[HN Gopher] Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 394 points
Date : 2023-05-27 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| opmelogy wrote:
| The word he is looking for is resentment. It's well understood in
| relationship psychology. But it's good to have someone outside of
| that field be able to untangle these topics and word them in ways
| that resonate with different people.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I like the analogy and think what he's describing is a big reason
| relationships fail, but I don't think he's right that you need to
| make sure scar tissue never occurs in long-term relationships, at
| least romantic ones. That's an almost impossible goal. I've seen
| a lot of good relationships, and the level of conflict that
| exists in them is all over the place. What actually seems to
| matter is that the people involved learn to repair whatever
| damage is done after the conflict. That can also happen months or
| years later. It also requires much less saintliness than avoiding
| scar-tissue in the first place does.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I agree. Like my physical scars, the ones in my relationships
| still serve as a useful reminder. Injury is a fact of life and
| one we should become good at responding to. A comfortable and
| hassle-free life is virtually impossible (and perhaps not even
| desirable), so it appears to me that the injuries should be
| attended to, healed, learned from, then used as a symbol of
| that process to reflect on.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| An anecdote about contractors, since that's Osterhout's example:
|
| In my book, _The Big Bucks_ I used some of my actual history with
| Jerry, my contractor, as the basis for Walt. I say "some" since
| Jerry was already married, and he never did an Eichler in Palo
| Alto. Plus we started in 1992, whereas in the book it was 1983.
| Jerry did about ten jobs on my house after that. I'm not giving a
| plot spoiler on what happens with Walt /s
|
| I just found his traits endearing. He was just like an engineer
| in so many ways, and he'd even vacuum up rooms he hadn't been in.
| But basically it was consideration and respect for each other. A
| lot of homeowners treat contractors like lower-class servants.
|
| I gave him a copy of the book and he _loved_ it: he finished it
| in two days, and then gave it to a contractor friend, who also
| loved it.
| manmal wrote:
| TLDR: Perfectionism and the inability to forgive other people's
| mistakes imbues relationships with an expiration date.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Compromises make relationships wear out. If you land on a
| compromise where it's one person giving in rather than both
| changing their requirements, that one person will always feel
| like they have been wronged. You only need to a couple of such
| instances to burn out the strongest affection
| antman wrote:
| I see a lot of models here so let me add another common one:
| Parallel monologues. Couples discuss and perhaps consent but not
| realign the criteria. Why would they? The can just ignore the
| small stuff. But the small stuff is the practice sessions. Once
| big decisions come aka buying a house, how to grow a kid, move to
| a different country, finance they are mot prepared
| m3kw9 wrote:
| That's why letting yourself/significant other sleep still angry
| after an argument is not such a great idea. Resolve it before
| sleeping or it gets swept under the rug, or as he said, adds one
| scar tissue, as nobody will bring it back up next morning. It
| will be remembered when it happens again next time
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There are a lot of times when you need to let cooler heads
| prevail. You're not going to get less cranky as the night
| progresses.
|
| On the other hand, it took literally years to come to a
| compromise between my very devout wife whose had it drilled
| into head that you should give 10% to the church as a family or
| we will never have a good life and we will be damned to hell.
|
| The argument would always come up after we made a big financial
| commitment and while I was still trying to dig myself out of
| some bad financial decisions that I made before we even met.
| She was fully aware of them.
|
| But one thing it's almost impossible to square is a
| disagreement between two people when it involves religion or
| cultural disagreements.
|
| When someone believes their actions will lead to damnation and
| burning in hell for eternity, no amount of logical argument
| will ever dissuade them from this. Faith is by definition not
| based on physical reality - and that's not meant to be
| demeaning.
|
| The compromise we came to is that she does what she wants as
| long as she stays within the overall budget we agreed to and I
| give what really amounts toward a "this is the price I pay for
| never having to hear mention of giving again".
|
| While I will say that my wife has her belief system. She is
| what I would consider a "liberal Christian". She isn't
| judgmental about other people and we have friends across the
| divide.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You should go full accountant on her. 10% of profits or
| revenue? What about cash flow, massage the numbers a bit and
| present her a spread sheet to your liking. No accounting
| fraud needs to be involved
| [deleted]
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's not that easy. The church teaches that if you give
| your "first fruits" - ie gross before taxes - that no
| matter what or even if the numbers don't add up, "God will
| provide".
|
| That means before getting out of debt, saving, paying your
| rent etc.
|
| Dave Ramsey - a popular "financial guru" - is very opposed
| to debt of any kind except mortgage debt. But he's also a
| fundamentalist Christian. He tells people that you should
| give 10% of your gross to your church (not his
| organization) even if you are struggling to get out of
| debt.
|
| The church is very adamant about it.
|
| I'm not here to debate theology. I'm just letting you know
| about the RFC for Christianity.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah that's tough, glad you have it sort of sorted out
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| On the flip side, when you have a partner that brings up issues
| almost every night before going to bed, that gets old too.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Only for fights that seem warranted, otherwise it could get
| too much. Most time small arguments gets "resolv-ish" right
| away, say small stuff like leaving a mess and being an ass
| about it, you know? You say sorry, next time I'll be better
| and it's usually done
| lazide wrote:
| It can also just be dangerous - before bed is usually when
| people have the least emotional regulation and are the most
| tired and cranky. It's peak 'domestic' call time.
|
| Well, outside of end of year holidays.
|
| Ideally, being able to go 'now is a shitty time, let's laugh
| about it and check tomorrow if it's still an issue' would be
| better. But emotions don't always work that way.
| [deleted]
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| The key to long lasting relationships is pretty simple to be
| perfectly honest. Forgive people, have empathy, and don't sweat
| the small stuff.
| flatline wrote:
| I agree with his characterization of relationship breakdowns. I
| think the scar tissue is a bit of a tortured analogy.
|
| At some point you just have to let shit go if you don't want it
| to build up. These little things are what Dan Savage calls the
| "price of admission." It's important to have good communication
| skills, to be able to talk through conflict, to be able to give
| someone space. But if after talking about how your partner loads
| the dishwasher three times and nothing has changed? Or the
| umpteenth big fight where things were mostly patched over bit
| there's still some underlying pattern that you know is going to
| come up again? Now you know the price of admission. Is it worth
| it to you to pay that price to stay in relationship, or not?
