JADE: Good for Jewelry, Bad for Relationships

The Jade Buddha for Peace

Nephrite, or Jadeite, the two minerals we think of as Jade, can make stunning jewelry and beautiful objets d'arts.

JADEing, as a technique for dealing with someone with OCPD or other personality disorders, sucks rocks.

We have the right, as adults, to decide what we want to eat, drink, wear.  If we want to go to a movie or a party, or not.  Just because we want to - or don't want to.  We are responsible for our choices and their consequences.

With a normal person, we might explain, "No thanks, I'm just not in the mood to see a movie tonight.  Perhaps tomorrow night?"  Or, "I'm up for a comedy, or something light, but not in the mood for anything deep or dramatic."

With a disordered person, they have boundary issues.  They don't really "get" that they could be in the mood for TV, and we could be in the mood for reading, because we are supposed to think like they think, want what they want.

When we JADE, we are agreeing with the presumption that they are entitled to an explanation, as if we can only read, go to the movies, or perform some household task by their standards or with their permission.  Unless they are actually our work supervisor, that’s simply not true.

JADE stands for Justify, Argue, Defend and Explain, and it's something we all tend to do, but it feeds into never-ending, circular arguments and the Land of Frustration.

"Don't JADE” doesn't mean “don't disagree,” or giving them the silent treatment.  It means that we don't follow them down the rabbit hole of disagreements and explanations and their arguments against our explanations and our arguments against their arguments.
 
An example:

Him: “Did you eat that whole bag of cookies?”

You not JADEing: “I am in charge of what I eat.”

Him: “But you're supposed to be on a diet! You never stick to anything!”

You JADEing: “I missed lunch, and I'm not supposed to get too hungry on the diet, or I'll binge later.

The book says...”
Him: “If you keep eating this way, you're going to have a heart attack and die. And you'll deserve it!”

You JADEing: “I haven't eaten any junk food in two weeks! And what about that bushel of cheese fries you had last Thursday?”

not JADEing: “I am, once again, in charge of what I eat. And I'm done talking about this.”
Him: “And what if I wanted a cookie? Did you think of that? You never think of anyone but yourself!”
not JADEing: “I'm done talking. You seem to be having trouble letting this go, so I'm headed out to the movies. See you in a couple of hours.”
 

How about someone partner whose is "concerned" when her husband goes out for lunch; both because of the money he's "wasting," and because she feels it is her job to be the Food Police.

"Did you go for lunch with anyone?"
"Yep, Joe and I went to Chili's."
"How can you waste money that way? Don't you know how unhealthy Chili's food is?"
"We can afford the occasional lunch out, and I'll manage my own food choices."
"We still have a mortgage! You have no business spending extra money while we still have debt!"
"Hon, I love you very much, but even married adults make their own food choices and their own decisions about small expenditures. I'm not going to discuss this any further."
"Most adults make sensible choices! I know you had fajitas, didn't you? Don't you know that cheese will kill you? You'll have a heart attack and the kids and I will be left homeless!"
"Hon? I love you, but I'm done talking about this."
"You don't care about us! You never communicate."
"Love you. Done talking."
"How would the kids feel if they knew their father hated them?"
"The talking? Is done."
"Why did you even get married if you were planning to have a heart attack before age fifty?"
"I'm going to watch Grey's Anatomy now. I'd be happy for you to stay and watch it with me, because I love you, but I'm not going to talk any more."

Another example - the Perfectionist wife has been getting very upset over the "wrong way" in which the grocery bags are packed at the store, and the order in which they are carried into the house from the car. It’s not like people can stop eating, after all, and the Perfectionist wife has back problems so the husband can’t just leave all the grocery shopping and loading up to her, much as he'd like to. Now he's tense and dreading the weekly drama.

