Why My Girlfriend Can't Calm Down

When Shaelin gets angry, she turns into a different person, and that person hates me.

I was similarly dysregulated early in our relationship, so our blowout fights used to be more balanced. I would scream at her, she would sob and break up with me, I would destroy inanimate objects, and we’d both call each other horrible names.

Over the past couple years I’ve learned to regulate my emotions by setting boundaries and reminding myself that it’s okay to take a break from talking if it’s too hard for me at the moment. Strangely, Shaelin’s side of our conflicts have not changed all that much—she will have the whole damn fight without me.

I do feel an occasional surge of violence when she screams at me, but for the most part I’m not even tempted to join in the fray anymore.

If you’re wondering what the fights are about, the inciting incident can be literally anything. One of our worst fights this fall started because a glass jar came out of the dishwasher with food still caked to it.

“Let’s just leave it in for another cycle,” I said.

“I’d prefer you wash it by hand first."

“I know, but I don’t want to do that. Let’s run it through again and see what happens.”

“I don’t want you to do this. Don’t do this,” Shaelin said, her eyes suddenly wide with rage.

My response was, “Hey, I think I’m allowed to disagree with you about how we should handle the dirty dish. I’m not really doing anything to you.” I even threw in a little chuckle, like the Padme meme. You’re not gonna lose your shit over a dirty jar, right babe?

Wrong.

“You never care what I want to do. You never listen to anyone. You’re abusive.”

“If it’s really important to you that I wash the jar, maybe you should directly ask me to wash it instead of trying to shame me into washing it. Do you want to try that?”

”I did ask you, and you wouldn’t! You never care what I want to do! Everything we do is about you!”

“Okay, I think we have to stop doing the dishes until you calm down a little, Shaelin. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m never going to calm down!”

“Okay, I’m setting a boundary with you. I don’t want to keep talking about this until you calm down.”

“Then we’re never going to talk again!”

She retreated to her office (thank god she has an office to retreat to) and sobbed loudly for an hour.

At this point in our clashes, sometimes she’ll calm down on her own and text me that she’s ready to talk. But sometimes she won’t. Occasionally she sleeps in her office, which hurts, but I think it’s good for her to know she can do that.

Often by the time we talk I can barely remember what the fight is about, and Shaelin has spiraled into a repeating thought loop about how I don’t care about her.

(I’ve boyfriend-diagnosed her with OCD. I like to call her a “ruminatrix.”)

Because life is short and Shaelin is 10 years younger than me, sometimes I’ll just go knock on her door.

“What.”

“Can I come in?”

“I don’t care.”

Stepping gingerly over various articles of clothing and pieces of old mail, I’ll tiptoe across Shaelin’s office to the twin mattress on the floor—the safest place in a cruel universe, as far as Shaelin is concerned.

She glares at me through puffy eyelids like a rabid fox eyeing a pond. It’s my job to convince her that she’s not dying.

“I’m making dinner. Do you want some salmon?”

“You’re manipulating me.”

“I understand that you are angry and will continue to be angry, but it’s getting late and you should have some dinner.”

“You know I’ll stop being mad if you give me food.”

“You don’t have to have any if you don’t want it.”

She’s already dropped her guard, but pretends to keep it up for a few minutes just so I know her trust can’t be regained with a piece of pan-fried fish (it can).

“Fine.”

The high frequency and long duration of these blowouts gives me a lot of time to ponder our relationship, and I’ve had a few hard-earned epiphanies that I’d like to share.

Epiphany #1: Calming down feels poisonous to victims of abuse.

When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about things like cutting myself, punching my parents in the face, and running away. I thought that if my mother saw me soaked in my own blood she might care about how I was feeling.

These urges would be quickly tempered by the internalized voices of my parents and older brother: Oh, come on. Maaaaax… Get ahold of yourself.

My protectors were my tormentors, and much of the soothing they did was for their own benefit. For years I was unable to meaningfully express anger or set boundaries with my family, my friends, or myself.

When I was 30 I finally got help. Going to therapy was a great first step, but redefining those calming inner voices as abusive rather than loving left me with no way to regulate my emotions. I acted like Shaelin for several years before I could establish a new sense of internal safety.