|
| The speaker confesses their perfectionist tendencies. People like
| this, myself included, cannot let go of anything. I've spent
| years learning how and it still takes a conscious effort, but
| it's better. My zen teacher used to hand students a stick and
| tell them to let go of it. So many could not - it's going to
| drop, messily, onto the floor! The stick might break! You can't
| just let go of it like that, it needs to be put down gently, in
| its proper place, etc.
|
| High achieving individuals, especially in a field like academia
| which heavily rewards certain narcissistic and neurodivergent
| traits, are just hard to deal with in relationship. I look around
| me at the few successful long-term relationships I see and one or
| both people are usually pretty subdued/chill in every aspect of
| their life. This is not the norm.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> At some point you just have to let shit go if you don't want
| it to build up._
|
| I think this is a very important point that is not addressed in
| the article. The article basically describes avoiding scar
| tissue as resolving conflicts so there is "zero lingering
| animosity". And sometimes (actually quite often, I think), only
| one person of the two in the relationship is prone to feeling
| any animosity about how a particular conflict got resolved. And
| in most (if not all) such cases, the best way to avoid the scar
| tissue is exactly what you say: let it go. Is it really _worth_
| feeling even a little smidgen of animosity towards this person,
| with whom you have a relationship lasting many years or
| decades, because of this one little thing? At the very least I
| think one needs to _ask_ oneself that question, before
| embarking on the kinds of conflict resolution that the article
| describes.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| > But if after talking about how your partner loads the
| dishwasher three times and nothing has changed?
|
| Use it as motivation to become wealthy enough to afford a
| cleaner who packs the dishes the way you _need_ them to be
| packed!
|
| Joking aside, I'm not sure if you can meaningfully let go of
| these kinds of things if you don't address the control issues
| underlying them.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This seems like quite an uncharitable reading of the
| situation. They talked about the manner of packing. If things
| are packed incorrectly then they may block other things from
| being cleaned or require another cycle of cleaning, which
| presumably moves to work onto the other partner or in extreme
| cases could be indicative of weaponised incompetence.
| dymk wrote:
| The author sort of touches on this, although doesn't state it
| outright (but does refer to compromise) -
|
| > And that's really hard to do; I don't have any perfect
| answers for that; it's communication and compromise.
|
| But I generally agree with you. There's a big difference
| between compromise and letting things go. The author kind of
| implies that they _can 't_ do the latter, and that it's bad to
| do so ("Well, that seems generous, but it's a really bad
| idea."), and so to make up for that, they rely on communication
| instead.
|
| Truly letting things go is harder than outright communication
| (at least, for me). How do you determine what's small enough to
| let go? I have to make a gamble every time I think "Well, I'll
| just let this little thing go", because I need to make sure
| I've actually totally gotten over it. If I don't, then it
| becomes another paper cut.
| hosh wrote:
| Letting shit go is more or less what I hear from those 25+ year
| Indian couples with arranged marriages (from Netflix show,
| "Indian Matchmaking"), though they call it "tolerance".
|
| The thing is, how many people truly and honestly let shit go?
| stocknoob wrote:
| Arranged marriages work in the same sense that 98% of people
| found deep satisfaction in their career as a peasant farmer
| 300 years ago.
| [deleted]
| hosh wrote:
| Hmmm. While this has some truth, and I think there is a lot
| more to it than this, I think I'll just start practicing
| letting this go.
| hosh wrote:
| Continuing from above -- in "Indian Matchmaking", what pops
| up over and over again is that you will never have "100%" of
| what you are looking for in a partner.
|
| Every young person she helps with always start a list of
| qualities of their ideal partner, some of them are really
| small things. Yet despite telling them, it is not "100%",
| they can't let that go even before dating starts. And then
| you see how it sets the tone for the dates and all the drama
| that comes of it, and they have not even married yet.
|
| I remember watching that and thinking, yeah, that's obvious.
| Glad I know better.
|
| But thinking about all of this, I realize, it doesn't end at
| the dating. Your partner wasn't "100%", and as people grow
| and change, they are not "100%" different ways, over the
| years. There are different things that comes up in which to
| let shit go.
|
| It might be why arranged marriages and strong cultural values
| around it works. There is no illusion of an ideal partner to
| begin with. (And you get the shadow side too, like anything
| else when there are bad actors)
| reaperman wrote:
| There's a juxtaposition I don't get - on one hand, the super
| high prevalence of arranged marriages in Indian culture, on
| the other hand is the super high prevalence of "finding
| romance" stories in Bollywood movies.
| hosh wrote:
| I'm not an Indian, though I don't find that paradoxical,
| since I know how influential the story of Rama and Sita is
| to the Indian culture. That story is held as the ideal of
| relations between a husband and wife.
|
| And then there is the story of Krishna and the cow maids.
|
| When you watch the "Indian matchmaking", you see the
| parents of the current generation letting their kids find
| their way, even though they themselves did not. But you
| also hear about how the older generation met -- it's an
| arranged marriage, but their parents typically let their
| kids choose from a small pool of their choosing.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Exactly. If you love someone, you need to accept that person
| fully, flaws included. Trying to "correct" or change someone
| will never work out.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Some people have a natural talent to turn friction into lively
| repair tissue and not senescent scars. Whereas others (myself
| included) have two modes: suffer into submission or avoid forever
| (basically the point of this article).
|
| It's an important topic, I'm surprised (but happily so) to find
| out about this in a gist from a CS teacher.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Scar tissue needs to be massaged often to break it down. Perhaps
| the same is true of trouble areas in relationships: don't let
| things sit and seize up.
| brookst wrote:
| It's relatively painless to massage scar tissue. Relationship
| rough spots are more like cavities that are constantly
| unpleasant and the require a really unpleasant day to address.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Different ideologies make relationships wear out, all the time.
|
| Some manager does not care too much about documenting some area
| of the product, some IC does not care enough to dig into the code
| to understand it, etc. Week by week these people's trust on each
| other will be eroded by the disagreements that stem from what
| they expect from each other.
|
| I may be a cynic, but I don't believe in fixing most if not all
| of these relationships. Life is too short, and the industry is
| huge.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I used to work in construction, and his story about the
| contractor he worked with was almost triggering. Those types of
| people were the absolute worst to work for. The closest thing in
| software development is a client who has no expertise or
| understanding of the process but still wants to bikeshed every
| detail. It's exhausting.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| I call it death by a thousand papercuts instead of scars.
