Don't be sorry for the crime you didn't commit. That's silly. But maybe consider being sorry for what just happened to the other person who you care about.
About the great guy who is stuck in the pattern of interrupting his wife.
After forty years of marriage this is what their control issues boil down to: he interrupts her, she gets pissed. The classic same-fight over and over and over.
The necessary self-control ignored and projected onto the Other, ad nauseum.
They are equal in their obstinacy to relinquish the cherished position.
They are equally stuck.
Whoever surrenders his or her defenses first will transform the relationship for both --
she in setting the trap, he in stepping right into it.
Whoever loves more will make the first move. The other will follow, or not.
It is not easy but necessary if they are to grow, as individuals and together.
No perpetrator, no victim: equals in the petty dynamics of control in relationship.
Do not let the great guy in group fool you. He is not yet honest.
Human beings are complex, but staying with the single experience as described between this man and wife, it may be their repeated impediment to breakthrough. He will solicit sympathy from the group and delay his awakening.
Our definition of love is ambiguous. Too often it is seen as emotional, sentimental or romantic, causing pain when there are, disappointments and difficulties.
I could say: whoever values the relationship more will do whatever it takes for it to remain and to thrive. It may take two to tango but there is always one who initiates the first step, no matter how subtle. Let it begin with me.
"Whatever it takes" means seeing my own role in the dynamic. The norm is to project what's wrong onto the partner. This is the perfect way for nothing to change.
What's most lacking is intelligent love. Another word for this is wisdom.
I was the one to take the first steps in the difficult but extremely valued by me relationship. I am the female but more active than my gentle, more passive man. I had to mature my interpretation of love. Many decades in Al-Anon kept me on track. One does not have to be with an alcoholic to benefit from the wisdom of this philosophy.
Thank you for your interest, Diane! All the very best to you.
Respectfully, I think you may be saying 2 very different things here?
1. Whoever VALUES the relationship more will do whatever it takes for it to remain and thrive.
2. What's most needed is WISDOM.
So is it actually the wisest person "takes the first step"? What is this "first step" that they are to take?
I can be the person who VALUES the relationship more (not sure how we'd quantify that, but let's go with the overall idea). While simultaneously also lacking the needed WISDOM (or awareness) of what's happening in the overall dynamic and/or my role within that the dynamic.
Is my problem that I don't value the relationship enough? Or that I lack the necessary wisdom?
Valuing something or someone, and having wisdom in life are not mutually exclusive.
Valuing is personal.
Wisdom is seeing the bigger picture on the world, and the human condition.
The first step... and the second, and the ten-thousandth! is increasing self-awareness.
Not to criticize or judge ourselves, but to see our role in the dynamics of any relationship, and to take responsibility, especially when it is difficult.
Most of us have personality patterns for better and for not. We learn to become an expert witness on our words, behaviors on the outside, and thoughts, beliefs and feelings on the inside.
We experience the consequences of how we are in our relationships - what makes for a great day and what leaves us angry or depressed.
I could write a big book on all this , but many have already been written.
It boils down to this:
"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." Then we add: the only thing I can change is myself.
Thanks again for your good questions, and have a beautiful day.
How do you prevent this attitude from discouraging introspection from the partner feeling hurt? I might be misunderstanding, but my read of your point (in this and other posts) is that you shouldn't tell your partner they are wrong to be hurt by your behaviour since it invalidates their experience. And that defending your behaviour as not reasonably hurtful is implicitly doing that too.
But what if they genuinely are misinterpreting your actions and/or being oversensitive to a reasonable action from you?
I worry your advice leads to both people having to avoid more and more things, even perfectly fine behaviour, over time as someone feels hurt by something. Sort of like a victim's veto.
This stuff is hard. It’s why I coach about it and we spend hours working on it.
I won’t be able to thoroughly answer your question here, and I’m sorry.
I’ll simply say this:
1. If you do things, and the other person experiences pain afterward (no matter how insane and bullshitty you and I might consider that to be), trust will erode in your relationship. You and I, as hard as we might try, will never get to decide if someone else SHOULD feel hurt because of something.
