From The Daily Dialogue
From The Daily Dialogue
Broadcast of 1/11/98
Subject: [DailyDialogue #11] Seeing My Partner as Wounded
"I first ran up against the wall of silence as a child. For days my mother would ignore me in order to demonstrate her total power over me and reduce me to subservience. She needed this power to disguise her own insecurities to others and to herself...As far as she was concerned, her behavior was justifiable punishment for my wrongdoing. She was as they say, 'teaching me a lesson.'" -- Alice Miller in Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: the liberating experience of facing the painful truth.
You and I were mistreated as children; make no mistake. The mistreatment differed in severity and kind; but it was present. As children, we initially reacted with frustration and outrage, and later learned to blame ourselves, cover it up, ignore it, and forget it. We carry scars of our experience in our psyche, mostly hidden and forgotten. Our reactivity and hypersensitivity today surprises and alarms: Why am I so upset about this, I ask myself?
Likewise, my partner and your partner were wounded. It was not her fault; she was innocent and remains innocent. She doesn't deserve blaming or criticism if she seems to overreact, or dramatizes. She deserves my continuing willingness to listen, mirror, and acknowledge her and my compassion for her as a fellow wounded person. Seeing my partner as wounded goes a long way toward making it OK when either of us seems out of sorts.
Experiment: Share a hypothesis about the childhood source of your last upset with your partner in dialogue today.
Affirmation: We are healing from the wounds of our childhood mistreatment by dialoging about the source of our present pain.
The Daily Dialogue is published each day of 1998 by e-mail. Copyright 1998, Eddy Brame and Marty Crouch, All rights reserved.
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