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| Human relationships are like complex systems. And some of the
| principles of antifragile design can also be applied if we look
| at it from a systemic lens.
|
| The build up of small cracks over a period of time can lead to
| any system getting brittle and fragile over a period of time.
| That said, resolution or letting go are both viable techniques to
| make it anti-fragile. Sometimes we have to realize, all of us
| have some shit we come along with and it's never perfectly
| matched to someone else. And it would be mad if it were too!
|
| Much like you make the best of life and the world around you
| think of making the best in the relationship by investing into
| the right things. Sometimes it's ok to let go - at other times
| it's necessary to draw boundaries and expect resolutions.
|
| To keep a complex system running, we also need to keep working at
| it.
| [deleted]
| toxik wrote:
| Would have been nice to have the actual audio. Nice essay though.
| personalityson wrote:
| Why are relationships holy and have to be salvaged at any cost?
| Just let go and move along
| dymk wrote:
| Some relationships are important, others aren't. It's good to
| have a framework for keeping the ones that matter lasting. If
| you treat every relationship you ever have as disposable,
| eventually you'll just find yourself alone.
| newsclues wrote:
| I only have one Mom. If I didn't put in the effort to fix the
| relationship I ruined, myself and my mother would suffer.
|
| I'm happy to let go and move on from most relationships, but
| some are holy and must be salvaged at any cost.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| > must be salvaged at any cost
|
| I disagree with this. Relationships with Cluster-B people can
| become very dangerous. This can even include parent-child
| relationships, for example, if the parent has NPD (narcisstic
| personality disorder). At the end you really need to look out
| for yourself and your mental health first (hence not at any
| cost).
| newsclues wrote:
| You missed the important part in that quote.
|
| "but _some_ are holy and must be salvaged at any cost"
|
| My relationship with my mother is part of that "some" for
| me. For others it may be someone else, but I didn't say
| everyone needs to salvage relationships with their parents
| at all, I shared my personal experience.
|
| Hopefully everyone has a relationship worth saving. Find
| that and fight for it, because a good relationship is worth
| any cost, up to including your life (eg. relationship with
| your child).
|
| I'm not an expert but does your way of thinking about this
| not map to Cluster-B personality types?
| k8sToGo wrote:
| No I simply misunderstood how you meant that part.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| [Big Laughter]
| xorvoid wrote:
| This! Wisdom!
|
| I've experienced exactly this multiple times and felt this way.
| Thank you thank you for the words to describe it John Ousterhout.
| rcarr wrote:
| The straw that broke the camel's back.
|
| It does make me laugh how hn appears to have a pathological need
| to come up with a new (and normally "science" based) metaphor for
| common folk wisdom.
| tbirdny wrote:
| Yeah, that and "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
| cure" (from the current top comment.)
| MarvinGaze wrote:
| That reminded me of this article:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-...
| munificent wrote:
| I'm always excited to see psychology stuff discussed here, and I
| like Ousterhout a lot, but I don't think this analogy works very
| well.
|
| Scar tissue really is permanent. Resentment in a relationship
| _can_ be permanent, but doesn 't have to be. The analogy that
| every unresolved grievance leads to a monotonically increasing
| amount of perpetual relationship weakness is, I think, wrong.
|
| I think of resentment more like foreign bodies. When I was a kid,
| I got a chunk of pencil lead stuck in my hand without realizing
| it. The wound healed over it, but it was still in there. I could
| see it as a dark spot under my skin. Many years later, my body
| gradually migrated it to the surface and eventually it came out.
| (This was definitely a weird experience.)
|
| When there's some sort of grievance or unresolved conflict in a
| relationship, I think of it as leaving a little chunk of foreign
| body or poison in the person's symptom. Some amount of this is
| natural, and you will just build up a little scar tissue and get
| by. But if you keep accumulating them, they'll make you less and
| less healthy.
|
| Often, the best solution is to make sure the foreign body is
| removed before the wound heals over. When a hurt happens, take
| the time right then to work through it with the partner so that
| you aren't leaving anything in there and it can heal quickly and
| completely.
|
| But, if that doesn't happen (and sometimes it won't), you can
| still dig it out later. It just requires re-opening the wound.
| The longer you wait, the more painful it is. When you re-open
| that wound, you will feel raw and vulnerable. It requires a lot
| of trust and care. Sometimes, this may happen years later, but it
| can be done.
|
| If you find yourself doing this so frequently that you feel like
| you're never fully healed, that's a good sign that you aren't
| right for each other. Likewise, if you never feel that you're in
| an emotionally safe enough space to re-open those wounds and
| clean out the festering gunk in them, that's also a warning sign.
| Fgehono wrote:
| My wife is the person I literally tell everything.
|
| Not much scar tissue if you see your partner your bff.
|
| Not much of a relationship you have anyway if you withold things.
|
| I'm even sometimes take pictures when I experience alone because
| I immediately want to share it with her.
| jmbwell wrote:
| As I understand it, scar tissue isn't necessarily weaker, and can
| be stronger, but is mostly adapted to the injury and how it was
| able to heal. If the injury was well attended, scar tissue can be
| as good or better than what was there before. If the injury is
| neglected, or repeatedly re-injured before it could ever fully
| heal, then it will be tougher and less flexible and more painful
| even long after it has technically healed. It won't move the same
| way as before, it won't be as supple, it will need more attention
| over time.
