Ask Dan and Jennifer » ego

Are You Playing The Blame Game? Do Any Of These Situations Sound Familiar?

Melody Brooke — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:54:08 +0000

Randy was reaching for a doughnut when his wife glared at him. Inside, Randy could feel a defiance surging inside. He reached for the second doughnut and felt smug and happy with himself.

Janet struggled to maintain her composure when Jerry joked about her going to spend her morning with a bunch of “old ladies”. Her anger railed in particular because just prior to his coming in to the room and making the statement she was recalling how he had hurt her by referring to someone else with his pet name for her.

Lisa was furious with Greg because he had chosen to call her while she was getting her hair done and didn’t believe it really took so long to highlight and trim her hair. He had even called his hairdresser to confirm his opinion that it should not have taken so long to accomplish.

Fighting words, all of the examples above could and did lead to long lasting, all out battles between these couples. Their ability to see themselves as the victim in the situation perpetuated the argument. Each part of the couple felt wrongly accused and unjustly treated. They were, of course, all correct.

They had been unjustly treated and had been wronged in some way. So had their partners! When we fall into the game of seeing ourselves as a victim and our partners ad the perpetrators we fail to recognize the others position.

It’s easy to do isn’t it? It’s easy for us to see ourselves as the victim of the wrong. But in reality what is really going on? Both people are feeling hurt, threatened and that they are being treated unfairly.

So what do we do? How do we address the issues when both partners are feeling wounded? It’s tough and requires a great deal of commitment that sometimes, we can’t muster.

When something goes wrong and we feel wounded our brain kicks into a survival mode that prevents us from seeing the situation at hand clearly. What we do is see things purely from our own perspective. This is not because we are terrible humans. This is because it’s what are brains are wired to do.

Survival Mode

When something happens and we feel threatened, our brains go into survival mode. What this means is that we go into hyper alert. Adrenaline pumps through our veins and we seek to regain a sense of control.

When our survival is threatened we feel out of control. There is, in fact, nothing so out of control is feeling like we are headed for disaster and death.

But then our brains look to regain control, and we do this by laying blame on someone. Once blame is in place, once we know whom to blame, then we know how to respond to the situation. Our brains can relax (to some degree) because we know what course of action to take.

Once we know who is to blame we know how to respond. If, the person to blame is ourselves, then we know we have to attack ourselves, berate ourselves and punish ourselves until we have learned the lesson to not do whatever it was again. This is the personification of the Victim role.

If the person to blame is someone else, we then get to chose between two responses. We choose to either defend ourselves against the perceived perpetrator, or rescue the victim.

Either way we get a sense of control and power back. When its our spouse we can see them as both Victim and Perpetrator. Our response then, is to rescue them and protect them from our anger at their perpetrative behavior.

An example of this is John, who knew his wife was stressed and tired, and he loved her desperately. One day he came in to find his wife spanking their daughter with a belt.

He intervened and gently told his wife, “Honey, I know work is hard right now. Why don’t you go take a hot bath? I’ll take care of Carrie.” He never held her accountable for her behavior, just tried really hard to make sure that she didn’t feel so stressed.

What’s really going on?

…

Arguments and Fights: Why Won’t You Listen to Me?

Melody Brooke — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:08:29 +0000

How many times have you been in a situation with someone you know pretty well, maybe your spouse or your best friend, when you just couldn’t get through to them? For some reason beyond your understanding they just refuse to listen to what you are saying. They argue, they say irrational things, they confound you with statements unrelated to what you are trying to say, they just don’t seem to hear what it is you are trying to get across.

Why is that?

Okay, we have all heard of the “Fight or Flight Syndrome”. That’s’ when your brain takes over and you feel you have to either fight or run away from the situation. But what does this mean to us on a personal level? What it means is our brains are engaged in a battle for our survival and it is sending us messages intent on helping us survive whatever the threat appears to be. That threat could be as simple as avoiding embarrassment, it could be defending against something that you said that the other person perceived as an attack. Whatever the threat, the other person is reacting to you as though you are a threat. They see you as “the bad guy” and themselves as “the victim”.

Now, if you asked them, they would deny this. They are not lying to you, they are not aware that “the bad guy” and “the victim” roles are unconsciously engrained into their way of perceiving the world. Actually, it’s a part of all of our unconscious minds. We can’t help it it’s automatic.

Picture this: A husband, let’s call him Jim, is trying to help his wife who is swamped with Christmas preparations. She told him that she has to set up the tables for their holiday dinner and gave him a vague notion of how she wanted it done. Without asking for more details, Jim thinks he can help his wife; lets call her Susan, by setting up the tables for her. He hurries around hastily setting up the tables before she comes back from Christmas shopping, hoping to surprise her. Well, boy, was she surprised. Susan says, “What is this?”

