5.7 Conflict

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information, see right.

It took me a few weeks to relax. I thought Pat was going to diagnose me, stick a label on me, pack me up and send me off home with a treatment plan, like doctors did. It was the label I dreaded most. My ailments were mine. They were particular to me. No one else suffered in the way I did. I wanted to be treated like an individual.
    And that was exactly what Pat did. She asked question after question, probing ever deeper. She listened without comment. To both of us, both Frog and me, and to each of us in turn. And when one of us was speaking, the other wasn’t allowed to interrupt.
    It was the first time in my life I’d ever been able to speak about myself freely. Indeed, it was the first time in my life I’d ever been allowed to have thoughts and feelings. And I think it was the same for Frog.

I learnt a lot about him. I knew the facts but he’d never properly talked to me about the attached feelings. Perhaps he thought I’d understand automatically.
    I learnt that when he was a young child (six years old?) and fell off the desk and broke his nose and was sent to hospital for plastic surgery – which I already knew about - he only saw his parents once a week. The rest of the time they waved at him through a glass door. This was terrifying and devastating for him.
    I learnt that when Fran left it was a complete shock. They’d been together for nearly five years – since she was sixteen and he was twenty-one – and she was his first serious girlfriend. They’d met at a folk club and he’d followed her down to Exeter when she started at the university. He’d had no idea she was carrying on with one of their housemates.
    I began to understand that he feared abandonment. He feared rejection. He didn’t trust his own instincts. He couldn't trust that I really loved him, that I wouldn't suddenly go. He needed from me more reassurance than I could give him, because of course I had my own troubles.
    As a child he’d been traumatised by listening to his parents argue. Then, when he was a teenager and started to help his mother, he had to be strong. He couldn’t burden her with his own problems because she had enough of her own. He had to try and sort his problems out by himself. He still thought this was how he had to behave.
    Not only was it a revelation to me that he had these feelings, but it was a revelation to me that he had feelings at all. I’d always thought of men as creatures from another planet. They didn’t understand very much at all. They didn’t speak the same language as women. In fact, they hated women and did their best to imprison them. I didn’t trust them and I’m not sure I even particularly liked them, except for my two brothers.
    This conclusion was partly as a result of my experience and partly due to the way my mother treated my father – with disdain but from a position of servitude, servitude being the position for women of her generation (but that's another story).

I was surprised about myself too. I was surprised by how much I cried and what I cried about. The tears arrived without warning. They rose from somewhere deep inside and shook my whole body.
    I was surprised by the fact that Pat let me cry. She didn’t offer comfort. She didn’t say anything. She just handed me tissues and waited while the spasm passed.

The sessions exhausted us both and we went home raw, wondering if we could survive another week, just the two of us together. Pat must have known this as she always sent us off with a hug and something positive to take away, some new way to behave, some new idea, and she always rang halfway through the week to check on us.

Then the sessions moved on and we began to talk about our feelings for each other – our grievances – and again we weren’t allowed to interrupt each other. These too were a revelation. Why had Frog never told me all this before? Why had he flown into a rage instead and punched the wall? Why had I never taken my own grievances seriously? Why had I always dismissed them and blamed myself?
    Pat was the referee we so desperately needed, but sometimes she lost control too and Frog and I began hurling complaints at each other as we had at home, without the violence but worse in other ways as we didn’t hold back.
    Slowly, slowly though, we began to understand the fundamental principle of conflict. It was OK. In fact it was inevitable. Grievances mattered but you had to be constructive otherwise you made the situation worse. And to be constructive you restricted yourself to talking about your own feelings rather than blaming the other person. You had to confess. You had to be vulnerable. ‘I’ not ‘you’.
    For instance, when Frog began laying into me about refusing his sexual advances, saying ‘We’re married. I’m allowed to touch you whenever I want,’ Pat would stop him and say, ‘But how did you feel when Belinda refused you?’
    And Frog would start crying and it would all come out all over again about being separated from his parents, about Fran leaving without warning. He couldn’t read me – or at least he didn’t trust what he read. He was afraid of losing me.
    And then she would turn to me and say, ‘And how did you feel when Frog reacted to you like this?’
    ‘I felt angry.’ I said. ‘But I didn’t feel I had a right to be angry. I felt upset that Frog didn’t understand my point of view. I didn’t know how to express my point of view. It was so outlandish, so unlike what other people said that I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I felt like I didn’t matter. I was just a piece of meat. A possession. I was disgusted.’
    And then I would start crying too.

What a quagmire. No wonder we’d struggled. And loving each other as much as we did made it worse. We loved each other with our souls as well as every other part of ourselves. To lose each other, we would lose everything.

To be continued . . .