2. If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships.
Am I discounting the possibility that our partner is literally insane and unworthy of love and care in certain circumstances? Yes. I don’t waste time thinking and writing about con artists and people who are fabricating lies and manipulative drama.
I write with the assumption that you’re with a quality human being not intentionally deceiving you when they communicate problems and pains they’re having.
I also want to be clear that none of this is about right and wrong, or good and bad. This isn’t about being correct.
If I do something—anything—and pain results for someone else, and there’s nothing they can say or do to get me to try to be different tomorrow?
Trust will erode or vanish entirely in our relationship.
Independent of concepts like “who’s more right about this?” Is a the more important idea of maintaining and fostering trust in our most critical relationships.
It’s the only way for them to be healthy and lasting.
The alternative? Being single. A valid choice.
If we’re going to consistently choose what we think and feel over someone else, then it makes sense for them to not trust us in a committed partnership with them.
It’s important that this not be controversial because it’s kind of the only way to make it work.
I wish we could have a more specific conversation, though, because without all of the context and nuance there’s just no way for you and I (or you and your spouse/partner!) to be having the same conversation with one another.
I don’t think it’s okay for your partner to get mad at you or fight with you about something that is totally harmless.
I also don’t think it’s okay for other people to hurt as a result of our actions.
Healthy relationships and being trustworthy humans requires a bunch of uncomfortable and deliberate, thoughtful work in the messy middle of those two ideas.
If you’d like to share an example of a reasonable action that they are misinterpreting and being oversensitive about, I’d be happy to address it, though there’s no way for you and I to fully get to the truth about it without including and respecting the sensitive/hurt person’s lived experience.
So my concern is that what I understand from your approach is for people to be allowed to choose what they think and feel over someone else - if they think and feel that a behaviour hurts them. I'm checking if I've got that right, that you're saying there is no need to check or consider if a behaviour is genuinely hurting you or not before your partner has to change it or they are undermining trust.
To give a concrete example: I once asked a woman I was dating if there were any habits or behaviours I had which bothered her, and she said that she found my conversational style a bit domineering. Specifically, she felt I interrupted her frequently before she'd made her point. The interruptions she was talking about did happen, but she was talking about my habit of making verbal acknowledgments when someone is speaking to me. Things like 'OK', 'I see', or echoing a word or two back to them at the end of a sentence.
I understand different people can find different behaviour annoying or hurtful or benign or helpful. My issue isn't that she saw it as annoying and I saw it as a harmless habit at worst and at best a slightly active listening.
My issue is this: I could either have said 'Fair enough, I'll try and stop that' (I did say that in this case), or something like 'I hear that, but I'm not trying to interrupt you. I'm happy to let you keep talking and finish you point, and I do let you do that. I don't mean to annoy you, and sorry if I do, but these verbal tics are a habit of mine and I would ask you to reconsider if they are really interrupting and taking over the conversation or just my way of showing I'm listening.'
When you say that 'If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships' I read that as meaning if a person complains about my behaviour the solution is always for me to change it, and never for them to consider if the behaviour is actually harmful or they just need to adapt to me.
Is that right? And if it is, I go back to my initial question: How do you avoid this leading to both people curtailing more and more of their behaviour which the other person has raised an issue with as time passes, and neither person being encouraged to do any introspection about if they are being properly sensitive to the difference between actual harm and mere annoyance, or what the limits of reasonable tolerance is. And that doesn't seem a healthy or sustainable relationship either. I worry it would lead to resentment from both sides.
I'm not taking a side here. Or taking a position that I think anyone is "right" or "correct" here.
Everything is about trust. Can you trust your partner to communicate pains to you, and to not be some domineering, micromanaging asshole? If not, I'd encourage you to not pursue a relationship with her. Please don't let yourself be fucked with (and it doesn't sound to me like you do).
The problem, as I see it, is that most people have blind spots around how their behavior (well intentioned and not perceived as "bad" or "painful") is affecting someone else.
I promise I don't think you should just have to change everything you do all the time at the request of someone else.
Again, this stuff is subtle. The pains build up in long-term marriage and partnership over MANY years.
My work isn't about dating or partner selection, exactly, until you've decided they're someone you want to build a life with.
The "harm" I speak to is metaphorical. I'm a little mad at you for roping me into this. Again, this is what I do for work.
