Conflict

Tom from Children's Aid will be here once, perhaps twice more before he decides whether or not he can trust us with children, and if so, what kind of children.
We've finally moved off my childhood, which is a relief. I think Tom has simply given up on trying to understand that period of my life. I can't say I blame him. I don't understand that period of my life.

During a job interview, my wife was once asked, "how do you deal with deadlines?" Her response: "I meet them. I didn't know I had a choice."
I was tempted to answer last session's big question--"how do you deal with your anger?"--in the same flippant yet serious tone. Deal with anger? I just do. But that wasn't good enough for Tom; he kept trying to paint me into a corner. It was almost like he was trying to force a confession out of me. "Yeah, every once in a while, when I'm really pissed, I just haul off and punch people. Then I feel better."

Herewith, my mini-lecture on emotions. This is based on material from the Conversations with God series, and it's among many things from that series I try to keep in the back of my mind.

There are five natural emotions: grief, anger, envy, fear, and love. The last two, fear and love, are not only emotions themselves, but also filters for ALL emotion.
LOVE is a natural filter. If you take any of those natural emotions and filter them through love, you get a natural state. But if you use the other filter, FEAR, you get a corrupted, unnatural, damaging state.
To wit:

Grief, filtered through love, becomes sadness and mourning. Filtered through fear, it becomes despair and depression.
Anger, filtered through love, becomes compassion and a desire to correct or heal. Filtered through fear, it becomes rage.
Envy, filtered through love, yields a desire to grow. Filtered through fear, you get jealousy.
Fear, filtered through love, results in caution. Filtering fear through more fear results in panic.
Love, in the total absence of all fear, means freedom. Filter love through fear and you get possessiveness.

I try to always filter my emotions through love. I don't always succeed. But the nice thing about failing at this is that it's really easy to tell you've failed. All you have to do is stop and ask yourself what you're feeling. Is it natural? Or not? If not, where did the fear come from and how do you address it?

When I let fear mix with my anger, it's usually a stupid kind of fear: the fear of being wrong or appearing silly. Or it's a fear of being out of control--fear of the unknown. None of these are anything to be frightened of...or angry about. I've been wrong a lot, and it hasn't killed me yet. I've looked pretty damn silly, but few people think me stupid. And we all confront the unknown every single day just by getting out of bed.
If you let your emotions get the better of you, you can very easily forget all that.
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There came a telling moment midway through the session with Tom that I think convinced him just how different we are. While discussing anger, I mentioned that I kept a daily diary for the years 1988-1990, and related an anecdote contained therein. Eva confirmed that she had read the story, whereupon Tom blinked. (If you make a social worker blink, congratulations: you've shocked him.) "You've read his diary?" Tom asked Eva. I answered: "Of course she has--it was one of the first things I had her do when I realized we were getting serious. That's my life in there, and we were going to start sharing lives."
I can't be sure, but I think he blinked again. "That's the first time I've discussed somebody's diary with three people in the room."
Hopefully it won't be the last. I've shared my diary with everybody I've been attached to. You can learn a lot about a prospective partner from her reaction to your words penned years ago. One ex made the mistake of thinking decade-passed crushes and infatuations were still fresh in my head. Other people have simply wondered why I would share something so ostensibly private. That's easy: in opening up to someone, you expose your every flaw. If they can accept them all, you have the basis for a relationship.
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Next week, we are to discuss things Eva and I disagree on, and Tom warned us that he will try to provoke conflict to see how we deal with it.
This'll be fun.
Eva and I differ in a whole host of ways, most of them trivial. She, for instance, loves her television, whereas I (mostly) detest it...but don't separate me from my computer! Eva makes every effort to avoid news, while I seek it out. I confess I tend to seize on the worst-case scenario nearly every time, but then let it ago upon being reassured (admittedly, sometimes it takes three or four reassurances); Eva examines every possible scenario and loses sleep in the process. Stress impedes me; Eva thrives on it, to the point where its absence--on vacation, for example--will make her sick. And then, while she's sick, in the manner of women everywhere, you'd scarcely know it; I, meanwhile, treat every sniffle as an urgent call for immediate total bed rest. My wife has a deep and abiding love for all things animal; aside from pets (and a narrow definition of them at that--dogs and cats, mostly)--I don't care about animals one way or the other.

These aren't the sort of differences that provoke arguments. I've mostlly been cured of those. They invariably had to do with prejudice, things I hadn't bothered to think about. Some of them:

--tattoos and especially exotic piercings are for the criminal element. Yes, I believed this. I knew it to be true, actually. Look how many movies depict jailbirds with murals inked all over their bodies? And anybody willing to mutilate their own flesh by means of poking a bunch of holes in it might not hesitate to mutilate somebody else's, so you better stay clear.

Hard to believe I thought this way, once. I still shy away at inflicting pain on myself, but I was forced to re-evaluate my impressions on the matter when I met my wife, who has four tattoos and counting, and has also poked holes in her flesh.

Another thing pointing to my shallowness at one time: I didn't want to buy a house unless it was (a) a single detached and (b) in a "good" neighbourhood.
I'll never forget the first move we made as a family. It was 1980, and we were relocating to London...to a rented townhome. Upon realizing the finances weren't good enough at the time to get us a "proper" house, my mother burst into tears. To her way of thinking, living in a townhouse forever stained you as poor.
I've since lived--quite happily--in another townhouse, as well as a few apartments and semi-detached houses. But some of my mother's irrationality stuck with me, and I regarded such dwellings as temporary, things to be endured until I could afford a "real" house.
The "good neighbourhood" injunction was obvious. There's an old real estate maxim that states you should aim to buy the worst house in the best neighbourhood you can find. The house can be fixed up; it's much harder to "fix" a ghetto.
I've softened my stance on all this. Our neighbourhood is, by and large, pretty good. I admit I could do with a few less university students...it'll take more than ten years to wash that particular prejudice out. But few areas are so bad I would avoid living in them on general principle. And our semi-detached house is every inch a home I'm proud of.

One more--Vancouver is instituting safe injection sites for its population of addicted men and women. I was bitterly against this before Eva clarified my thinking. Why perpetuate people's addictions? I thought. The best thing to do with these people would be to lock them up, far from their "supply", and let them normalize. And if a few of them die in the process, well, then there'll be a few less brain-addled junkies in the world.
Real humane of me, don't you think? Eva very calmly told me that these brain-addled junkies were the remains of human beings from all walks of life. (I didn't understand this...having never felt the need to do drugs, I trivialized that need in other people. That's probably one of my worst faults: if I haven't had the experience of it, it doesn't exist, or isn't valid. I still need my nose rubbed in this on occasion.) Anyway, the downtown Eastside in Vancouver has the biggest concentration of AIDS cases in North America, and nobody needs or wants that scourge spreading around. And these people are human beings, people who no longer care about themselves, people whom nobody else cares about either. What could possibly be wrong with showing these folks that somebody does care, that somebody doesn't want them to die? Who knows, it might restore a sense of self worth, and then a life.
Not to mention--they'll take the drugs anyway, safely or not. Why not make it as safe as possible?

Doubtless more of these little pockets of alien thinking will surface in the years ahead. When confronted with one of these, Eva tends to say "Huh?! What the HELL are you thinking?" , dust her hands off, and dig into my brain, changing things as she goes, always for the better.

Conflict? Yes, we have it. But it's far from a defining point in this relationship. I hope, if nothing else, we can convince Tom of that.