OCPD Wife: “What are you doing?  You’re doing it all wrong, I can’t believe you <hissy hissy, fit fit>
JADEing: “Look, it doesn't matter what order I carry the bags in. If the ice cream goes into the freezer a minute and a half later than it could have, it's not going to be ruined. No, it's not. No, ice crystals are not going to form in a minute and a half. Look, I'm not going to evaluate every cold item in the groceries and make a plan like the Battle of Normandy to get them in the freezer in the right order. No, I don't want you to get salmonella, but chicken doesn't go bad in a minute and a half either! What do the crackers have to do with it; we were talking about cold stuff? No, the crackers aren't going to go stale if they're in the bag for half a minute with the apples. No, and they're not going to make the apples go bad. I don't care what they say about ripening apples with a piece of bread, that has nothing to do with...”
fit.>”

Not JADEing: “Hon, if you don't like the way I'm carrying in the bags, maybe you shouldn't watch.”

You see why JADEing is a bad idea? The argument will never, ever end. You will never, ever be anything but wrong in her eyes. All you can do is refuse to cater to her demands, and let her accept, over time, that you are determined to be wrong. Over time she may come to see that you're being “wrong” will not result in horrible doom for both of you, and she may be able to relax her fears for a couple of minutes before the next threat comes along.

When you JADE, you are feeding the dynamic that you have to get their permission/approval to carry out your personal actions.  This creates more anxiety for them.  Remember, the OCPD person is convinced that if s/he doesn't take charge of as much as possible, catastrophe is around the corner. 

Will the disordered person be upset if you don't JADE?  Yes. 
Will they be upset if you DO JADE?  Yes, and so will you. 

Key to making not JADEing work is

a) the 4 C's: Staying Calm, Cool, Collected, and Confident.
b)  Practice!  Run some of the most frequent arguments through a script process, above, and see if you can't take what you usually do, whether it is justifying, arguing, defending, or explaining your point of view, and try not JADEing.  

It takes being prepared and balanced to practice not JADEing.  If we start off-balance, it is that much easier for OCPD to knock us off our feet and into the drink.



Just pretend you're Crush, Queen of Joust. Do a little mental booty dance.

Have you had experiences with not JADEing vs. JADEing?
Tell us how it worked out.

10 Rules For Being Human from No Busy Signal

I've been fighting bronchitis this past month, and something about coughing and gasping for breath has made it tough on my brain to come up with new ideas. It keeps whining at me, "More oxygen needed" or some other lame excuse.

Luckily, there are plenty of other good ideas out there I can steal borrow. Here's a fabulous post from No Busy Signal which I stumbled upon a few weeks ago in my delirium.


Ten Rules for Being Human


by Cherie Carter-Scott

1.	You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.
2.	You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3.	There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4.	Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5.	Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6.	“There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7.	Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8.	What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9.	Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10.	You will forget all this.

I'm not sure I agree with all of these, but many of them rang true true TRUE to me.

 #1 - Yep, I got the body I got, and though I might be body-envious of a dainty little ballerina-type, even if I could starve myself thin, there's no way I can starve myself dainty.  So, might as well learn to love & take care of the body I've got.

#4 - I do see that there are patterns, or lessons that keep getting presented to me.  I might as well suck it up and learn 'em, because the avoidance thing did not work out for me.

from LOLCats

#7 - I'm not sure that other people are always mirrors.  However, I have noticed that others are most impatient with the flaws of others that they themselves possess.  (I've noticed it myself doing this sometimes - which means either I don't do it as often, or, more likely, that I don't catch myself doing it as often as I do.)

#10 - What was that again?

Did these life rules ring any bells for you?

What struck you the most - or least - true?

Please share in the comments, below.

Too Perfect Tuesdays -Chap. 2 Retroactive Control

Aaah, what we could fix, if only we had a Time Machine!
Or, could we?

This post continues with Retroactive Control, from Chapter Two.

This series will look at a small snippet of The book on the Perfectionist Personality, aka The Obsessive Compulsive disordered Personality, aka OCPD, each week. Please follow along, leave your comments, engage more on the FaceBook website... whatever your heart calls you to do.