The person most complicit in my abuse, by far, was me. No one can gaslight you without your help. That’s what gaslighting is—enlisting a victim of abuse to silence themselves. To stay calm when they should be screaming.

Shaelin was distant and dissociated when I met her. Now she’s screaming. Good for her, but her outbursts are traumatic and scary for me. If I directly ask her, “Do you care about my boundaries right now?” during a fight, she will flatly say, “No.”

Empathy for me feels like manipulative poison to her, so I’ve settled on the protocol described above—hiding and then feeding her, like I’m dating a giant cat.

Epiphany #2: Our relationship is definitionally abusive if Shaelin can’t calm herself down.

The problem with the wait-and-feed approach to Shaelin’s dysregulation is that her concerns about our relationship are usually eclipsed by the insane things she does when she’s angry. I may very well have steamrolled her in our conversation about the dirty jar, but because of her reaction, we never talked about it.

A couple years ago I was adamant that we agree to a plan where, at any time, either of us could make an abuse allegation about the other and be listened to immediately. The rule was that if you just say, “I think you’re being abusive,” the other person has to drop what they’re doing and say, “Okay, how so?”

The problem is that Shaelin’s responses tended to be more like, “I don’t care,” and “That’s because YOU’RE being abusive.”

She also pulled the fire alarm one too many times when she didn’t really think I was being abusive, and instead just wanted me to shut up.

So now who decides when I’m being abusive?

Me.

Shaelin’s rage and indignation are so compartmentalized that she either thinks I’m the worst person on earth or a perfect angel. The moment she starts thinking critically about me, she’s dangling helpless over a pit of unfathomable despair.

So while Shaelin can intellectually articulate how she wants our relationship to run, once we’re in a fight she has no sense of emotional scale, no empathy for herself or for me, and no way to even define what’s happening, let alone advocate for and hold onto that definition.

If your partner cannot self-regulate, you are abusing them, even if you’re the nicest guy on earth.

Which I am.

Epiphany #3: If your partner can’t effectively call out or define abuse, having sex with them is rape.

I don’t have a counter-argument or any nuance to add here, but I will say that I’m proud that I’m able to both admit this and also, despite my anti-male and sex-negative upbringing, prioritize my sexual needs enough that I’m willing to rape my own girlfriend.

16-year-old me could never.

Epiphany #4: Making plans is pointless.

This is actually an umbrella epiphany that encompasses several micro-epiphanies:

1. Since Shaelin can’t discern between safety and danger, she is almost always in a state of terror. She can really only discern safety by rapidly escaping danger—in the case of our relationship, threatening to break up with me and then quickly getting naked and eating a sandwich while we cuddle (kind of like jumping back and forth between a hot tub and a snow bank). The same way I assume smoking crack must feel amazing, these scraps of serenity must be a great relief to her, given the amount of chaos and destruction she causes in order to experience them. All this is to say Shaelin is not trying to get along with me.

2. In her rage state, Shaelin breaks our boundaries on purpose. She purposefully eschews her own agency. It’s a mistake to think she is striving and failing to follow our agreements when in reality she’s setting them on fire as a way to express her anger and also feel loved.

3. Everything I do perpetuates the cycle. By fighting back, I allow her to blame me for her lifelong feelings of neglect and hatred. By avoiding her, I only destabilize her further (this also makes me lonely). By explaining things—I can’t stop explaining things—I drift naively into the very father role I’m so desperate to escape. By screaming at her, I regress with her into the emotional paycheck-to-paycheck way of life.

4. When Shaelin freaks out, the correct move is to do nothing. To say nothing, to propose nothing, to demand nothing, to neither blame nor apologize, to refrain from creating and organizing her reality, and to hold onto my own existence—especially my impatience. Shaelin likes to say, “You’re making me feel like there’s something wrong with me.” And I say, “Yes, there is something wrong with you.” Shaelin has to figure these things out for herself, and it’s going to take her a really long time, even when the solutions are extremely fucking obvious.

Epiphany #5: The healthy and ethical thing to do is to cede power to a third party—a couples therapist who can create equality and safety by defining abuse and setting and enforcing rules.

But what if she takes Shaelin’s side?