Question

In situations of stress, I sometimes channel my frustration onto my partner, through blaming them and they react in similar ways. I also heard other people describing this. Could you please talk about this?

Answer

Yes, the wrong view that causes this is that Dukkha exists, and the cause of Dukkha lies in others, in the world, but not in me. So wrong view is causing this. The wish to control and make everything, everybody the way we would like them to be, is fuelling this. This is a wrong view about believing that everything is "mine." Especially with a partner, it's very easy to think that the partner is "mine" and that they exist to satisfy me. It's much more difficult for us to have unselfish emotions towards those who are closest to us, because we frequently see them as a way that they should satisfy us, give us pleasant feelings and make us happy. And when we don't get pleasant feelings, we blame them and get angry.

So in order to lessen this tendency we have to develop more unselfish ways of viewing our partner and accepting that they are different to us. And when we are wanting them to say a certain thing and they don't say it the way that we would like to hear it, it doesn't particularly mean that they are at fault, it's just that we may be having a certain expectation about what they say.

Sometimes we're seeking compassion from others, having this feeling or neediness. And the more we want it, the more we seek it. If it's not given to us in the form that we like, we may get angry.

And so the way to turn this around is to try to have more compassion for ourselves, to not need others so much. Of course, if we're frustrated, we have to look at our aversions, and try to note this, and try to have compassion for ourselves.

It's a very human to do this. Sometimes this happens because men and women react to their difficulties in quite different ways. Women tend to want to talk about it a lot, thinking that by talking about it, they will get over it. They seek to be understood, and this frequently satisfies them. So women like to talk a lot about these things, share things with others, whereas men tend to think they're not supposed to share their difficulties with others, they're supposed to find solutions. And so sometimes when these types of people get together it's a bit frustrating because the partner may be giving suggestions on how to deal with it, but the other person doesn't really want to deal with it yet, they just want to talk about it, share it, feel understood.

So sometimes it's just a matter of differences in sex. But really, we don't want to make men into women and women into men, I like the differences.

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