Too Perfect, When Being in Control Gets Out of Control by Allan E. Mallinger, M.D. and Jeanette DeWyze was published by Random House in 1992.  If you believe you are dealing with OCPD or someone who is "Too Perfect," whether that's you or a loved one, please buy a copy of the book and read it for additional insights that will not all be covered in these excerpts.

RETROACTIVE CONTROL

When the obsessive's control fails in one of these ways, a flood of anxiety will surface, unless she can ignore or distort what has happened.  One common "fudge factor" is what I call Retroactive Control.  The words "should've," "could've," or "would've" are essential for this.  She should've done this instead of that.  If only she had, she would've been better off.  She could've struck it rich, avoided the flu, or performed better.

Using this trick enables the obsessive to recast the frightening events after they happen.  It offers him a possible escape route from the truth - that one's control of life is frequently imperfect at best.  Should he catch a cold, he immediately searches for and usually finds, a good reason: a draft he "should've" avoided, too little sleep, forgetting to take his normal dose of vitamins.

[The chapter goes in to cite a man whose girlfriend broke up with him primarily because of a large age difference and differences in religious faiths - things that were totally out of his control -  though he clung to a belief that if only he had behaved differently, she would not have broken up with him.]


WHEN EVEN RETROACTIVE CONTROL FAILS

[Another example is given of a commuter plane crash, and how this upset many of his patients, since this was something that could have happened to them, and which, again, they could not possibly have controlled by any actions of their own.]

The anxiety they felt was an inevitable consequence of having seen their control mythology shaken.  The whole reason obsessives construct and embrace the Myth of Control is to fend off anxiety; and when an experience contradicts the myth, if they can't ignore or reinterpret the experience, that anxiety returns with a vengeance.  They may even develop physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach problems, sleeplessness, or dizzy spells.

But even when they aren't acutely suffering, obsessives' rigid need for control is causing them irreparable damage.  Their much-vaunted self-control, for example, is like some impervious suit of armor that has rusted shut and can no longer be shed.  Fashioned in childhood as protection, it has become life-constricting.  Their rigidly controlled posture has in itself become a source of pride that they're terrified of jeopardizing.  And though they long to be more easygoing, flexible, and spontaneous, fear inhibits them.

***

This was OCPD ex b-f all right, full of retroactive control, and it used to be me, too, but twenty years ago or so I figured out that when we play the game of "if only," we always imagined it could have gone better.  We rarely imagined that the outcome could have been the same, or even worse.

This was then hammered in to my consciousness by the marvelous 1998 movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow.  Writer/director Peter Howitt tells this story in a unique way, in parallel from the moment Helen (played by GP) misses - or doesn't miss - her train.

In one version, after she's been rudely sacked (fired, for my fellow Americans), Helen barely catches the sliding doors of the train, arriving back at her flat to find her cheating boyfriend in bed with another woman.



In the other version, the child on the stairwell delays her just enough so that she misses it.  Then the next train is delayed, and she gets mugged, and arrives home well after sleazeball boyfriend has cleaned up all evidence of his ongoing affair.

When she catches the cheater, in the first scenario, she throws the bum out on his ear, and takes a whole new path in her life.  When she doesn't... she doesn't.  Which one works out better for her in the long run?  I won't be a spoiler; if you haven't seen it, put it on your Netflix list.

All we can do, at any point in time, is the best we can, given our health, knowledge, state of restedness, anxiety level, number of distractions...  One of my friends would use this Maya Angelou quote as her signature line,"You did then what you knew how to do, And when you knew better, You did better.”

Comparing the ways things actually did work out, in Real Life, to the way they might have worked out, in FantasyLand - and beating ourselves up because the reality doesn't measure up to some fantasy of The Perfect Outcome...   Why would we want to do that again?

How big a factor is Retroactive Control in your life?

How much do those you love use Retroactive Control?