|
| An injury can take only a moment, but recovery and healing takes
| much longer. If you address it sooner rather than later, and if
| you take care to avoid similar injuries, it's more likely to heal
| well. If it's neglected, if you half-ass it, etc., it may never
| heal properly.
|
| A nitpick, but only because other than that it's not a bad
| metaphor.
| hliyan wrote:
| I agree. I've seen couples who've gone through a lot of turmoil
| in their younger years but have emerged stronger and have
| happily grown old together. Granted, they are the minority. So
| I too, feel the scar tissue analogy is imperfect. Perhaps in
| some cases, relationship issues are like fractures -- the mend
| is in fact stronger than the break.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Or they were weakened but they didn't get ripped apart...
| haldujai wrote:
| > fractures -- the mend is in fact stronger than the break.
|
| This is also a medically incorrect statement for similar
| reasons to scar tissue, the resultant trabecular
| disorganization always results in weaker bone, even for
| "perfectly" healed fractures.
|
| I think the original metaphor (and even fractures) still
| holds but in a different way than you described.
|
| I highly doubt any of those couples (and from personal
| experience myself) wanted the turmoil however one feels after
| the fact, "made us stronger" is often a combination of
| dissonance and a statement that other areas of the
| relationship strengthened to compensate (in the fracture
| analogy: if you break your left leg your right one will
| strengthen from increased mechanical load to compensate).
|
| One would not break a bone in an attempt to make it stronger,
| but a broken bone can heal to near full strength and other
| bones in the body get stronger to compensate. If you break
| your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed structure that
| is considerably weaker than what you started and will break
| from a minor injury.
|
| If you substitute bones for relationship I think this holds.
|
| With effort it's possible to recover from and compensate for
| relationship trauma and thrive as an organism/couple, but
| it's still better to avoid emotional trauma to begin with
| (assuming it's possible) as with physical trauma.
| eastbound wrote:
| > If you break your bone repeatedly, it heals as a deformed
| structure that is considerably weaker
|
| So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars don't
| get stronger from the repeated hits, do you confirm?
|
| And "what doesn't kill, makes you stronger" is false too?
| haldujai wrote:
| > So taekwondo people who train to hit concrete pillars
| don't get stronger from the repeated hits, do you
| confirm?
|
| Stress from repetitive microtrauma is not the same as a
| fracture (stress to failure). Increased mechanical
| loading (hitting a concrete pillar, exercise) can
| absolutely strengthen bone in a similar mechanism to
| decreased load weakening bones (little old lady,
| astronauts).
|
| Breaking a bone completely disrupts the internal
| architecture and what is deposited is unequivocally
| weaker than what was there before.
|
| > And "what doesn't kill, makes you stronger" is false
| too
|
| I have no professional opinion on this aphorism. I do
| have one on bone healing.
| dmd wrote:
| > And "what doesn't kill, makes you stronger" is false
| too?
|
| It's absolutely false. Nearly everything that hurts you
| makes you weaker, not stronger.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Nearly everything that hurts you makes you weaker, not
| stronger._
|
| I think this is, at the very least, highly variable from
| person to person.
| dmd wrote:
| Why isn't it standard medical practice, then, to have
| each of your major bones broken in series, for example?
| denial wrote:
| Hormesis-- it's all about the amount. Those taekwondo
| practioners are inducing microfractures rather than gross
| fractures.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Loading your bones close to the breaking point does make
| them stronger. At least as long as you give them time to
| recover in between, otherwise you get a stress fracture.
| It's a balancing act. Do it well and you get stronger,
| overdo it everything spirals downwards. Same for most of
| the rest of your body. If something gets close enough to
| killing you, it will definitely make you weaker.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| That is, if you take the time to mend it.
| haldujai wrote:
| Medically speaking, your understanding is bit off in that while
| there are several factors that affect the resulting strength of
| scar tissue, the underlying disorganization in scar tissue will
| _always_ leave it biomechanically weaker than than uninjured
| skin.
|
| It is true that with early attention, proper wound care, etc
| scar can approach normal skin but even in the best of
| circumstances it will still be "slightly weaker" rather than as
| good or better.
|
| [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840475/
| dinvlad wrote:
| Oftentimes people enter relationships since they're too afraid to
| be alone, and so are willing to close their eyes and tolerate
| something in a partner (be it a friend or a lover) they would not
| otherwise. Of course, there comes a time when the accumulated
| annoyances with these incompatibilities become too much, and so
| it falls apart.
| superposeur wrote:
| The scar tissue model sounds convincing and there's something to
| it. But when I reflect on my very long term relationships, it
| doesn't seem to get at the core of why we've stayed together.
| Instead, for these relationships there is a deeper alignment of
| interests / alignment of values / alignment of outlooks (whatever
| you want to call it) that allows us to get past the annoying
| stuff. Put differently, a model that resonates more with my
| experience is that there are two baskets of conflicts: core stuff
| and peripheral stuff. As long as the peripheral conflicts don't
| get too egregious, they don't actually matter if the core stuff
| is still working.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| But those relationships ended right?
| superposeur wrote:
| No I'm thinking of my spouse of 20+ years and my friends from
| high school.
| haldujai wrote:
| > As long as the peripheral conflicts don't get too egregious
|
| From a scar model perspective this is like a
| papercut/superficial injury which isn't leaving you with a scar
| (or at least a very minor one).
|
| > they don't actually matter if the core stuff is still
| working.
|
| Being stabbed in the heart (literally and metaphorically) will
| leave bigger and deeper scars that can impair core function and
| your heart will never pump blood as effectively again.
| superposeur wrote:
| I guess, but reflecting further, the scar tissue/injury model
| is a little odd in that it focuses only on the negative, not
| on what the two parties actually _get_ out of the
| relationship.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Scar tissue is a reason the bank account goes negative, it's
| easy to forget that it also needs reasons to go positive. No
| credits mean the debits make the account go red very quickly.
| nokya wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your view, you put words when I couldn't.
| Shared values is precisely the best explanation to my
| relationships that wore out in the past, I don't think scar
| tissue was the reason.