If I leave a drinking glass by the sink and my wife says it hurts her, it might be easy for you and I to think "That's bullshit. Cancer is serious. Knife wounds hurt. A stupid glass by the sink is NOT those things."
Logical. You're not wrong. I get it. I think and feel that way too.
So, if I always put the glass away because that's what I think my wife wants me to do, even though I'd prefer to do it a different way, might I feel resentment in a unhealthy marriage with little trust and poor communication practices? Absolutely. That's EXACTLY what my marriage was like before divorce.
I'm not asking you to be someone who always does what your partner wants you to do.
I'm asking you to be someone she can trust to CONSIDER -- to think about -- to NOT FORGET -- her when you do things.
For years, I left that drinking glass by the sink. It's not an "injury" in the traditional sense. It's not "harmful."
But it was disrespectful and trust eroding.
Every time my wife walked into the kitchen to find the glass by the sink, she could only conclude one of two possibilities.
1. I left the glass there on purpose, because fuck her, she's not my mom or my boss, and I'm not going to do something just because she tells me to. When what I want comes into conflict with what she wants, I'll always choose me over here.
One possibility. The other?
2. I left the glass their hurriedly and thoughtlessly. I left it there because I don't think about my wife at all when I do things. I was busy. I was on my way to work. I was something, but I didn't MEAN for it to feel bad to her. I wasn't making an intentional statement. I was just going about my life in a busy way, and failed to consider how it would feel to her.
And how would it feel to her? As if she's not someone I think about or calculate for when I make decisions. If I'm NOT doing these things in a dick-measuring way to exert my independence and manliness, then she guesses I'm doing it without any thought at all. She's not someone I see. She's not someone I hear. She's not someone I pay attention to. She's not someone important to me. She's not someone who can trust me to handle with care the things that matter to her.
So. Either, I do things which hurt on purpose. Because I'm more important to me than she is, in that really specific narcissistic way.
OR. I do things which hurt her by accident. Because I don't think about her as much as I do me. Because all my wants and needs are more real and more immediate and more obvious and more important to me than all of hers.
And that glass by the sink is the proof. Not the first time. Not the second time. Not in month one together.
But the 700th time. In Year 8 of the relationship. That's when the real, dark, gutting pain starts to set in for someone who realizes she (or he) will never be important enough to the other person.
I must admit you've lost me a bit. How can both of these be true at the same time?
1. If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships.
2. I'm not asking you to be someone who always does what your partner wants you to do.
My confusion here is precisely how the first doesn't imply the second. Is you point basically that I should seek relationships with people I am confident only ever come to me about things which really matter, having already considered when to tolerate and when to speak up?
I'm not Matthew, but FWIW, I think that if you want close relationships (and it's totally okay to not want to an intimate partner, or closeness)... but if you do, then you should indeed seek relationships with people you are "confident only ever come to you about things which really matter".
If you want trust, closeness and intimacy with another human being, then you'll respect *whatever* they tell you matters to them. Recognizing that they're telling you because it actually does matter to them. And that it therefore needs to matter to you - if you want to be close with them and have trust between you.
Again, totally okay if you don't want intimate relationships with others or a romantic partner. Only applicable if you do want that.
This sounds familiar! 11 years with my (second!) husband and I’m just beginning to appreciate that things just hit differently for him! Maybe it’s because he is a highly sensitive person? Maybe because he has misophonia? But if I do ANY of your classic “active listening” noises/comments/questions he hates it! Fortunately he is getting better at telling me and then moving on, and I am getting better at just shutting up rather than explain how correct active listening strategies are 😂
“You’re not bad. You probably didn’t do anything wrong. That’s not why we apologize.”
Your insights are so helpful. Please never stop sharing them. 💛
Thank you, Lindsey. 🙏
About the great guy who is stuck in the pattern of interrupting his wife.
After forty years of marriage this is what their control issues boil down to: he interrupts her, she gets pissed. The classic same-fight over and over and over.
The necessary self-control ignored and projected onto the Other, ad nauseum.
They are equal in their obstinacy to relinquish the cherished position.
They are equally stuck.
