“As he should be,” she agreed easily. “Good partners are always aware of their person’s state.”
“Wait.” I regarded her skeptically. “You just told me that we shouldn’t be trying to read minds, and now you’re saying that good partners read minds.”
She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Ok, true. But to me, there’s a difference between expecting your partner to read your mind and being an active partner who pays attention to cues. Yes, they overlap, but not entirely. It’s appropriate for him to be aware of things that might trigger you; it’s not appropriate of him to expect you to somehow intuit that, say, he didn’t want you to take that phone call.”
Ehhhh. Sounded fishy to me. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but she went on before I could: “So I think it’s valid for him to be aware - even hyper-aware - of your struggles at this point in time, and to do his best to accommodate them. But I also think he gets to make the call for himself about whether it’s too much for him.”
Thanks, I hated it. “But he’s too nice to just be like ‘Yeah, you’re too much for me’.”
“Do you trust him?”
“In what sense?” I countered suspiciously.
“To know his own mind and his own needs.”
Another question with a clear right and wrong answer. I sighed. “Of course.”
“So at what point do you have to just trust that he’ll tell you the truth?”
I heaved another pointed sigh, but she just continued to stare at me, waiting. “I guess,” I finally ventured uncertainly, “that I don’t actually completely trust him to tell me the truth, if he thinks the truth will hurt or traumatize me.”
She considered that. “Is that perhaps something you need to talk to him about?”
“What, ‘Hey honey I don’t trust you’?”
“No.” She shook her head. “More like ‘Hey honey I’m going to need you to be honest with me about your needs, because I don’t feel, in my current state of mind, that I can read them to the level I’d otherwise expect of myself’.”
That was a whole lot of words. I tried to imagine myself sitting Jamison down and telling him that, and mentally shied away. “That seems…really blunt.”
She nodded agreeably. “It is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not something that needs to be said to keep your relationship healthy.”
“But…” Even I could hear the whine in my voice. “Won’t it hurt his feelings, to hear that I don’t trust him?”
“Did I say that?” she countered smoothly. “There was no mention of trust in what I suggested.”
I thought back. Ok, there hadn’t been. “But that’s basically what I’d be saying.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it is. I mean, if trust comes into it at all, you’d actually be saying you don’t trust yourself, but really it’s not a question of trust. It’s a question of emotional capacity at this point in time. Yours is understandably low right now.”
“And he’s just expected to live with that?”
“Ah.” She tapped her fingertip on the arm of her chair. “Listen to what you just said. How did we circle back to what’s expected ofhim? We were talking aboutyourcapacity.”
“Well…” I thought about it. “Ok, point. But…”
She tapped her finger again. It made hardly any noise, but somehow it succeeded in shutting me up as if she’d banged a gong. “Here’s another homework assignment: for the next week, every time you find yourself thinking about what Jamison can do, should do, is thinking, might think…challenge yourself. Ask yourself what therealquestion is, framed in terms of what you actually can do and knowyourself.”
That sounded like a lot of mental gymnastics. She must have been able to see that on my face, because she smiled slightly and simplified, “In other words, when you start worrying about your partner’s actions and thoughts, often you’re avoiding the real issue, which is your own mindset. So challenge yourself on that. See what you come up with for alternate interpretations.” She paused, considering. “And also,” she appended, “if it ends up actually being about him, once you’ve thought about it:talkto him.”
I let out ahmph. Why did she have to be so logical? I just wanted to wallow. Even though I knew that would, at best, accomplish nothing and, at worst, ruin things between me and Jamison. So…could I do it, ‘challenge’ myself as Gay suggested? I guessed I would have to try. I selfishly didn’t want to lose Jamison, even if I did think he’d probably be better off without me dragging him down. “I’ll try,” I finally allowed. “But it’s hard.”
“It often is,” she said with an agreeable nod. “But that’s not a strong reason to not do something that’s otherwise for the best.”
“Do they teach you these lines in therapy school?”
Her smile didn’t waver. “Absolutely. That’s why it costs so much: someone has to write all the lines.”
That got a snorted laugh out of me. “Fiiiine,” I whined. “I’ll try, for real. But sometimes I get so caught up in my head that actually saying anything out loud is…harder than it has any right to be for a normal human being.”
