This morning Sandy raised his voice and expressed his frustration with Eliot and I as he was busy trying to herd the clan out the door. It was legitimate, but I realized that his ability and willingness to get vocally upset powers his influence.
This is how the male dominating dynamic works: man uses anger to express his opinion. Regardless of whether the other more submissive person agrees, he, but probably more often, she defers in order to diffuse the anger. But in deferring, the man assumes that his opinion is fact because he won the argument. That then creates a sense of self-rightness, maybe self-righteousness.
I have commented before about Sandy’s general lack of guilt. When he expresses remorse, it follows the “I’m sorry, but…” approach to life. I shared with him that I noticed that whenever there is an accident he has to assign blame – usually to someone else. He knocks over something, “dammit, if you hadn’t…,” or if he is rough-housing and slightly injures a kid, “I’m sorry, but you shouldn’t have….” Maybe he was taught accidents are preventable and someone is always at fault. To my very clumsy self, sometimes accidents happen. At the time, I was commenting on it because Auden had fallen from his kitchen chair . He was standing on it, and as Auden topples over and screams, Sandy’s first words were something like, “dammit, i told you to stop standing on your chair.” Whereas, my first thoughts were, “are you ok? can we make it better?” I had mentioned this to Madeline as illustrating Sandy’s lack of compassion. She pointed out, that it doesn’t make Sandy any less compassionate in thought and feeling. This is simply how Sandy deals with a crisis – he identifies the problem as quickly as possible and tries to prevent it from happening again. My response in a crisis is to treat the symptoms and then investigate later (if at all) about the cause. Sometimes his approach works better and sometimes my approach works better.
In London, he had something of an altercation with a guy behind a counter. The guy outyelled him. In fact, the guy got so mad so fast that I wonder if the emotional side of Sandy had any idea how to react. Instead of getting angry right back at the guy, he apologized. Which pissed off Sandy inside, but Sandy kept it in and deferred. I bet that that cashier thought he was in the right in the end.
I told all of this to Madeline today, growing teary as I recounted stories of Sandy’s impatience and low tolerance for what he probably sees as incompetency. Many of these scenarios, at least the ones that I remember and retell, are when Sandy snaps at one of us. After some prodding, Madeline made me see that even in this I was attributing intention and meaning to the behavior rather than acknowledging that it is a behavior. I.e., I say, “Sandy has no compassion. Here’s my evidence,” which is of course, a hypothesis. All I really know is that Sandy behaves as if he has little patience and raises his voice and reacts angrily easily. This does not impugn Sandy as being without compassion. She stated that she doesn’t condone the behavior because it hurts others, but I cannot ascribe motive and meaning to the behavior.
She’s clearly correct: I was inferring intent to hurt because I am hurt (or I feel as if the boys are hurt). I suspect that I have been doing this since I was a child.