My Mother's Rules: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Emotional Genius by Lynn Toler

My Mother's Rules: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Emotional Genius by Lynn Toler

Author:Lynn Toler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-11-06T08:45:00+00:00


THE RULES

The Doctrine of Family 11

RULE NUMBER ig : Understand the He, Me, and We of It

There are three people in any marriage. You, your spouse, and the thing you become when the two of you get together. When you get married, you must change. Things that worked well when you were single will not necessarily work any more. You have to look to see how the best and worst of you brings out the best or worst in the other person. Then you must adjust what it is you do so that things work out the way you want and need them to, for the both of you.

Case in Point: One day, Mom hit me in the head with a pillow and said, "You had better stop apologizing to him." Then she pointed out that one of my better traits had combined with one of my husband's less admirable ones and turned into a mistake.

All my life, Mom had trained me to look at Lynn Toler first whenever anything went wrong. Unfortunately, my husband thought that was a fine idea, and began blaming me for every problem that he had. So every time something went wrong, I would admit to any part I played in it, no matter how insignificant or small. My husband would then seize upon that point as the sole focus of his concerns. It got so bad that one day he blamed me for the fact that he'd forgotten his wallet, even though I wasn't with him when he did it. "If you would let me open up the window at night and get some air," he said, "I'd sleep better and wouldn't forget things." Thus identified as the biggest problem in his life, I became the target of all his anger.

So even though taking responsibility is a good thing, in general, I had to change. I had to be much more careful about saying mea culpa so he'd stop seeing me as the be-all, end-all bitch who was the source of all his problems.



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