|
| The analogy of scar tissue could work for symptoms, though: the
| presence of scar tissues in a relationship may/could indicate
| that conflicts never get fully resolved because deep in the
| relationship, there is a fundamental misalignment of values,
| and that's what creates scar tissues when conflicts emerge.
|
| For me, the real thing that tends to explain my long
| relationships is the authenticity of someone to her/his own
| values. Which is not to be confused with sharing the same
| opinions, I can easily be friends with people who vote
| differently than me, but what I can't stand is dishonesty
| (e.g., inventing theories or excuses to put the blame on the
| "others").
|
| The reason I think it works that way is in part due to my own
| character: I don't hesitate getting into conflict with other
| people and more particularly with those dear to me when I
| disagree or when I feel disturbed by something. I can have
| intense arguments with some of my friends, my wife, my parents,
| my boss, but it never damaged our relationship because I think
| deep under, our values are aligned.
|
| Now, what do I mean by "values"? Those are things I
| characterize as values: - how you negotiate internal conflict -
| how you respond to being wrong / corrected by someone else that
| presents a good argument to you - how you treat people of lower
| socioeconomic level (e.g., disdain, disrespect,neglect vs.
| empathy/consideration, etc.) - how you treat people of higher
| socioeconomic level (e.g., jealousy, envy, ass-licking vs.
| admiration, respect, inspiration, etc.) - whether you behave
| differently with co-workers situated "below" you vs. "above"
| you vs. those who can affect your career advancement - whether
| you are faithful to yourself and your opinions (aka, whether
| you can stand the cost or implications of your opinions, or if
| you change your mind and invent yourself another stance just to
| avoid any discomfort) - whether your respect everyone's right
| to privacy or assume you can invade your spouse or child's
| personal space - etc.
|
| So, in summary, yes a very interesting article but I can only
| disagree with the premise: I don't think that scar tissues make
| relationships wear out, I think values misalignment does.
| HurtByNegatives wrote:
| _I don 't think that scar tissues make relationships wear
| out, I think values misalignment does._
|
| Sometimes it can also be a character flaw.
|
| While I believe our values were aligned, my partner was very
| critical about almost everything I did. She was not
| supportive of my goals. She dismissed my interests, and she
| often criticized how I did things. We were from two different
| cultures, but we strongly agreed on many important points
| (including how to raise children). It was the little things
| that bothered her. This was bad enough that even friends who
| visited us noticed and admonished her for treating me like
| that. A therapist friend also noticed and tried to help her.
| Probably due to how I was raised, it took me years to realize
| myself that there was a problem, and it took a few more years
| for her to acknowledge the problem herself. It was when she
| realized that her mother treated her the same way.
| Unfortunately she felt that she was unable to change. I
| credit it to our shared values that I stayed with her as long
| as I did. This issue would have almost destroyed our
| relationship if it hadn't been ended by cancer instead.
| [deleted]
| rubidium wrote:
| "my very long term relationships"?! i think you and I have a
| different conception of what long term is...
|
| Long term is like 30 years, not 5.
|
| What makes real long term relationships work isn't common
| interests. It's commitment.
| superposeur wrote:
| Ha, no, I'm old(ish) and long term means 30 years for me too
| :)
|
| Notice, I did not use the phrase "common interests"; my use
| of "interests" is in the sense of exchange: you get something
| and I get something in return. Equivalently, this same
| exchange can be described as an "alignment of values" or
| "alignment of outlooks" since sharing a value or a lens on
| the world with someone is a special pleasure and is something
| you get out of a relationship.
|
| I think two people committing to each other and valuing their
| commitment certainly qualifies as "alignment of values"
| contributing to the positive side of the relationship ledger.
| CPLX wrote:
| This concept is pretty well developed in the context of 12-step
| programs. What he's calling "scar tissue" they call resentment.
| roenxi wrote:
| > He would have been pretty worried if we sat down and I was
| like, "Jim, can we talk [Laughter] about my feelings? I mean you
| left the plastic open and dust got into the house, and sometimes
| I feel like you don't respect me as a person."
|
| This is one of those moments where someone is theory own worst
| enemy. The expectation for people to bottle up their feelings and
| sit there in annoyance is silly. There are only two basic
| scenarios here. The cause of the annoyance mainly sits with...
|
| 1. Jim.
|
| 2. John Ousterhout.
|
| 3. Some unidentified cause.
|
| The proper approach is to think carefully about whether it is
| case 2. If it is, stop feeling annoyed - the annoyance is harming
| the self and the relationship for no reason. It is an illusion
| that can only cause trouble.
|
| Most of the time that is the end of it. However, sometimes it is
| a case 1 or 3. Then it is perfectly fine to sit down with Jim and
| talk feelings. Just do it. Learn to make it sound natural and
| stilted and people only notice that you seem really easy to talk
| to. Figure out whether it is case 1 or 3 and whether it can just
| be resolved on the spot. Nobody is helped by bottling even minor
| things up. Learn to live a comfortable life.
|
| It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and
| don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men! If
| you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved and
| talk it through.
|
| Plug for Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication. This
| stuff really can be reduced to an algorithm as long as it
| accompanies a relentlessly nonjudgemental mindset and a tolerance
| for not getting your own way.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| I don't know that NVC always works the way its proponents think
| it does.
|
| I've been around a lot of NVC practitioners. Many have been
| active NVC educators.
|
| Maybe they've all been Doing It Wrong, but...I find that when
| presented with the "NVC way" of discussing a problem, my brain
| always translates it to the emotional symbols I understand,
| which are nearly identical to the symbols generated by an overt
| criticism.
|
| That said, I recognize that could simply be a "me problem."
| Which I won't dispute. I'm not entirely neurotypical. And
| generally if something I'm doing is bothering someone, I try to
| deal with it; I don't make everything into drama. I just don't
| parse the NVC words appreciably differently than a normal,
| polite request. (Overt hostility does push my buttons, but
| short of that, it doesn't seem to matter.)
|
| Just saying that NVC isn't magic. If the person making the
| request has a reasonable point, I'll acknowledge and do what I
| can to adjust my behavior. If they seem to be asking something
| less reasonable, wrapping it with NVC language doesn't change
| the request materially for me at all.
