I’m getting closer to being able to name and understand this pattern after friction or rupture in relationships with people heavily invested in their rightness and entitlement, and equally invested in my wrongness and unworthiness.
When the conversation—tilts into litigation mode, they get to focus on proving the impeccability of their form while pointing to my “sensitivity” and inability to percieve correctly as THE problem. Historically I offered up the gift of distraction – with high reactivity- my increasing escalation or full on collapse. Having withdraawn these unfortunate ways of feeding the binary dynamic, has not been well-recieved, which at first made no sense, to me. I was like “let’s celebrate”- Now we can really focus on repair—right? Wrong.
When I limit my communication to the question of “what we can each do to make this better for us”, it has been treated as an act of hostility or insolence – their focus and commitment are to their authority, rightness, and excellence of form. Because if they are right and in perfect form, then the only problem is the person who notices the problem or reacts imperfectly to it. When I fail to degrade myself in escalation or collapse, I am consistently met with stone cold silence.
There is a specific exhaustion in holding the map while being told the map is the problem:
- I am seeking progress toward a shared intention.
- They are seeking consensus.
- I am seeking a plan.
- They are working on their untouchable closing statement.
