The Urge to Argue Fact Assertions Is Strong With This One

[Starboard Song]

We are now 8 YEARS NC from my in-laws. Wow!

On Christmas Day, my MIL wrote to us for the first time in -- I think -- a couple years. The card's purported purpose was to assure my wife that they still and always would love her. But that positivity was drowned in a hot curry sauce of invective.

She began by asserting that our hearts were incapable of forgiveness, which is at least poor tact, but is really more of a moral judgment than a falsifiable fact assertion. Then she makes two false accusations.

These get to me, people. People who know me assume I am an engineer, lawyer, or a preacher: no joke. I speak in terms of logic, math, and reason, and I do so with a great deal of passion and -- I hope -- heart. So back during our going-NC crisis, it was the factual errors that angered and frustrated me the most.

With healthy people, it has always worked. Either I didn't do what they are angry about, or I did but it was an accident. Or it was on purpose, but I meant no harm, and I am sorry for the harm done. With a PD person, I just can't accept what they often cannot accept: facts matter.

So this card, eight years down the road from NC, five years since our last words spoken to them, got to me. And there are two characteristics that are just so maddening:

Abstraction of the Accusation - She didn't accuse us, in this card, of anything specific. She abstracted: we had "hurt" someone. We had "taken advantage" of another person. Moving up a level of abstraction from the specific acts of which she's complaining eventually makes all charges true. And it allows the accuser to smuggle in judgmental terms, rather than stick with the facts.

Leap to Motivations - This rankled me then and still does now. She never decries only the abstracted descriptions of what you did. She also heaves in a complaint about your motivations. And there is only one. You did anything you did only TO CAUSE HER PAIN. This leap to motivations I see in colleagues and friends, sometimes, and I am sure I am sometimes guilty. But it is always a moral weakness, in my judgement. Unless we know their motivations from their actions, we really need to stick with what someone did.

Anyway. It's been a few days since we got this nastygram. I was worried, from its first words, that it might challenge us. Maybe she was about to write kindly about a potential reconciliation. Maybe it would be an olive branch. Maybe it would be kind.

Psych!

The fact that it in no way created any challenge to the status quo didn't make it easier. The two fact-assertion accusations -- one false as to motive and the other totally unhinged -- wakes up that engineer or attorney that lives in my heart, and makes me want to argue. "Do you see these words your wife wrote? Can you defend that?"

And ladies and gentlemen, this is the nub of it. We go NC when we no longer want to argue because we no longer care to win. And I am a steadfast believer in the power of words and facts and reason. I will never, on this side of the looking glass, give up on words and facts and reason.

But these folks whom -- sadly -- we must give up on, they are on the other side of the looking glass. I chose to read the damn card, I know. And perhaps I ought not. But I must always remember that if I do choose to read it I am peaking into another world, and must never get confused. Because I sure as hell am not going back in time.

[moglow]

And she feels able to speak to your supposedly hurting someone and "obvious" motivations because ...? A thinking person would have taken the high road and offered a softer path with her reassurance of love and stopped there, but no. The woman clearly hasn't a clue who you are, not even as a family. She decimated that with her behavior. But Heaven forefend that she step back and look at herself, her behaviors, how she has actually treated and spoken to all of you. She, like mine, forgets that these things don't happen in a vacuum.

She needs to go beat that drum somewhere else. Unless she's burned those bridges also and has circled back around in desperation... Still. Not your stuff, brother.

[Starboard Song]

Thanks, Mo.

I do know that's right. My desire to argue is built on the premise that reasonable discussions make the world better. This is only true, though, with people susceptible to such discussion. As a counselor once told me, "You know how you probably don't discuss politics or religion at work? Well, you are now both politics and religion to your in-laws. They have a dangerous peanut allergy to inconvenient truths."

[square]

Man do I hear you. Certain levels of illogic really hurt me, stupid as that sounds. Some things my husband says hurts my mind, like it cracks reality or something because there is no sense to it.

He also is fixated on motivations, and yes, the motivations are always the same. He once accused me of courting and marrying him for the sole purpose of "destroying" him. I would have to be inhuman, an actual demonic spirit, to have grown up, reached young adulthood, and decided I wanted to dedicate my life to finding a young man and spend my life destroying him.

Not to say people don't destroy each other, but his sense of motivations are unreal. I could be a psychopath and be exploiting him for my own gains - money, labor, a front for my con lifestyle. But to have simply decided I wanted to destroy this random guy I met all those years ago? Bruh, what?

Anyway, I just can't with PD nonlogic.

[moglow]

She sounds horribly like mine:
Discussions simply aren't allowed - she may Exorcist over it all while your/our jobs are to sit and agree while we watch it spin. Attack retreat attack, claim victim of it all retreat attack retreat ad nauseum. And those mind reading skills? Phenomenol.

Breeeeeeathe, mo. Make it so.

[Starboard Song]

He once accused me of courting and marrying him for the sole purpose of "destroying" him. 

Symptom #104.17(k) - Leap to Implausible Motivations

There really is a training manual out there somewhere.

[Cat of the Canals]

You did anything you did only TO CAUSE HER PAIN.

This is my MIL's bread and butter as well. It goes so far that if any of her past sins are brought up -- which only happens after she has already launched an attack -- her response is, "You're only saying that to hurt me!" Welcome to DARVOland, where mentioning her bad behavior is "abuse."

We go NC when we no longer want to argue because we no longer care to win.

This got me. I acknowledge that I can never and will never win because the game is rigged. It's the caring part that gets me. And it's not even necessarily about winning/not winning, per se. At least not in a competitive way.

I'm like you -- I put a lot of stock in logic and reason and well... reality. The thing that drives me the most crazy is the absolute denial of reality in favor of a fantasy that exists only to further their own agenda.

[Srcyu]

A reminder really, if one were needed, of why you went no contact and why there can be no return. Proof, when it's there in front of you, available to be read and re-read at your leisure will sit there in your house and seep into every corner with its presence. A bit like Pandora's Box. The temptation to see what they had to say caused the lid to be lifted.

When all the poison had flooded out, the story goes that Hope remained at the end.

That hope is a certainty, you are better off without them as you already know.

[Starboard Song]

Yep. I kept a journal of everything said and written during our crisis. It is called "Error 404: Mother Not Found," and I occasionally refer to it when I need a reminder.

[Srcyu]

I like that.
"Error 404:Mother Not Found."

So painfully and yet blissfully, true.

[NarcKiddo]

Yep. I kept a journal of everything said and written during our crisis. It is called "Error 404: Mother Not Found," and I occasionally refer to it when I need a reminder.

That title is inspired!