My dogs bark at the letter carrier. They also bark at the UPS box carrier. They bark at these intruders into their territory, because the letter carrier is an unknown, a threat, and his footsteps set off an alarm in their heads. They get their hackles up, their hearts pounding, their minds focused, and they present themselves as flesh-rending crazed canines, intent on death and destruction and guess what? The interlopers leave.
So from my dog’s perspective, the cause and effect is pretty obvious. They bark and these modern day Visigoths retreat. They go away. They turn tail and run. Thus, it seems to my dogs that they have an effective tool to keep the barbarians away from the gate and to keep their world safe: they bark,.
And when an intruder happens to simply walk down the sidewalk: they bark. The trespasser, according to the story my dogs tell themselves, is aware of the immense threat they pose and probably mindful of the dog’s successes with the postal service, and so moves on up the street. This is another example from my dog’s point of view of the extraordinary effectiveness of barking.
Mind you, the from the letter carrier’s point of view, (or as we say in HTSYMBBABM speak, the letter carrier’s “reality”) there is no hasty retreat, there is no turning tail and running, there is only the next mail box to fill, the route to complete, and the kids to pick up from school. In the letter carrier’s reality, as with the sidewalk trespasser and the Man from Brown, the dogs’ barking is mostly irrelevant.
A friend of mine, Stan, comes by the house on a regular basis. At first the dogs barked and being a prudent man he waited outside the gate until I responded to the dog-bell and let him in. The dogs barked some more, but eventually they shut up. Time and time again, Stan would drop by and the dogs would bark and Stan would wait patiently for me to come to the door.
Eventually they stopped barking. Now when Stan stops by they don’t even bother to raise their heads from their sun-besotted dozing. He gives them a pat and walks on in, often commenting that I need to get my dog-bell fixed.
The cleverer of my two or three constant readers will now nod their heads and say, “I know where this is going” but for the slower, the stubborn and the neophyte I will explain how the story of the barking dog fits into the paradigm of the better man and saving your marriage.
My dogs have one tool that allows them to keep a modicum of control over their environment when they feel threatened: they bark. In their reality it is an effective tool. It seemingly generates the response they want. When Stan did not respond the way they expected, the barked and barked and barked until at some time they realized that the whole bark thing wasn’t working on Stan and they quit barking. The tool didn’t work, there was no point in using it.
Your spouse might have one tool that allows her to maintain a modicum of control over her environment when she feels threatened: she becomes angry, and when she becomes angry she seemingly generates the response she wants: you leave, you retaliate, you shut down, you give in… whatever response to which you habitually resort is the response she associates with her anger, and thus by seemingly causing that response she gains something, maybe it’s a sense of moral outrage, ascendancy, or maybe it’s simply control and thus a sense of safety.
You’ve seen this happen time and time again. It shows up as when you start talking about one thing, it leads to another, and soon you are fighting about something that has nothing to do with where you were.
Imagine it happens like this: you and your beloved are chatting and you say something that you think is totally innocent but she hears it differently and for whatever reason it scares her. Maybe it scares her because it brings up a guilt issue, maybe she feels controlled, or blamed, or inadequate. It doesn’t matter what particular alarm you set off in her brain: the sensor has been tripped and the bell is ringing. She is scared, so she goes to the one tool she has, anger, and with the expression of that anger she gets the response that you all ways give her and suddenly she is on safe ground again. Admittedly, it is unpleasant ground, her hackles are up, adrenaline is coursing through her veins, and you’re not on your best behavior, but it’s safe ground. By reacting as she expects you return to a pattern that she’s experienced before and she can anticipate the course of the next few minutes, hours or days. Not pleasant, but predictable and thus safe.
Now mind you, she’s not trying to start a fight. I know it seems like that, but remember my dogs are not trying to kill the letter carrier. They’ve just learned to bark when they hear his footsteps and because they are scared and they’ve learned that when they bark the letter carrier leaves and safety is restored.
When Stan simply stood there the dogs eventually learned the tool didn’t work with him and they stopped using it. Likewise, and this is not to compare your wife to a dog, if you can become non-reactive, if you can learn not to give tit for tat, if you can learn not to take offense and make that point clear by way of engaging in an argument, guess what will happen. Guess what will happen if you simply stand there, as Stan did, and not react to the barking?
She will quit. She will quit because the tool isn’t working for her. As I said, she’d not trying to tell you she hates you, she’s not trying to drive you away, she’s not trying to hurt you, she’s simply trying to protect herself from some fear, perhaps a fear she doesn’t want to confront, perhaps a fear of which she is unaware. And if you stop reacting, if you stop responding in king, she will either start looking for another tool or she will open herself up to introspection and try to understand the fear that is driving her anger, but she will stop barking.
I shit you not.
