The War of Narrative

A

s mentioned earlier, most relationships

are founded on a

war of narratives

in which competing mythologies jockey for the dominant position.

Love and Mythology

How many times in relationships do we have the following interaction:



        

“Hey, that really hurt me, what you just said.”



        

“I had no desire to hurt you, you must be oversensitive, or must have misunderstood me. I’m sorry that you are so upset.”

The first statement is a statement of fact, the second statement is a statement of

mythology

.

For about six months, Christina

and I had lengthy conversations about what I called “zinging.”

Christina

would say something that hurt me, and I would express my surprise and upset. With total sincerity, she would apologize for the fact that I got hurt, claiming that she had no intention to hurt me, that she had no idea that it would be hurtful, and so on. To her endless credit, she did not say or imply that I was oversensitive or paranoid.

I replied that I completely believed that she did not consciously want to hurt me – since that would be sadistic, and thus would be a complete deal-breaker as far as the relationship

went.

This was very confusing for her, of course, and was a great challenge to her sense of her own virtue

and benevolence. As we continued to work on this problem of, “Stef gets hurt despite the fact that Christina has no desire to hurt him,” we did slowly get to the point where Christina was willing to explore her own history, and how she was never really apologized to in her own childhood, after she was hurt.

Eventually, we got to the point where we understood that Christina

had been treated callously or cruelly at times in her childhood, and then when she expressed hurt everyone told her that no one had any intention to hurt her, that she was oversensitive, and so must have misunderstood the intentions of those around her. If she continued to express her upset, she was punished. When she was spanked, her mother would snap: “Why are you crying?”

The ironic thing about this all-too-typical interaction is that Christina

was in fact ignoring her

own

hurt feelings rather than mine – and those hurt feelings existed in

her

past, not in

my

present.

Human beings are in essence pattern-making machines. In her childhood, Christina

’s hurt feelings were endlessly minimized and ignored by others, and so a pattern was set up within her own mind, which was: “hurt = minimize.”

When her parents

hurt her, and she expressed pain, her parents then experienced pain themselves – since no one really wants to hurt someone they claim to love. (Certainly when Christina finally understood that she was in fact causing me pain through her stinging comments, it was very painful to her – both because she did not want to cause me pain in the present, and because she then re-experienced her own childhood pain.)

Since Christina

’s parents did not want to experience the pain and anxiety of having caused their child pain, they blamed

her

sensitivity and paranoia for causing her pain – and so, by extension, their pain.

In other words, it was fundamentally

their own pain

that they were minimizing – their dismissal of Christina’s criticisms was an effect of their own self rejection.

They rejected Christina

because they rejected themselves.