Teamwork

There are lots of great things about having multiple partners at the same time. You get to do things with one that the other thinks are silly, or at least not their cup of tea, stretch different parts of yourself that meet in different areas, when one is busy the other can play, and having multiple people being nice to you makes you more nice to them.
There are also some good parts that are less fun. Like when they gang up on picking on you and suddenly it's like having two older brothers in the house and you ahve to remember that you did this deliberately. Or when you've been having conversations with your primary for years and years in a certain way and you do this thing that you don't think you do but you totally do and when he gets to talking to the other man and they're all "oh, ya, she totally does that" and I'm all "crap, maybe I do."
Those are great learning moments.

Between the two of them, I learned that when I have a "discussion" or when I sense that someone is upset...wait. back up.
I'm very uncomfortable when people are angry around me. It doesn't even have to be *at* me, just in my vicinity and I start to go all kinds of alarm and warming up systems and checking missile bay doors and escape routes. This comes from growing up in a house where "mad" was a step away from physical or verbal abuse. And as I think back on it now, there was a specific marker that heralded the crossover. My mum would get angry, and common to her particular brand of broken, would get what some in the kids-with-borderline-parents community call "hunter eyes" or my favorite, "shark eyes" Her pupils would get really big and she would start to loose control. Apparently it's not uncommon to experience a blackout during that period, so she'd not remember all the terror of her rage. Must be nice. (maybe that's why people's eyes on "substances" that dilate pupils freak me out a bit...hmmm)
Anyway, another component of this exchange was the fact that at the best of times, borderlines don't have the strongest grasp on objective reality. They see the world in black and white, there is no middle, no "good person who occasionally makes mistakes" and so in order to survive her head monkeys she had to rewrite history to make her totally right and someone else totally wrong. So when we started to sense the Change, the only real recourse we had was to present a counter-story that pleaded to her rapidly retreating rational brain presenting the facts as you understood them. See, part of this was the assumption of intent. She assumed you did things for a certain reason, because that's the way it makes sense in her head and no one would do anything for reasons she didn't understand, right? So you had to lay out your intent as rapidly and convincingly as possible to try to bed the beast down again, but not go too far, because you couldn't say that she was wrong, only that you weren't deliberately attacking either.

Naturally, some details got smoothed over in the process, because when you're arguing with a mind-shifting crazy person who doesn't believe in gray area, to admit any fault was to admit total fault, and thus alleviate any guilt over what came next because obviously I deserved it, right?

So, when I'm in any sort of conversation with someone who has a point that implies i fucked up, the instinct is not so much to say "no I didn't" but to present the case of my intentions and background and reasoning that makes it perhaps a wrong thing but a forgivably wrong thing so can we review what to do next time and move along before this gets bad and you loose track and I....oh, wait.

I'm not under attack any more. There was a very good reason this very important and useful strategy developed, pretty much as soon as I could talk. Problem is, with people who are sane, or at least crazy in different and fun ways, this can be very invalidating and frustrating because it feels like they're not being heard. Which they're not. Because I've left the room and am running a completely different program.

So when the boys start to compare notes, or rather when I have "discussions" with both on the same day and tell the one about the other and the one is like "ya, you totally do that. I thought it was just me and I'm not as articulate or organized with my thoughts so I start to doubt myself and assume you're right." Soo, ya. When two people you love and respect and want to have good relationships with are telling you the same thing, perhaps it's time to listen.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: It's hard for me to get out of that pattern once it starts. I have a feeling it would be easier to keep me out of it from the beginning. So saying something like "so, I have this thing that I need to say, and I need you to hear me, so please don't interrupt until I'm done and just listen." might be helpful. And if I seem to be getting deflective, asking something like "so can you reflect back to me what you think i just said" could keep me in, you know, the conversation I'm actually having.
And it doesn't have to be all flowery and clinical. "I need to say something and I want you not ot get your knickers in a twist and actually listen to what I'm' saying instead of jumping in to redefine things because I love you but you're working my tits and we need to talk"
"art of war, chapter one, shoosh and get all the information first, eh?"

B: so basically what you're saying is that you were trained from a young age to become a master of the ninja way of deflecting and invalidation. And P and I get to try to retrain you bit by bit. Because the skills that you learned over the course of a decade on a Tibetan mountain top are inadvertently getting in the way of us feeling like you understand and care about what we're feeling, and you want to fix this so we can all be in a better place together.
That about sum it up?

me: two and a half decades, and yes. except instead of trying to beat the ninja head on, which is unlikely, because I'm very vary good at this game, because there were times when my life literally depended on it, and I like being alive, I'm trying to show you and P how to "sweep the leg" and come at me from the side. Because I'm pretty sure I've got that whole "being and staying alive" part down, and now what I'd like to be is happy. And to make the people I care about happy.

B: ok, well then tell P that another sweep technique is that when you start talking a lot and going on and on and explaining yourself and your perception of things.... that's a sure sign that you are in the zone, and he/I/we need to interrupt you and hit your reset button."

See? They're helpers. And that is why my life is awesome.