Dateline:  American Airlines Flight 813 Austin to Los Angeles.

The Big Lesson:  The Need to Be Right, Part Two…Disagreement can FEEL like SEPARATENESS or Emotional Distance.  Our efforts to prove ourselves right and others wrong, launched to reduce anxiety, end up causing greater anxiety and just what we didn’t want…Emotional Distance….Lovers looking forward to an evening together can disagree over which route to take to a party can end up with staying the night in separate quarters…the opposite of what they both wanted.   

Set-up: The young married couple, both graduate students, came into the University Health Center because their once pleasant evenings together had recently degenerated into arguments and distance.  Asked for an example, the husband offered up the pizza problem. 

One treat affordable on their limited budget was ordering in a pizza a couple of times a week. Sounds like a delightful evening, right?  What could go wrong? 

Here’s the problem as the husband explained it:  “We usually order one large pepperoni.  Then, my wife, who really prefers plain cheese pizza, sits there and picks the pepperoni off her side…which I think is messy and ridiculous.  Why doesn’t she order half pepperoni and half cheese?  The cost would be the same and she wouldn’t have to sit there picking off the pepperoni…I think she doesn’t order a half pepperoni, half cheese because she has a problem being assertive.”  (Oh?  Then this little repeated reasoning helps with the assertiveness problem, right?)

Here’s the problem the way the wife explained it:  “The reason I don’t order a half and half is because I might want some pepperoni one time and I don’t mind picking it off.  I think he gets all bent out of shape because he has impulse problems just like his mother and, since sometimes I don’t eat all of my half, he won’t be able to resist eating what I’ve left…then he’ll start in on how his weight problem is all my fault.”

Now careful…resist the urge to get bogged down trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong. The problem isn’t about who is right and who is wrong.  The problem is the way anxiety is handled.  The problem is, when our always vulnerable Pseudo Self is challenged, we can go crazy.  And our Pseudo Self, built to sway the way others see us, gets “challenged” pretty darn easily.   

Our Pseudo Self doesn’t need a disagreement with our Special Person to go crazy….drivers not doing our biding or airlines switching from tidy foil packs of peanuts to these little packs of cheap pretzels that splatter crap everywhere when you open them…are enough to rattle some people’s Pseudo Self cage.

We are, however, most vulnerable to those closest to us. One feature of better emotional functioning is the capacity to tolerate the choices of those close to us without a rather desperate urge to change them….or at least convince them they are wrong.  If we fail in convincing them they are wrong, our next move is usually to contact someone who we know will agree with us….

If this sounds like your psychotherapist…run.  Because…while bolstering our sagging self by finding agreement…we have distanced from our loved ones and let the urge to rid ourselves of current anxiety control our actions so that even more anxiety awaits. 

Not that some issues shouldn’t be addressed or the world is going all to heck. I complained loudly to the flight attendant about this pretzels boondoggle…I know she can’t do anything about it…but the strangers in my row know I’m no idiot…And I’m not the only one who’s taken all they are going to take from the airlines…Just to prove it, I’m going to survey my fellow passengers on this underhanded substitution of these salty sticks over the protein we travelers so desperately need…I’ll write up my complaint and send it to the CEO of American Airlines…We’ll just see whose right on this peanut-pretzel issue!…So what if I don’t finish the 50 pages of editing I’d planned to wrap up on this flight.  American Airlines is wrong and something must be done about it!

Next:  The Couple Who Counted Ice Cubes.  On Being Right, Part 3

….Then on to The Sunburned Chap in the Fisherman’s Hat Who Moved a Mountain to Prove He Was Right.