Plague of Focus

Posted by fxckfeelings on November 20, 2014

If focus exists on a spectrum from oblivious to obsessed, you’d be surprised how hard it is to find a happy medium, and how impossible it is to budge your brain if it tends to work at either extreme. So don’t blame your mind for paying attention in a way you don’t want or need. Once you accept the way it works, you will become better at making it work for you, no matter what its preferred setting.
–Dr. Lastname

I hate some of the sounds people make. Chewing, mouth breathing, loud repetitive nose breathing, even excessive coughing if I’m in bad mood. I know it’s ridiculous, because I make these noises too; they’re human noises. It’s not that I hate everyone’s noises, like my friends’ chewing is fine, but my dad’s annoys me. I hate myself for this. I hate myself because I can’t control my facial expressions, I try really hard to, but people still notice; my whole body language changes when someone is making a sound annoying to me. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, because I know they can’t help it, but I can’t help it, either. My stepmother makes a lot of noises. She has nose issues so she chews, drinks, and breathes loudly, all the time. I love her, and I try so hard to keep myself in check, but it’s not working. My reactions, subtle or not, are causing friction. My goal is to control my issue.

The problem with fixations like these is that the effort you make to ignore body noises just makes you notice them even more, which just leaves you more irritated and more determined to ignore them, and so on. You grimace because you can’t scream, and want to scream because you can’t just staple their mouths shut.

In these situations, it’s easy to blame people who irritate you for driving you nuts, but you seem to accept the fact that what’s happening is nobody’s fault. You don’t expect them to breathe or chew more quietly simply because those sounds disgust you. You just wish you could control your reaction, or at least your sourpuss.

Unfortunately, these are the kinds of problems you have to deal with when, for whatever reason, you can’t live alone. Or just have your meals alone, or wear earplugs without causing an argument.

Close relationships come with their share of irritation, particularly if haven’t yet had an opportunity to live apart from your family. Most people go through something like this in their lives, especially young adults who start to see their parents as fellow adults, not just parents, and, as such, begin to notice all the ways in which their parents are flawed, ugly and disgusting.

That might be why you have more negative feelings for people who are closest to you and around you most frequently, like your father and stepmother, than you do for a friend, and that’s why their body noises annoy you more. It’s a fact of life, and not one for which you should blame yourself.

Unfortunately, you can’t change feelings, and trying to change feelings like this often backfires, so you’ll just have to work harder to control what you do with them. Study dance, yoga or self-hypnosis. Take a crappy food service job that will train your body to express good customer service values, such as politeness and attentiveness, rather than annoyance and impatience, even if they’re justified (and in food service, they often are).

Meanwhile, keep doing your work and behaving according to your usual standards. Your body-noise aversion may control your facial expression, but don’t let it prevent you from being a decent person. Your top priority isn’t to change your feelings or even your body language; it’s to maintain the basics of family relationships by showing up, caring, and doing what’s necessary.

In time, your aversion to body noises will probably fade as you get more used to having mixed feelings in close relationships, or even just get distracted by whatever life throws your way next. For now, don’t let it distract you from being respectful and going about your business.

If you develop more control over your facial expressions, so much the better, but for now, it’s best to worry less about hiding your disgust than showing you care in other, more important ways. Then this, too, will pass, especially if and when you get to move out.

STATEMENT:
“I hate my reaction to the disgusting body noises of those I love, but there’s no reason to feel guilty about feelings I can’t help, particularly when I haven’t behaved badly. I’ll continue to have good relationships while I learn how to live with these feelings and manage the way I express them.”

My husband is a nice guy, but he has a way of tuning out that makes me feel like I’m on my own. We’ve got two kids and he’s really eager to do something to help if I ask him directly, but when it comes to getting the kids up, making sure they’ve get their lunches, and getting them to appointments, there’s always something he forgets, or he just assumes I’m going to do it. He doesn’t really listen when I tell him and, if I write it down, he forgets to look. I feel I do all the work, and he devalues me. My goal is to get him to listen.

It’s hard to work with someone who promises more than he delivers; you feel like you’ve got a trusted companion who turns out to be useless for anything other than telling you what you want to hear. Fortunately, your husband isn’t dishonest, just oblivious; he isn’t avoiding his obligations, he just doesn’t understand the job description. Luckily, he’s probably trustworthy in most of the ways that count, just not perceptive most of the time.

You haven’t accused him of loafing, not working, not sharing his earnings, or not really caring, so I assume that he does a good job most of the time. He’s not a guy who constantly makes empty promises, just when he’s supposed to track tasks on a list. So ask yourself whether that’s purposeful avoidance, or just the way his brain works.

Take note of how he manages multitasking at work and whether he had problems with his homework in high school. What you’ll probably find is that he works hard and doesn’t leave early, but does best with jobs that grab his attention, like sales and crises, and isn’t good at following up on details and running down lists. In other words, his failures at home aren’t personal, though personal criticism may make them worse.

Instead of criticizing his failures, tell him you think he’s a good, hardworking partner who has trouble tracking certain kinds of chores. If it’s a chore that matters to you, help him track it by developing a reminder system. Use the to-do list and alarm in his cell-phone or send him emails from your own to-do list. If it’s simpler, use a big calendar on the kitchen door or next to his steering wheel.

Don’t show anger or condescension, even if you feel them; just determination and optimism about his ability to strengthen his executive function and extend the range of chores he can accomplish. Note his successes, learn from his failures, and encourage him to do the same.

He may always be spacy when it comes to doing his share, if you can provide a reminder system that will do the observing and remembering for him, his actions and intentions might finally match up.

STATEMENT:
“I get irritated by my husband’s obliviousness but I know he cares, so I’ll try to develop systems for him to track multiple tasks and see if he can do more, particularly for those I consider important.”