are better off finding books to read based on some other standard than picking them up and looking at them. Don’t read a book because you picked it up and looked at it. There are _so many better ways to spend your time_. If the only thing you know about the book is its cover, why even bother? Oh, wait, that’s not what you meant, was it? The aphorism advocates for putting _more_ time and effort into something, not less. Ha ha ha ha. Look, I know what this world is like. That aphorism barely exists any more, and no one using it reads books anyway, because I’m one of the last people on the planet still reading books.
In any event, I’m a big believer in judging a book by its cover, and if it looks promising, doing some further vetting before committing to it. Saves a lot of time and effort all around, and if I’ve got a trusted source saying, oh, hey, it’s great, and the cover looks terrible, I’m not here to judge the book by its cover. I’m here because the source told me it was great and I’m investigating the contents before proceeding.
The Correct interpretation of judging a book by its cover is basically, don’t watch unfamiliar TikTokers. So, so, so, many of them have Unholy Takes that are absolutely not worth the damage to your peace of mind, or, even, if we are being honest, your ability to calmly make it through the next 24 hours. Complacency has far more going for it than some troublemakers would like you to believe. This TikToker was unfamiliar to me, AND ALSO:
Long, flowing locks of “natural” grey hair
A slender, even skinny body
What appeared to be a very time consuming No Makeup Makeup “Look”
A very carefully thought through camera focus and focal distance
Clothing and jewelry that goes with that presentation
If there is a TikTok appearance I associate with Please Comply Or I Will Make Your Life a Living Hell, Smiling All the Time, it’s this.
I should have swiped as soon as I saw it, but I hate-watched it instead. It would have been _fine_ to hate-watch it by myself — I could have blogged about it! But I hate-watched it with my daughter, and was horrified to learn that she was susceptible to this kind of emotional skulduggery. [ETA: I _keep_ checking the spelling, because I am convinced there should be 2 ls in that word and yet, apparently there is only the one.]
I mean, I knew it was inevitable, and arguably, it is less annoying than my son’s Trump-y years, but still *sigh*
ETA: Did you make it all the way down here? You must really love me. I love you, too! Unless you are hate reading, in which case, I hope you enjoyed it and I’m happy I was able to supply you with some good hate-reading material.
Who Started the Fight … and Why Doesn’t the Marriage Counselor Care?
The passenger in the car on the way to the marriage counselor is very likely socially ept enough to know that saying, “do you have to complain all the time why can’t we just talk” is likely to have the response that it got. Given that the passenger in the car _knew_ they were headed to a marriage counselor, shouldn’t the marriage counselor wonder why the passenger was so committed to starting _this_ kind of argument on the way to the appointment? What was the homework from the previous meeting with the counselor that the passenger _really wanted to make sure was completely forgotten_ for this meeting? Did it involve the passenger, perhaps?
If the passenger — or if you sympathize with the passenger — is going, but but but but. Maybe dig around and do some shadow work. Because I can _guarantee_ you that a person who starts a big, unrelated fight on the way to a marriage counselor is absolutely trying to avoid finding something out about themselves that they don’t like about themselves.
If you would like to point out that the driver may very well have _also_ been trying to start a big, unrelated fight on the way to the marriage counselor, I absolutely concur. And also, probably they know that already. But asking them _why_ they wanted to start a fight on the way to the marriage counselor would result in some really interesting conversation so definitely ask that question.
The big difference between the passenger and the driver in this story, is that there’s a _chance_ the driver is forthright on one level (defensive driving, stay focused and alert), or another level (I want a fight, I bet this’ll get it done). There is almost _no_ chance the passenger is forthright on any level. In what circumstances is siding with the Not Forthright person in couples counseling beneficial? There are absolutely varied and excellent responses to this that are not, “None”, and none of them comport well with making this TikTok.
ETA still more:
Still here? Awww, you are a dear!
Somebody Has a Change Project Here And It Is Not For Themselves
Are you feeling like I am just not validating -enough- how traumatizing the passenger found the narration / vociferous cursing out of other drivers for their driving actions? Well, they got validated in the initial TikTok. And _you_ are validating them! Good for you!
Also, is this the _first and only_ time that this kind of complaining about other drivers has happened? Is it worse than before? Did it start _after_ the couple became a couple or before? Do answers to these questions influence how much validation you feel the passenger deserves?
If the passenger entered this relationship while the driver was busy being meticulously polite and well-behaved while driving, then boy, howdy am I sympathetic. They got bait and switched! Fraud has been committed! And definitely spend some counseling time on that.
If the behavior was present in the getting-to-know-you period, and the passenger thought this was a Fixer Upper type relationship, how do you feel about the passenger and the counselor siding with the passenger then? Who, exactly, is being invalidated and how much?
I think there is a case to be made that the driver actually _has_ an anger management problem, and that the driver’s rage is getting worse and that is a legit target for counseling resources to be directed at. But should that happen in couples counseling or in individual counseling? And why was the escalation or background anger management issue not included in the depiction?
Honestly, the way it was presented, I could not tell if the offending behavior was narration or vehement cursing. Narration can include cursing. Was the _cursing_ the issue? Again, see above: is that a new thing, was it concealed, is it escalating? Did they used to curse out drivers merrily together and the passenger is working their own anger management program and is lashing out at the partner for messing up their first tentative steps? There are so many possibilities here!
Does stopping the complaining — anyone’s complaining — help figure this out?
But Complaining Is So Irritating!
I know complaining is irritating.
_That is the fucking point of complaining._ We make _extremely irritating_ mechanical devices to do our irritating for us, when we are asleep or tired, or can’t detect the problem in order to complain about it. There are forms of complaining that are useful in some circumstances and not so useful in others, so _improving skill and repertoire in complaining_ is wonderful! People who join a street protest should definitely also learn about any available voting opportunities, petition and referendum opportunities, public comment periods, pro bono legal services that can help defend or sue. People who have awful bosses need to be aware of services to help them find other employers, HR procedures for making a company aware that they have awful management, tip lines to news organizations, government services to support labor in disputes with their employers, legal services that may be willing to take on a case pro bono on a class basis or for a cut of the proceeds. Everyone should know that there is a non-emergency police line that you can call and talk to someone about what your options are if you experience something that you find upsetting but doesn’t feel like a 911 call. There are self-help books, videos and all kinds of counseling services that can help you move from complaining to more specific problem-identification and -solving processes.
Why NOT take all that great energy and redirect it to something positive, rather than just saying DO NOT DO THAT THING THAT IS SO NEGATIVELY ENERGIZING TO ME.
I have so many feelings and thoughts about NOT-ing people.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-21 10:49 pm (UTC)Thank you for your kindness!
Date: 2023-07-22 12:16 pm (UTC)I’m going to try to go back and fix typos / word-os and similar — I see several now. I don’t intend to do significant edits, altho I may ultimately use this post as part of a larger project I’m struggling with that is intended to help people like me learn how to understand how other people are thinking and feeling.