Why I Feel Like Screaming When My Partner Is Being Nice

Thomas Fiffer shines a light on the lingering effects of emotional abuse.

___

Recently I read an article by Martin Scorcese in The New York Review of Books about how he came to love movies—watching them and ultimately making them.

Scorcese identifies several aspects of cinema that make it special, among them what he calls the inference, in which, when the director cuts between two images, “you experience a third image in your mind’s eye that doesn’t really exist in those two other images.”

An image that exists in the director’s mind, that he or she wants you to see.

An image transferred from one mind to another, almost telepathically.

When I think of the inference, the word that comes to mind is intimate.

Not intimate the adjective, but intimate the verb.

We intimate the third image.

We experience it in the interior, deeply emotional space of our imagination.

We see what we feel would happen and suggest it to ourselves, playing the image on our mind’s own screen.

We see what we feel, because there is no time to think between cuts.

No time to weigh and consider what the missing image might be.

No time to reflect.

Only a split second to react.

But our reaction does not come from nowhere.

Our reaction flows from what already exists inside of us—from the thoughts, beliefs, judgments, and perceptions that are already lodged there—interacting with the surrounding images being projected.

And so it is with close, intimate relationships.

Partners communicate with words and also with silence.

And when partners’ thoughts, beliefs, judgments, and perceptions of each other are aligned and in sync, what they intimate to one another and infer from these quiet intimations, matches, engendering a spirit of peace, harmony, and understanding.

It’s always nice to say, “I love you,” but sometimes, you don’t have to say it.

Those lovely words sit there in the silence.

The words, though unsaid, are heard.

If however, the dynamic between partners is negative, unhealthy, and destructive, other words are heard, even when they’re not spoken.

I despise you.

I’m disappointed in you.

I have no respect for you.

You drive me crazy.

You make me sick.

I don’t like the way you handle things.

You’re always screwing up.

I hate what you’ve done to my life.

You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I can never forgive you.

These unspoken words live in the space between other, less direct communication.

And these words stand as silent testimony to the misalignment (and maligning), to the cold war that replaces the warmth of intimacy, to the disharmony (and constant dissing), to the absence of understanding (and endless misunderstandings), to the shivering truth that one—and often both—partners are afraid to speak.

And this third image, between the thousand cuts, gets burned into our brains.

And this is why, even when a partner who’s cut us to the quick, stabbed us where we’re vulnerable and twisted the knife, left us to bleed out, wounded us countless times, and walked away gloating, even when that person actually says or does something gentle and genuinely nice, something respectful and restorative, something supportive and sustaining … that is why, even then, these actions constitute too little, too late.

The third image, the indelible impression of the abuse, burned in by the blinding flash of all those flashpoints, cannot be ignored.

We see it every time we close our eyes.

It haunts our sleep and leaks into our dreams.

And we find ultimately that we cannot be intimate with someone who has violated us—emotionally, psychologically, sexually.

It no longer matters what apologies they offer, what promises they make, what words they say to try to undo actions and erase other words already said.

Because what we hear is … the unspoken language of cinema.

And what we see in our mind’s eye is … the persisting vision.

Originally published on Tom Aplomb

Photo—Andrew Yee/Flickr

The post Why I Feel Like Screaming When My Partner Is Being Nice appeared first on The Good Men Project.