Whoever surrenders his or her defenses first will transform the relationship for both --
she in setting the trap, he in stepping right into it.
Whoever loves more will make the first move. The other will follow, or not.
It is not easy but necessary if they are to grow, as individuals and together.
No perpetrator, no victim: equals in the petty dynamics of control in relationship.
Do not let the great guy in group fool you. He is not yet honest.
You get it.
No being fooled, though, I don’t think. He seems very forthcoming and supportive of his wife in the group conversations.
I didn’t mean to imply that he doesn’t have work to do! He has lots of repair work to do before he’ll be able to have the relationship he wants. ♥️
Thank you for sharing here, Constance.
Thanks for this, Matthew!
Human beings are complex, but staying with the single experience as described between this man and wife, it may be their repeated impediment to breakthrough. He will solicit sympathy from the group and delay his awakening.
"Whoever loves more will make the first move."
I don't think that's true?
It isn't a lack of love that causes these difficulties with repair. Is it?
Our definition of love is ambiguous. Too often it is seen as emotional, sentimental or romantic, causing pain when there are, disappointments and difficulties.
I could say: whoever values the relationship more will do whatever it takes for it to remain and to thrive. It may take two to tango but there is always one who initiates the first step, no matter how subtle. Let it begin with me.
"Whatever it takes" means seeing my own role in the dynamic. The norm is to project what's wrong onto the partner. This is the perfect way for nothing to change.
What's most lacking is intelligent love. Another word for this is wisdom.
I was the one to take the first steps in the difficult but extremely valued by me relationship. I am the female but more active than my gentle, more passive man. I had to mature my interpretation of love. Many decades in Al-Anon kept me on track. One does not have to be with an alcoholic to benefit from the wisdom of this philosophy.
Thank you for your interest, Diane! All the very best to you.
Hi Candace, thank you for your reply.
Respectfully, I think you may be saying 2 very different things here?
1. Whoever VALUES the relationship more will do whatever it takes for it to remain and thrive.
2. What's most needed is WISDOM.
So is it actually the wisest person "takes the first step"? What is this "first step" that they are to take?
I can be the person who VALUES the relationship more (not sure how we'd quantify that, but let's go with the overall idea). While simultaneously also lacking the needed WISDOM (or awareness) of what's happening in the overall dynamic and/or my role within that the dynamic.
Is my problem that I don't value the relationship enough? Or that I lack the necessary wisdom?
How do you tell him that the "I'm sorry I made you feel that way" apology is crap when the act wasn't benign.
Hello Diane,
Valuing something or someone, and having wisdom in life are not mutually exclusive.
Valuing is personal.
Wisdom is seeing the bigger picture on the world, and the human condition.
The first step... and the second, and the ten-thousandth! is increasing self-awareness.
Not to criticize or judge ourselves, but to see our role in the dynamics of any relationship, and to take responsibility, especially when it is difficult.
Most of us have personality patterns for better and for not. We learn to become an expert witness on our words, behaviors on the outside, and thoughts, beliefs and feelings on the inside.
We experience the consequences of how we are in our relationships - what makes for a great day and what leaves us angry or depressed.
I could write a big book on all this , but many have already been written.
It boils down to this:
"Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." Then we add: the only thing I can change is myself.
Thanks again for your good questions, and have a beautiful day.
How do you prevent this attitude from discouraging introspection from the partner feeling hurt? I might be misunderstanding, but my read of your point (in this and other posts) is that you shouldn't tell your partner they are wrong to be hurt by your behaviour since it invalidates their experience. And that defending your behaviour as not reasonably hurtful is implicitly doing that too.
But what if they genuinely are misinterpreting your actions and/or being oversensitive to a reasonable action from you?
I worry your advice leads to both people having to avoid more and more things, even perfectly fine behaviour, over time as someone feels hurt by something. Sort of like a victim's veto.
This stuff is hard. It’s why I coach about it and we spend hours working on it.
I won’t be able to thoroughly answer your question here, and I’m sorry.
I’ll simply say this:
1. If you do things, and the other person experiences pain afterward (no matter how insane and bullshitty you and I might consider that to be), trust will erode in your relationship. You and I, as hard as we might try, will never get to decide if someone else SHOULD feel hurt because of something.
