Today's "Daily Stoic" email landed heavy after an evening and night spent rallying my internal fortitude towards the goal of using all of his disrespectful actions to build a protective wall between myself and his blatant disregard. I feel a need to protect myself from further grief and pain, pain masked and portrayed as resentment and disbelief, to balance the control I don't want to afford him, or others to observe.
"They did something to you. They cost you something. They screwed something up. That's annoying, no question. It's expensive. It's a setback. But why are you making it worse? This is something both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca talk about. The event, the comment someone made, the mistake, the injury, whatever—that's one thing. But now by being angry, bitter, by ruminating on it, by responding impulsively, by becoming like your enemy or antagonist, you are adding to that injury. You are piling costs on top of costs."
It's a challenge to maintain this level of removal and awareness when my instinctual and learned response to a metaphorical "fuck you" is "fuck me? Fuck YOU!".
When asked not to leave a glass bottle filled with cold water sitting on the couch beside him earlier this week, I was met with defiance, resistance, and refusal. Saying "OK" and agreeing to the request would have been reasonable. Arguing the reasons was not. I picked up a nearby wooden tray for him to use instead of the fabric, but he refused it, too. We ended up wrestling with the bottle until I released it, at which point it splashed on the couch and the dog.
I was incensed by the complete default position of opposition to any and everything asked. This is how he was raised. By adoring fans and loyal servants, never setting boundaries or enacting consequences. And this is the clusterfuck I allowed, contributed to with my acquiescence, and then entirely inherited in her passing.
There is little I can or will ever be able to do now beyond setting boundaries and enacting consequences in an uphill battle to find some semblance of peace in the relationship. That means enduring the pushback about unlocked doors, unflushed toilets, and water rings left on fabric sofas. It means spending time and money automating door locks that inconvenience me and Jennifer, to avoid the very real possibility of theft of our property, or his, due to an unlocked front door being knocked on and unanswered. (This is one of the few times the dog's barking seems like a positive, yet a cracked door revealing wagging tails would defuse their effectiveness.)
As much as I wanted to smack him with the tray I was trying to get him to use to protect our furniture from water damage, it would have been unproductive to let my resentment manifest in doing so. The wrestling over it resulted in the very problem I had wanted to avoid.
I fully recognize my faults and failures in raising him, as well as his mom's idealistically unrealistic parenting ideas. I believe he's deeply damaged, insecure, has low self-esteem and is in pain a good deal of the time. I want to help him work through that, but not at the cost of being consistently snarled at and bitten.
At 4 AM this morning, I awoke to the sporadic clicking of Scottie's toenails on the wooden floor in our bedroom. Very brief, not moving much, just intermittent clicking. I woke to find him standing by his bed. He was trembling and it felt like he might have pee'd but I could find none. I took him outside briefly and brought him back in. I sat with and pet him until he calmed down and returned to his bed, still sporadically trembling. Maybe it was a nightmare. Maybe it's Jennifer's absence. Whatever the case, I didn't get annoyed that he woke me, or that he wasn't meeting my expectations that he would sleep through the night. I considered the circumstances.
Late last night, before the incident with the dog, Tommy came in and attempted to ease the tension from our earlier exchanges about the day's issues. I denied him my response beyond telling him to leave me alone and that I was not interested in arguing or talking. I was aware of the need to take such steps when dealing with a narcissist, which is how he presents in these repeated episodes. He said something along the lines of "don't go to bed angry," and I dismissed him and his "Is that what you want?" statement.
I don't want that. His mom and I had a sign over our bed for several years that said exactly that: Don't go to bed angry. Yet we eventually became complacent and content with going to bed unhappy, disconnected, and resigned to living an unfulfilling life. I don't want that, either.
Anger is an emotional reaction based on our expectations and judgments of what should be, yet lies beyond our control. That "Daily Stoic" passage above landed at just the right time this morning. It literally caused me to sigh, take a breath, and admit I had to look closely at the situation with less reaction, perhaps setting a better expectation of my limited influence while striving to model resolve and detachment from being as quick to respond to triggering behaviour as… well, shit, as he likely is, too.
"The parable of the two arrows, shared by Buddha, illustrates that while we can't always control the painful events in life (the first arrow), we can choose how we react to them, and this reaction (the second arrow) is often what causes greater suffering. The first arrow is the initial, unavoidable pain of a difficult situation, while the second arrow is the mental and emotional anguish we create through our reactions, thoughts, and narratives surrounding the first arrow."