Jim proudly says, “I set the tables up for you.” Suddenly, without warning, Susan explodes on him, telling him this is not at all what she wanted, and why did he think this is how she wanted it? And why didn’t he let her do it? Jim was dumbfounded. He starts yelling back at her how he was just trying to help, and didn’t she want his help? Susan is aghast that he can’t see this is not what she wanted. She starts telling him he was just trying to horn in on her show, that this holiday dinner is important to her because her new son-in-law’s family is going to be there and she had it all planned out. Jim insists that he was trying to help her and she is just being petty.

The discussion erodes from there into an all out fight.

What happened here? Both people were trying to accomplish the same goal, but they got seriously derailed. Why? It’s because their brains kicked into survival mode. The whole argument escalated because neither of them realized how suddenly they had become each other’s enemy. Each saw the other as “the bad guy” and themselves as “the victim”. Whatever understanding they may have had of each other’s stress was out the window and they were each solely focused on surviving the current threat.

So what is the alternative? The alternative is…

The Battle of the Sexes

Melody Brooke — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:43:20 +0000

Growing up in the 60’s with a liberal mother I was all over the women’s movement. We marched for Choice, we burned our bra’s, we shouted out “Equal Rights for Equal Pay!” And, we did a lot of good.

Things have changed.

They are not yet as equal as they should be and the Roe vs. Wade keeps being modified and brought into question, but women have made a lot of headway in our culture. We “have come a long way, baby”. And perhaps as a rallying point for women the National Organization for Women is needed to get people to push for women’s freedoms. Maybe we wouldn’t address them without this, what I call, “Self Protective” stance. But it’s a shame.

In the past few years men have begun to organize themselves in a similar fashion. There is a National Men’s Equality Congress this year, there are men’s rights books and magazines, men’s rights online digests and men’s activism agencies. They have brought light to the issue of parental alienation and father’s rights. And for better or worse, Alec Baldwin has suddenly become their spokesman. They have done some great things to help father’s regain position in the courts as important in the emotional lives of children. But again, they have thrust themselves into an extremely “Self Protective” stance. Again, it’s a shame.

As human animals we find ourselves in this “Self Protective” position when we perceive ourselves to be under attack. There is no doubt that women have perceived themselves as under attack from the pedagogical structure of our society from it’s outset. Women have fought for the right to vote, to go to work, to own property, to raise our children on our own and to choose when to continue to carry a child. Women have even had to fight for the right to not be beaten by their husbands.

In our culture, and most others, men have more income and therefore more access to financial power. Money buys a lot of power. It’s easy for those without power to assume that those in power have all the rights they want and that they are persecutory. Women have experienced themselves as the “Victims” of this perceived persecutory power that men have held for generations. There is no doubt that women have suffered.

When we perceive ourselves to be “Victims” we have three choices. We can remain in the “Victim” position and let ourselves slowly deteriorate because this position is one of hopelessness and powerlessness; there is no way out. Or, we can learn to placate our persecutor and please and cater to them while controlling them through our pandering to them, this is called being a “Rescuer. It is a position that women have often, throughout history used to give them as sense of power (think of the characterization of a “Jewish Mother” or a “Southern Belle”). Finally, we can chose to become a “Self Protector” and fight for our rights against our persecutor whom we perceive to be “wrong”, “bad”, and needing punishment (a classic example is of the caricature of a “bra-burning femi-Nazi dyke” from which most men recoil in fear).

The problem with choosing to perceive ourselves as a “Victim” and taking any of these positions is that we cannot escape the battle. Conflict and pain is unavoidable when we are in this egocentric position of perceiving ourselves as the “Victim” of some persecutor that has no soul and no sense of empathy for our plight. We are then stuck in a position of having to fight for our survival against a perceived enemy. We become staunchly adversarial with our foe. We fight until we prevail and our enemy “loses”.

Of course, when someone loses a battle…

How to STOP Arguments and Fights from Killing Your Relationship (Video)

Dan and Jennifer — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:09:20 +0000

Endless fights, arguments, and snipes late into the night…

You’ve seen it time and time again. Everything is going great, you and your partner love each other dearly, and your relationship couldn’t be better. Then, it strikes without warning. Someone says something, the other responds, and it’s on!

What appears to be a simple misunderstanding escalates into an argument, a fight, and someone ends up sleeping on the couch. Worse yet, one of you starts throwing things, then storms out of the house. Remember the frustration, the anger, the resentment?

Remember how puffed up your ego got? "Yeah, so there!" OK, clearly that didn’t go as planned. And you can bet nobody gained anything from that exchange.

What happened? How did a simple question turn into a screaming match?

In your mind, the other person "just doesn’t get it". But here’s the problem – in their mind, YOU "just don’t get it".

And what’s even WORSE is having ANY kind of emotional discussion (read: argument) by phone or email. NEVER do that if you can avoid it.

So how can this possibly be resolved without endless fighting and eventually maybe even breaking up?

When a "discussion" escalates into an argument, all sense and reason seems to leave the building. At that point, it’s all EGO, and going downhill hard. Everybody is getting puffed up trying to one-up the other person by saying something just a little more hurtful in response to what they just heard last. A guaranteed path to achieving nothing useful.

Could you agree to disagree?

Imagine…