|
| > It drives me crazy when I find out people just sit there and
| don't tell me when I'm upsetting them. Communication, my men!
| If you can't fix it in your own head, get other people involved
| and talk it through.
|
| Agree that people should _generally_ be open about issues. But
| there 's appropriate context for everything. I really don't
| want coworkers coming up to me and asking to work through an
| emotional issue for an hour because something I suggested was
| different than their suggestion, and my suggestion bruised
| their ego. Close friends? Sure. I probably have higher than
| average tolerance for such conversations among those I care
| about. But I choose my close friends, and largely don't get to
| choose specific coworkers, and so demanding that level of
| emotional work seems outside of the job description.
|
| Also: Totally agree about telling the contractor that dust got
| everywhere and letting them know that's a problem. But for me,
| it wouldn't be at all about "my feelings." It would be about a
| request to a contractor to adjust their behavior or that of
| their subs based on reasonable expectations. I would personally
| feel foolish taking an NVC approach with a contractor in that
| situation, TBH. Not "It makes me feel disrespected when dust
| gets all over the place," but something more like, "Hey Jim,
| someone didn't seal the plastic around the construction area
| and we had a bunch of dust we needed to clean up. Can you be
| sure that everyone knows that it's important to keep the dust
| seal closed? Thanks." Heck, the latter is even less
| confrontational than the "you left the plastic open" in the
| OP's comment.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| I appreciate the idea but I think it's trickier then described.
| There are multiple reasons to tell and not tell a person you're
| in a relationship with the problems they cause you. Some of them
| benefit the relationship and some don't.
|
| It's a cliche to say that relationships are about compromise but
| that's because it's true. That compromise isn't always spoken;
| sometimes it's done without the other person even knowing. If
| you're clear eyed or empathetic or just love the other person you
| can know that they do the same thing for you. If you're none of
| those things you can make the compromise painfully clear and
| create a zero sum situation.
| pstuart wrote:
| That's HN. I come for the tech and leave with the advice...
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Trying to get to root cause of what's actually wrong with my
| communication capability, I've come to the belief that
| transplanting a thought from my mind to my wife's mind _intact_
| is really hard. Fidelity can break down in several
| transformations: how clearly the thought is formed in my mind,
| the words I choose and arrange to express it, how fluidly I can
| speak them, whether there is impedence in the environment or
| emotional state, how accurately she hears the words, the precice
| meanings she applies to each word, the context she overlays and
| finally, any bias that modulates the meaning.
|
| Even if all of that goes reasonably well, my expression of
| thought encounters the _intent_ modulation. What does she believe
| I am trying to accomplish by communicating this thought?
|
| To a large degree, having a positive outcome from any
| conversation relies on the trust between us, the value we place
| in the relationship and the willingness of each of us to monitor
| for and correct misunderstandings so that even when conflict
| develops, the understanding of the situation is the same for both
| parties.
|
| What gets me down is knowing that for some (most?) people, the
| above is so intuitive, they've never had a problem with it. Alas.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I think I would replace scar tissue with known limitations of the
| other person. You can learn in a long term relationship you can
| trust a person in certain ways and not in others. You learn you
| will be fulfilled in certain ways but not others.
|
| Long term relationships work out of accepting limitations.
|
| There's also plenty of examples of long term collaborations in
| business, so I'm not sure the underlying premise is solid.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Every time you are a jerk to someone, criticise someone, belittle
| someone, disrespect someone or attack someone, they like you
| less.
|
| Relationships have a "bank account of good will", and each
| incident/negative interaction withdraws from the account.
|
| Positive interactions contribute goodwill to the account.
|
| Negative interactions withdraw at many times the rate that
| positive interactions contribute.
|
| It's very easy to destroy a relationship - you can do it in
| minutes or seconds. It's very hard to build something positive,
| very very hard to rebuild damage.
| csallen wrote:
| My ex was a relationship therapist. She was absolutely allergic
| to letting scar tissue build up. She would tell me about every
| little negative thing that happened between us. And she would
| phrase it by talking about her feelings rather than about my
| actions. ("I felt hurt when I heard you say X," rather than "You
| shouldn't have said X.")
|
| Suffice it to say, it freaked out. I wasn't used to people
| sharing their feelings with me. In normal relationships, by the
| time someone is telling you they feel <insert negative emotion>,
| a ton of scar tissue has already been built up, and they're at a
| breaking point. So I was conditioned to believing that sharing
| feelings = things have gotten really bad.
|
| But early on she would calm me down, and say no, things aren't
| bad, she's fine, she's just into sharing feelings early and often
| to prevent the buildup of resentment. So I got used to it, and
| even started doing the same thing back.
|
| Eventually our relationship ended, but I brought the practice to
| new relationships I entered afterwards. And, unsurprisingly, it
| kind of freaked people out! Almost nobody is used to it at first,
| just like I wasn't. It's incredibly easy to get defensive when
| someone lets you know that they felt bad in response to something
| you did. And it's usually vulnerable and risky to find the words
| to share feelings without arousing the other person's defenses.
|
| Still, when I look back at how I've evolved as a person, I credit
| this "scar tissue" view of relationships with a lot of personal
| growth. It's given me a habit of confronting people problems head
| on, something past-me was unconsciously avoidant of. An ounce of
| prevention is worth a pound of cure, and being willing to have
| uncomfortable conversations instead of kicking the can down the
| road is one of the hallmarks of adulthood and maturity.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This has to be merged with inherited lineage trauma. I've seen
| many adults of the previous generations who were incapable of
| talking or listening normally, creating cycles of silence and
| rage. It took decades for me to snap out of it, and when I
| tried to get the point across, they kept repeating nodding but
| repeating the same things. Very disturbing.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I've had a chat with psychotherapist one and we both agreed,
| at least from our own limited experience - previous
| generations were/are very stiff when it comes to emotions,
| sharing them openly, talking about them.
