I’m sure I surprise Laura when she’s feeling good (and usually frisky) and I am disconnected/uninterested. It’s probably equally surprising when I respond positively to the invitation to drive in to work with her. She never knows what to expect from me, not because I’m totally unpredictable but because she is completely clueless about how to recognize my moods.
I can see her efforts to try to give me what I want/need (like leaving a shelf for me and buying pickles) but so long as I remain a mystery to her I won’t feel safe with her. The fact that she continually misunderstands and misreads me means that the only thing I can rely on is having her react in ways that don’t match up with what’s happening. She tries to coddle me when I don’t need coddling and she tries to fix me when I don’t need or am not ready for fixing.
The problem isn’t that she doesn’t understand – that happens to everyone. Misunderstanding each other is almost the defining feature of mortal interaction. The problem is that she is unable to accept when she is misunderstanding and respond by taking a non-judgmental, hands off attitude to gain that understanding.
My driving motivation in life is to build people but she continually accuses me of trying to break them. She doesn’t trust that I have reasons for almost everything I do – she thinks I’m just a man at the end of my wits most of the time.
On top of that, I’ve given up on building her because she fights every attempt to help her. I’ve resigned myself to watching her thrash though her issues. I no longer try to pad the rails as she crashes against them nor try to help her understand the pathway out of her corral because she always thinks I’m just trying to tie her down (this is a direct result of her lack of trust and her failure to recognize my primary motivation).
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