Dear Cali Chica:

Before I read your recent post, from the last one I submitted to you, I want to repeat the following, with the bold faced letter feature corrected:

Notice a moment of Frenzy and see to it that it doesn’t progress into an episode of Frenzy.

And now to your recent post: she said, “well you didn’t even talk to me for a month.. how rude!”, and you “realized how she did not gut it at all.. she had no clue… (she is) not.. someone who is capable of truly getting it entirely”, and you realized “that this ignited even more guilt on  my end”.

But what if she did get it, what if she did have a clue and knew that she has the ability to ignite your guilt, that it will benefit her if she does,  and then, proceeded to ignite your guilt?

Maybe it is her who is getting it entirely.. and you who imagine that she has no clue. “sometimes I am fooled”- I suppose so, but not because you sometimes think she gets it, but because you don’t get that your sister too, like so many others, keeps doing what works for her (be it a short term Win) at the expense of others (others’ Lose).

“Her main reaction was anger and that she was done wrong. How it was unfair”- which leads you to do right by her, to make it fair- that’s her Win. Igniting your guilt- that’s your Lose.

“her passive aggressive communication makes me quite uncomfortable”- the aim of the passive in passive-aggressive is to make the aggressor look like the victim, and obscure the aggression that way. It makes me think of a recent example you gave, the day after Thanksgiving, she wanted you to keep her dog, and you said no, she said “okay”, and you thought she got it. I don’t think so, I think that you are likely to hear about it again, how rude you were to not keep her dog (after she kept yours etc.) That okay was not really an okay, it was a disguised anger kind of an okay, to be brought up later so to ignite your guilt when needed next.

Current example: Friday after work, you asked her when she will be meeting her friend, and later what the two of them will be doing, and she answered sort of petulantly, “I dunno!”, to both questions.

It is possible that she lied and had no meeting planned, and she was not prepared or willing to make up more lies as to when and what. “It was almost like she was uncomfortable and distressed about meeting her friend”, or about lying that she was meeting her friend.

In summary: even the most unaware people (unaware of the long-term consequences of their words and actions) are aware enough to know what works for them short term. There is more anger in her than there is in you. Your ROAR is loud and direct; hers is hidden in silence, in okays, put aside occasionally while she is delightfully honest, then it is back, and you don’t know where it is, what it is about at any moment in time, what’s going on in her mind, she won’t tell you, you can guess but you don’t know. And what that does is.. well, it feeds the Frenzy.

anita