|
| I mean even within 1 generation, from my father to me, the
| difference is massive. Not sure on what to pinpoint it
| exactly, we saw and see massive transformations of our
| societes at neck-breaking speed. When my late grandma saw how
| I hold and hug my then-girlfriend, she just sighted 'why cant
| I have a bit of that', and said similar stuff about my father
| (aka her son just to be clear).
|
| In fact, I used to be like you describe when young, quiet
| till explosion, rinse and repeat. Something when growing up
| changed in me, I was growing up slowly till my mid 30s, even
| redefined who I am by diving into mountain/extreme sports,
| handling one's fears ie of dying quite regurarly has quite an
| effect. Plus a lot of backpacking around the world in 3rd
| world countries, I cant be xenophobic or +-racist like many
| former peers even if I tried hard after that. My parents
| lived in communist eastern block, this kind of adventure
| stuff was unheard of, so I dont blame them.
|
| My advice to anybody and everybody out there - expose
| yourself to intense experiences, cultures, understand how
| everything works (schools made me hate those topics, took a
| decade+ to find my own way back to them). Everything changes
| you, imprints on you, makes you richer and better person, the
| more intense experience the more profound effect. Just stay
| the fuck out of comfort zone for as long as you can.
| [deleted]
| notRobot wrote:
| My current partner does this too. Communicates a lot and early
| so there's no build up of resentment. It took me a long time to
| adjust to this, it was jarring since it was so new to me. But
| I've grown to appreciate it so much, and I try to do the same.
|
| Your comment and the OP have taken me a bit by surprise, in how
| closely they match my own experiences. It's kind of validating!
| Thank you :)
| gedy wrote:
| > She would tell me about every little negative thing that
| happened between us.
|
| Without sounding callous, I have to say I prefer a relationship
| where we don't do this and let the little things go. I'm an
| extremely self conscious person and already rather hard on
| myself and this would drive me away from the relationship due
| to feeling like walking on eggshells or being controlled in
| detailed ways.
|
| (Married 20+ years btw)
| grugagag wrote:
| > due to feeling like walking on eggshells or being
| controlled in detailed ways
|
| Sure, this could be done badly and could backfire. But it
| could also be done in a once a week session where partners
| share what they feel to each other. This is what I'd like
| actually and I admit it is not easy. I personally get over
| the small things fast and tend to forget them till their next
| occurrence, and at some point of this repeating I end up just
| spitting it out on the spot. It doesn't help that my partner
| dismisses everything I say as a kind of being oversensitive.
| If it wasn't for us having a child together we'd most likely
| go our separate ways.
| notRobot wrote:
| If you are unhappy in your relationship you shouldn't "stay
| together for the kid". It's a common misbelief that that is
| good for kids, when in actuality they absolutely pick up on
| what's going on and it's not healthy for the kid to be in a
| not-happy family. I speak from experience, I was a kid
| whose parents didn't separate when they absolutely should
| have. I'd encourage you to discuss this with a therapist if
| you haven't already.
| grugagag wrote:
| Ok, it's also financial too, but mostly I want to be in
| my child life daily. The current situation is not too
| bad, we aren't fighting but not an ideal match either and
| there are some scars. I learned to ignore the ideal, the
| ideal doesn't exist. It's the best calculation to my
| life's eqution I could come up with for the time being. I
| could find what I am longing for through other parts of
| my life. I actually know this too well from my own
| parents, they too had a loveless marriage. I think a big
| part in what decides how couples work is their attachment
| styles the two have. It's a theory that I feel explains
| my predicament quite well.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| > being controlled
|
| Talking about every little negative thing vs. using every
| little negative thing for control are very, very different
| things. But they look similar on the surface.
| Taywee wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "little things". If it's "a little
| thing that happened", then absolutely. If it's "a little
| thing that happens regularly", then it's worth discussing it
| before it snowballs.
| gedy wrote:
| OP sounded more like the first; something ongoing, sure.
| csallen wrote:
| To me it felt like "every little thing," but that was due
| to a combination of me being defensive + not seeing the
| value in communication and preventing resentment. Today
| I'd consider many of those little things to be important.
| hackernewds wrote:
| I see a lot of pushback to your comment so wanted to chime
| and offer support to your perspective. See my previous
| comment for an expansion of my limited personal experience
| echoing your thought
| nazka wrote:
| This type of communication has actually a name, it called non-
| violent communication. There are books about it. It is one of
| the best way to communicate when things gets tough or are in a
| crisis. Since it avoids finger pointing, personal attacks (even
| when we don't mean to), etc... and still being able to talk
| about the issue and how we feel (instead of how the other
| should do such and such or putting words in their mouths).
|
| But I guess it can be weird to be used all the time and maybe
| without explicitly talking about.
| kortilla wrote:
| Non-violent communication is orthogonal to addressing scar
| tissue. You can use non-violent communication and not address
| scar tissue and you can use "violent communication" to
| address scar tissue.
| spiralganglion wrote:
| Can you give some examples?
|
| In particular, an example of how using "violent
| communication" could ever address scar tissue.
| kortilla wrote:
| Scar tissue comes from leaving an issue unaddressed, it's
| not related to how it's addressed.
|
| My wife, "it pisses me off when you don't do the dishes
| on your night like you did last night!"
|
| Me, "oh shit, I completely forgot. It's not intentional,
| I'll set a calendar reminder."
|
| Scar tissue isn't from "aggressive" or even "accusatory"
| words. It's unrelated.
| matwood wrote:
| Reminds me of Blake's "A Poison Tree". Communication matters.
| Let issues fester and they can lead to bad places.
| shon wrote:
| This style of communication is well defined and works quite
| well. It's sometimes called Imago Dialogue.
|
| https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ccf42ef3560c3...
|
| As you said, If you can get the other person over the shock of
| talking about feelings it's a very useful tool to keep a
| relationship running well or even repair a damaged one with
| scar tissue.
| wenc wrote:
| Yes, I learned about Imago dialogue through a book called
| "Getting the Love You Want" (which sounded gimmicky, but it
| was recommended by a therapist friend, and I've found it
| surprisingly practical, not just for intimate relationships
| but also just relationships with friends and coworkers). The
| book Nonviolent Communication also basically teaches a
| similar structured conversation technique. It's the stuff
| that most marriage therapists teach, but it was a revelation
| to me.
