Lyme Temper

I lost my temper, oh, about a week ago now.  It’s not that I lost my temper at myself, I do that daily.  No, I lost my temper at someone else.  Here’s why:

 

My Dad’s girlfriend, Brazil lives with us.  She can go weeks without saying a word to me.  It’s improved slightly the last few weeks, but that’s mostly because I initiate the little pleasantries that let the other person know that they are acknowledged as a fellow human being: hello, good morning, welcome home, please pass the salt, &c.  To her benefit, she has begun to get the hint and occasionally done the same.

 

I’m use to being the bad guy when it comes to others; just ask my mother, I can also be quite deliberately cruel at times.  Not so much cruel, but honest – I say what I see and far too often I see it correctly and that hurts people to hear it.  I don’t like that I am this way inclined (and I have made the extra effort to be anything but to Brazil – up ‘till today), but I recognize my faults and live with them.  What I cannot live with is a person who will not talk to me.  For a person who is supposedly one of the world experts in Non Violent Communication (NVC), she never expresses her needs and wants.  Pulling teeth would be easy compared to getting her to say ‘hello’.  This is what I lost my temper at.

 

It was a little thing that set it off - it always is.  When words were finally exchanged, she expressed something that cut to the core of the matter.  She stated that she did not think I am ill.  She believes that my life is not in danger and she believes that all this trouble is nothing more than moodiness coupled with an eating disorder.  For those of you who have read my blog, you might understand why this hurts.  It’s exactly the kind of thinking that caused me to become ill and I think that this is the crux of the trouble between us.

 

Certainly, this goes against what my doctors say. It goes against what the blood tests say, it goes against what the symptoms say, and it goes against what I say.  I would expect someone looking in from the outside to call me a liar, the local medical establishment does this everyday though the simple act of denying the medical treatment I need to get better.  I suppose that under certain circumstances, like the self preoccupation of moving to a new country and becoming established in a dream career, that perhaps the preconceived notions of what I am would take dominance over the facts.  Sure, I can believe that.  What I have trouble with is that it’s not just me she is calling a liar; it is also the man she says she loves.

 

My dad has given up every financial asset he had to fight this infection.  His actions as well as words tell me that he is wholly committed to helping me get my life back.  Does she believe that he is lying too?  Maybe she thinks that he is the kind of man who would say one thing and do another – as you can see, he is not.  Or maybe she just thinks he’s stupid and misguided.  He has quite literally given up EVERYTHING and she doesn’t care about how important this is to him?  How can she be so cruel to him?  How can she expect him to just stop because she thinks that I’m not really ill?

 

She asked me, Would I rather she had not come?  I’ve thought about this for a while now and you know what?  Honestly?  I would rather she had not come at this time.  That’s not an absolute statement saying that I wish she didn’t come live with us.  I wouldn’t say that.  But you see, right now she is a greater stress in my life than anything else.  Even greater than those little Lyme bacteria.  But she is here now and I’m a problem solver looking for a way to make this work.

 

I asked dad the same question and he said, that he would have rather her come two years ago so that she could have seen me healthy and then seen me ill, really ill, we’re talking death bed ill.  Then seen the year it took to get a diagnosis (and the many experts who ruled out eating disorders and depression) while we scrambled around in the dark trying to find and eliminate everything from my diet and environment that made the symptoms worse.  He thinks that maybe then she would believe.  He (idealistically I think) believes that maybe then she might care if she had seen how much we both have lost and how much struggle we have gone through to get to a point where I am well enough to get out of bed every day.  He’s aware of her beliefs towards me and has known about them longer than I have.  I can see how much pain it causes him.

 

I wish that if she had to live with us that she would have come two years hence when I would be well enough to be self sufficient.  Then I would be well enough to deal with the stress of not being able to communicate with someone I live with.  Six months now with one conversation and that involved far too much yelling for my fancy.  As I’ve experienced in the past with my own mother, when you stop talking to someone you live with, you don’t know their wants and their needs.  When you don’t know that, your own opinions and predigests take over and it’s darn near impossible to hear the other person, if you do begin to talk again, over your own ideas of how things stand.  That’s where trouble starts.

 

I don’t know her wants, needs or intentions and it is giving me a stomach ache.  I’m doing my best not to jump to conclusions, but without a dialogue... how can I not think she despises me?  -  Facial expressions and body language confirm this theory.  That and her actions; but, can I trust her actions to tell me the truth when they contradict what she says (not to me, not lately)?  I’m not smart enough to sort out which is true: actions or words.  -  And if that was true, if she does despise me, how could my father bring someone into my home (our sanctuary) who thinks we are both liars and that my existence is inconvenient?  But maybe that’s not how she feels.  I’ll never know if she won’t talk.  I’ve asked her to tell me, I even suggested we bring in a family councillor to her and was met with a sneer.  Perhaps she’s too proud as an expert in NVC not able to solve her own communication problems?  But that’s my own ideas filling in the blanks again.  That’s the problem with the human brain, we cannot leave things blank so we, when no other evidence presents itself, we fill in the blanks with our own thoughts.  Gestalt psychology would do well to investigate communication deficits.  I know I’m not the only one doing this but I have done the first step towards fixing things: I’ve asked her questions.  I’ve simply received no answers.  How can I not fill in the blanks for myself if she won’t communicate?

 

The point is that I just don’t know and if this cannot be solved within a year of living with us then I will exercise my veto on this little experiment.

 

 

 

The point of this story is two fold.  Firstly and obviously, it’s me no longer trying to be nice.  And certainly yes, I would say this to her face if she would stand still long enough.  But it would seem that the best way to be an expert in communication is to not communicate: Not to listen nor to talk, simply believe what you always believed and life will be fine.  I’ve held off stating this out of respect for my father who it kills me to see in the middle of this conflict.  But 6+ months of being nice has not remedied the situation and it does as much harm to his health as it does mine. 

 

Secondly, this is an analogy for what society says and does.  The same contradictions hold: I’m told that health care is a right and should have access to the treatment I need (expert in communication) but am denied access to it (not talked to).  It’s the same kind of thinking and the same contradictions of behaviour, words and values that caused this health crisis for myself and countless others in Canada.  We don’t have the communication between the ‘experts’ and the patients because both sides think that they know best.  That just perpetuates the situation until something snaps.

 

Snap.