“There’s nothing I can do. This is the way he is, and I just have to live with it.” I could not tell if she was sad about what she perceived as a hopeless case or angry with me for suggesting she had choices. As we talked further, I discovered an underlying problem that kept Jen from making such choices. She did not experience herself as a free agent. It never occurred to her that she had the freedom to respond, to make choices, to limit the ways his behavior affected her. She felt that she was a victim of whatever he did or did not do.
“Limit the ways his behavior affected her” assumes a generous amount of stoicism on the offended spouse’s part. it is true that you can let someone else “get to you” too much and put ALL the responsibility for your well-being on someone else (which is a lack of boundaries on your part). but what the authors continually fail to acknowledge is that you can’t just decide to let something not bother you (especially when you are the one paying the price for your spouse’s unrepentant behavior), and spouses ARE responsible for one another to a large degree. they assume people exist in isolation from each other; people in bubbles that never intersect.