2. If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships.
Am I discounting the possibility that our partner is literally insane and unworthy of love and care in certain circumstances? Yes. I don’t waste time thinking and writing about con artists and people who are fabricating lies and manipulative drama.
I write with the assumption that you’re with a quality human being not intentionally deceiving you when they communicate problems and pains they’re having.
I also want to be clear that none of this is about right and wrong, or good and bad. This isn’t about being correct.
If I do something—anything—and pain results for someone else, and there’s nothing they can say or do to get me to try to be different tomorrow?
Trust will erode or vanish entirely in our relationship.
Independent of concepts like “who’s more right about this?” Is a the more important idea of maintaining and fostering trust in our most critical relationships.
It’s the only way for them to be healthy and lasting.
The alternative? Being single. A valid choice.
If we’re going to consistently choose what we think and feel over someone else, then it makes sense for them to not trust us in a committed partnership with them.
It’s important that this not be controversial because it’s kind of the only way to make it work.
I wish we could have a more specific conversation, though, because without all of the context and nuance there’s just no way for you and I (or you and your spouse/partner!) to be having the same conversation with one another.
I don’t think it’s okay for your partner to get mad at you or fight with you about something that is totally harmless.
I also don’t think it’s okay for other people to hurt as a result of our actions.
Healthy relationships and being trustworthy humans requires a bunch of uncomfortable and deliberate, thoughtful work in the messy middle of those two ideas.
If you’d like to share an example of a reasonable action that they are misinterpreting and being oversensitive about, I’d be happy to address it, though there’s no way for you and I to fully get to the truth about it without including and respecting the sensitive/hurt person’s lived experience.
So my concern is that what I understand from your approach is for people to be allowed to choose what they think and feel over someone else - if they think and feel that a behaviour hurts them. I'm checking if I've got that right, that you're saying there is no need to check or consider if a behaviour is genuinely hurting you or not before your partner has to change it or they are undermining trust.
To give a concrete example: I once asked a woman I was dating if there were any habits or behaviours I had which bothered her, and she said that she found my conversational style a bit domineering. Specifically, she felt I interrupted her frequently before she'd made her point. The interruptions she was talking about did happen, but she was talking about my habit of making verbal acknowledgments when someone is speaking to me. Things like 'OK', 'I see', or echoing a word or two back to them at the end of a sentence.
I understand different people can find different behaviour annoying or hurtful or benign or helpful. My issue isn't that she saw it as annoying and I saw it as a harmless habit at worst and at best a slightly active listening.
My issue is this: I could either have said 'Fair enough, I'll try and stop that' (I did say that in this case), or something like 'I hear that, but I'm not trying to interrupt you. I'm happy to let you keep talking and finish you point, and I do let you do that. I don't mean to annoy you, and sorry if I do, but these verbal tics are a habit of mine and I would ask you to reconsider if they are really interrupting and taking over the conversation or just my way of showing I'm listening.'
When you say that 'If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships' I read that as meaning if a person complains about my behaviour the solution is always for me to change it, and never for them to consider if the behaviour is actually harmful or they just need to adapt to me.
Is that right? And if it is, I go back to my initial question: How do you avoid this leading to both people curtailing more and more of their behaviour which the other person has raised an issue with as time passes, and neither person being encouraged to do any introspection about if they are being properly sensitive to the difference between actual harm and mere annoyance, or what the limits of reasonable tolerance is. And that doesn't seem a healthy or sustainable relationship either. I worry it would lead to resentment from both sides.
I'm not taking a side here. Or taking a position that I think anyone is "right" or "correct" here.
Everything is about trust. Can you trust your partner to communicate pains to you, and to not be some domineering, micromanaging asshole? If not, I'd encourage you to not pursue a relationship with her. Please don't let yourself be fucked with (and it doesn't sound to me like you do).
The problem, as I see it, is that most people have blind spots around how their behavior (well intentioned and not perceived as "bad" or "painful") is affecting someone else.
I promise I don't think you should just have to change everything you do all the time at the request of someone else.
Again, this stuff is subtle. The pains build up in long-term marriage and partnership over MANY years.