|
| I'm a brutally direct communicator (and I justify myself by
| saying "I'm honest and expect honesty from people") but I
| also tend to damage relationships (surprise! communication is
| not about 1 person's preference but 2). After many
| relationships that didn't work out, I decided to take a step
| back and ask myself what I could be doing better, and one of
| the things was learning to communicate in a way that others
| found less alienating, without compromising my own style. I
| stumbled upon the Imago technique and it has worked really
| well.
|
| One of the major takeaways for me that it is important to
| _validate people_ and _be curious_ , whether you agree with
| them or not. I used to think this was a contradiction, and
| that bad ideas need to be corrected immediately, but I've
| since learned that it's possible to validate people without
| agreeing with them. The point is to make them feel heard
| first, and then I can present my own view. Here's an example
| of how validation works (without agreeing): https://www.onsol
| idgroundcounseling.com/post/2015/08/31/crea...
| JackFr wrote:
| When many people describe themselves as brutally honest,
| they seem to believe that being honest is a license for
| brutality.
| [deleted]
| rgifford wrote:
| Oddly I quite like these people -- provided they're
| internally and externally consistent. It's refreshing to
| say, "you're being an asshole" and have a friend go, "oh
| my bad, I do that sometimes."
|
| Most young folks can't imagine having been an asshole and
| they call themselves emotionally intelligent without
| realizing their feelings are a tyranny. They've
| unsubscribed from anything that ever brought them even
| minor discomfort. Their social contract basically amounts
| to "lie to me and I'll lie to you." They are huge wusses.
|
| If a friend asks you if their hair looks nice, it's
| kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's
| been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks
| think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who
| would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I
| trust. If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing
| even if I just paid $70 for the haircut. Modern day
| stoics IMO. They're smart enough to know how to be like-
| able, they understand the fluff-each-other's-shared-
| delusions game, they just don't want to play. When they
| tell you something kind, you know it was real.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Personally, in a past relationship, I found this to be
| incongruent to a functioning relationship where every single
| feeling felt by my partner were valid and I was responsible
| for managing all her triggers. Example was yelling followed
| by "you held my hand too firmly, and it made me feel trapped
| like I were in my childhood". I believe there should be a
| degree of moderation and assignment of responsibility and
| repair that is not only designated to the other person.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I mean, you halfway got there. Your partner's feelings
| definitely were valid, but the latter part of that
| sentence, where you were responsible for managing all her
| triggers, that's not fair to you, and that's not what
| anybody is advocating.
|
| In fact, it would have been perfectly fair for you to
| respond and tell her that. It definitely sounds like not
| every time she brought these things up, it wasn't resolved
| mutually satisfactorily, and PLENTY of scar tissue built up
| instead.
|
| You get to advocate for yourself just as much as she did
| for herself. And sometimes during these conversations, you
| uncover irreconcilable differences, sure. Some
| relationships just aren't meant to be. But boy is it ever
| nicer when you discover these differences earlier, after
| honest and reciprocal conversations, as opposed to years
| later when all the suppressed argument come bursting forth
| at once. (Speaking from personal experience.)
| shortcake27 wrote:
| You don't get to decide whether someone else's feelings are
| valid or not. Sounds like you were just in the wrong
| relationship. I would argue this type of communication
| helped you realise that sooner - imagine if your partner
| bottled that up without telling you.
| retrac wrote:
| > responsible for managing all her triggers
|
| I think the key is to not conflate how someone feels, with
| being responsible for managing how they feel. A person
| feels the way they do - they can do little about this.
| Generally, I will avoid doing things I know cause
| unpleasantness for other people, and most such requests are
| reasonable, and I'm often unaware of what others do not
| like. So they should tell me how they feel.
|
| But once I have that information, I can also address it
| directly: perhaps _I_ feel that it 's kind of silly, or too
| burdensome, or whatever. So while I'm sorry you feel that
| way, I happen to feel differently about it. So maybe we can
| figure out a mutual compromise. Or not, as the case may be.
| mpol wrote:
| [...] yelling followed by "you held my hand too firmly, and
| it made me feel trapped like I were in my childhood" [...]
|
| That sounds a bit demanding and maybe even blaming. I think
| the point is to tell about your emotions, and just lay them
| on the table. Nothing needs to be done directly, first you
| both want a conversation. If anything would need to done or
| changed, you might agree on something. But demanding sounds
| wrong.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > Suffice it to say, it freaked out
|
| And then it put the lotion on its skin?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| haha, clearly OP meant "freaked [me] out" but that was a
| funny way to point it out
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| We will obviously have AGI before we figure out relationship
| therapy-- and likely have AI value alignment before human value
| alignment.
|
| Practically, though... try having a conversation with chatGPT
| asking it to translate what you each want to say into "nonviolent
| communication". Wow. AI seems way better than humans at human
| relationship communication...
| ryder9 wrote:
| [dead]
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, I have a colleague whose normal writing tone is
| confrontational. It's something they're aware of and work to
| remove during the editing process. ChatGPT has made this
| significantly easier for them:
|
| 1st draft
|
| -> prompt "soften the language"
|
| ---> review and revise output
|
| ------> prompt "soften again"
|
| --------> final draft
|
| Enter more complex prompts or more iterations if you want
| editing for multiple things, e.g., prompt "suggest edits for
| clarity, brevity, grammar, and softer language". You can
| iterate very quickly.
| nailer wrote:
| Honestly the worst thing about non confrontational
| communication is that someone named a very useful communication
| technique after something - violence - that is not the thing
| being avoided.
| ada1981 wrote:
| We've had researcher access to openAI for a couples years to
| build something that does precisely this.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I'll hit you up about this, my wife is a relationship
| therapist in Amsterdam
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I think most my long term relationships ended because of an
| accumulation of small issues.
|
| Incompatibility obviously plays a role but I know I fucked up in
| not sharing enough when I get annoyed with my partner but I don't
| know why exactly.
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