My work isn't about dating or partner selection, exactly, until you've decided they're someone you want to build a life with.
The "harm" I speak to is metaphorical. I'm a little mad at you for roping me into this. Again, this is what I do for work.
If I leave a drinking glass by the sink and my wife says it hurts her, it might be easy for you and I to think "That's bullshit. Cancer is serious. Knife wounds hurt. A stupid glass by the sink is NOT those things."
Logical. You're not wrong. I get it. I think and feel that way too.
So, if I always put the glass away because that's what I think my wife wants me to do, even though I'd prefer to do it a different way, might I feel resentment in a unhealthy marriage with little trust and poor communication practices? Absolutely. That's EXACTLY what my marriage was like before divorce.
I'm not asking you to be someone who always does what your partner wants you to do.
I'm asking you to be someone she can trust to CONSIDER -- to think about -- to NOT FORGET -- her when you do things.
For years, I left that drinking glass by the sink. It's not an "injury" in the traditional sense. It's not "harmful."
But it was disrespectful and trust eroding.
Every time my wife walked into the kitchen to find the glass by the sink, she could only conclude one of two possibilities.
1. I left the glass there on purpose, because fuck her, she's not my mom or my boss, and I'm not going to do something just because she tells me to. When what I want comes into conflict with what she wants, I'll always choose me over here.
One possibility. The other?
2. I left the glass their hurriedly and thoughtlessly. I left it there because I don't think about my wife at all when I do things. I was busy. I was on my way to work. I was something, but I didn't MEAN for it to feel bad to her. I wasn't making an intentional statement. I was just going about my life in a busy way, and failed to consider how it would feel to her.
And how would it feel to her? As if she's not someone I think about or calculate for when I make decisions. If I'm NOT doing these things in a dick-measuring way to exert my independence and manliness, then she guesses I'm doing it without any thought at all. She's not someone I see. She's not someone I hear. She's not someone I pay attention to. She's not someone important to me. She's not someone who can trust me to handle with care the things that matter to her.
So. Either, I do things which hurt on purpose. Because I'm more important to me than she is, in that really specific narcissistic way.
OR. I do things which hurt her by accident. Because I don't think about her as much as I do me. Because all my wants and needs are more real and more immediate and more obvious and more important to me than all of hers.
And that glass by the sink is the proof. Not the first time. Not the second time. Not in month one together.
But the 700th time. In Year 8 of the relationship. That's when the real, dark, gutting pain starts to set in for someone who realizes she (or he) will never be important enough to the other person.
I must admit you've lost me a bit. How can both of these be true at the same time?
1. If that person cannot trust that they can come talk to you about the painful things happening with a reasonable expectation that we’ll do something different afterward to help them not hurt anymore, then there’s going to be a trust deficit in your relationships.
2. I'm not asking you to be someone who always does what your partner wants you to do.
My confusion here is precisely how the first doesn't imply the second. Is you point basically that I should seek relationships with people I am confident only ever come to me about things which really matter, having already considered when to tolerate and when to speak up?
I'm not Matthew, but FWIW, I think that if you want close relationships (and it's totally okay to not want to an intimate partner, or closeness)... but if you do, then you should indeed seek relationships with people you are "confident only ever come to you about things which really matter".
If you want trust, closeness and intimacy with another human being, then you'll respect *whatever* they tell you matters to them. Recognizing that they're telling you because it actually does matter to them. And that it therefore needs to matter to you - if you want to be close with them and have trust between you.
Again, totally okay if you don't want intimate relationships with others or a romantic partner. Only applicable if you do want that.
That's fair enough, though I remain a bit worried about the risk it discourages each partner from being introspective about their own boundaries.
OK, I ordered "I do I think". I shall *totally* blame you if I don't like it!
This sounds familiar! 11 years with my (second!) husband and I’m just beginning to appreciate that things just hit differently for him! Maybe it’s because he is a highly sensitive person? Maybe because he has misophonia? But if I do ANY of your classic “active listening” noises/comments/questions he hates it! Fortunately he is getting better at telling me and then moving on, and I am getting better at just shutting up rather than explain how correct active listening strategies are 😂
I have misophonia, and I HATE it when the person I'm talking to makes a constant stream of little noises.