Adult bullying, aka High Drama Communication

Lately I've found myself in the middle of some neighbor drama involving trees.  My neighbor wants me to cut some trees in the parking strip down, and I don't want to.  Still, I said that I would look into the laws, do some research on what types of trees they were and what threat to the sewer line they may or may not pose, and get back to him.

Though I've contacted the authorities in charge of parking strip trees (they told me I would not get a permit to remove the trees; the trees belong to the city and do not meet the qualifications for removal) and shared that information with him, he's not satisfied.  He's yelled at me, he has ranted in my face as I said, "I'd like to be neighborly and do the right thing; let's work together on this..." and then he got so mad that he actually took a hatchet to one of the trees.  (According to the authorities, this is criminal trespass, and I should have called 911.  I didn't, but had to send a scolding email saying, "If you do this again you leave me no choice but to call 911...")

Wowza.

In addition to rocketing my blood pressure, making me check the real estate listings (no, I'm not going to move, but it is tempting), and making me wonder if my neighbor is actually insane, this has gotten me thinking about communication and drama, and how some people communicate in such high drama that they guarantee their own failure. 

He made it sure that he would fail.  He guaranteed that I am no longer inclined to view him as a reasonable person, and that we are now set up as adversaries.  No matter what happens with the trees, he has failed.  No more watching his cat while they're away, no more borrowing an egg, no more nice exchanges on the sidewalk.  And needless to say, it feels a lot chillier in the neighborhood now.  Even if I find out I *have* to remove the trees because of some city ordinance (unlikely), ultimately, he has a loss where none was necessary.

The funny thing is, I think my neighbor wants me to think he's smart and reasonable.  Based on this behavior, I (ahem) don't see him that way. . . and I'm much less inclined to treat him that way.

So, if you want to create high drama communication, here's what you do:
1.  Yell a lot.
2.  Lay down absolutes.
3.  When someone else talks, talk over them.
4.  When someone gives an alternate viewpoint, tell them that they're ridiculous.
5.  When someone says, "I'd like to reach a consensus we can both live with," say "It's my way or the highway!"

If you do this, and your bullying tactics work, you will get what you want, although you won't make friends.  But if your bullying tactics don't work, you set yourself up for some pretty brutal fireworks.

I think that this is what happens in divorce all the time.  One party lays down the gauntlet, angry and loud, and the situation turns from one in which perhaps both parties can get what they need, and changes into something where there are going to be winners and losers, or maybe just losers.

I know a story about a toaster that ended up costing $10,000 in legal fees.  Long story short, a divorcing couple (I'm friends with one of them) got into an argument about their toaster as they split assets.  One got the toaster, one didn't.  And then it was time for the one who didn't get it to make toast for her kid, and she couldn't, and so she got mad, and she communicated her anger by breaking into the ex's house and stealing back the toaster with a few choice words.  He was so angry with this method that he froze her bank accounts.....and high drama ensued.  I think it's fair to say they both lost....big time.

Now, I don't know what would have happened if she'd called him and said, "Our child likes toast in the morning and I would like the toaster back please," or if she said, "I really need a toaster, so I'm going to Target where I will spend $15 and buy a brand new one and I'm making that a line item in our settlement," or if she made her kid a smoothie in the blender she got instead, but in any case, I doubt that it would have cost $10,000 in legal fees.  But yes, she sure showed him, and she got that toaster.

I'd like to believe I'm smarter than that.  Sure, I get mighty angry sometimes, but in the end, I want to be happy.  $10,000 in legal fees to get a toaster would most definitely make me very, very, very unhappy, and I think it's fair to say that I'd rather give a total stranger or my worst enemy my toaster rather than run up that many fees to protect it.  And I don't want to yell back at my neighbor because I believe that when I take the high road, maybe I'll feel better about my life, and maybe I won't bring out his need to hatchet anything else, and that trumps the idea of the (rather satisfying in theory) idea of calling him a lunatic to his face. 

I don't want to fight over toasters, or trees.  Actually, I don't want to fight at all.  I want to behave like adults.  Of course, sometimes the drama is brought in by another party (a neighbor, an ex) and then we're stuck with the drama that they bring to the party.  In my case, I'm hoping that bringing in an impartial third party such as a mediator with the ex, and the city authorities over the trees, will bring some peace to the situations, and keep the drama to a minimum.  Still, I'm at the mercy of others' mood swings, and sometimes all of the reasonable behavior in the world can't make a high drama bully stop.

What to do?



So, my questions for my readers:

- Why is it that some people communicate in such a way as to escalate drama?  If you could help me figure this one out, I'd be pretty appreciative.  And if you can explain how to de-escalate their drama-inducing-communication, you should write a book, or at least a pamphlet, for wide distribution.

- How do you manage high drama situations?

- How do you take the high road when someone is creating high drama communication?

- How do you avoid drama without agreeing to it?

- And just for fun - what are your high drama communication stories?  When did your ex create havoc where it was unnecessary, just because they clearly were acting like a bully-lunatic?  Vent away.  :-)

The lonely high road

A dear friend of mine is the child of divorced parents, and ever since I met her in college, I've heard stories of that particular divorce.  The image of her father rolling up his car window and driving away with her in the backseat, as her mother yelled, "FUCK YOU!", is emblazoned on my mind, as if I'd been sitting next to her.  I know that I don't want that for Katherine, and I know that it's all too easy to get to that place.  I'm looking for role models, because I really want to do this as well as is humanly possible.

In an effort to avoid repeating the divorce mistakes made by so many, I'm looking for role models.

One of the first books I found on the subject of divorce was The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart by Constance Ahrons, Ph.D.  It was an auspicious start to my divorce research.  In the book, Ahrons outlines an ideology for approaching divorce in a child-centric manner.  I read it twice before I asked for a divorce, hiding it in my bedroom (we were already sleeping in different rooms a lot of the time, his choice not mine) until I was ready to commit to divorce.  If I was to sum up the whole book, it would be, "Take the high road."  The high road means being compassionate, it means controlling one's temper, it means placing the child's needs first and foremost.  This seems like a sound strategy for me, and reading the book actually solidified my decision to divorce; it was the first strategy I'd seen that looked like something I could live with.  (Make no mistake, the book doesn't advocate divorce, and it doesn't paint a rosy picture, but it doesn't paint a picture of parents screaming at each other through a car window, either.)

With the book under my belt, I thought that it would be relatively easy to find lots of people just like me, lots of blogs about women (or men) going through divorce just the way the book had defined.


I have taken to scouring the web to find just about every divorce blog there is. This is such strange territory for me: none of my close friends are divorced, my parents and my grandparents aren't divorced, and I don't have many footsteps to follow in.  Surely there are people out there doing it the way I hope to?


There are plenty of angry, vitriolic blogs about divorce.  Some of them are funny and entertaining, but when I read them I get a little chill to think of living in that kind of bitterness.  I don't want to live like that, and I really don't want my daughter to live surrounded by that.

I don't know about you, but she doesn't look very happy to me.

I keep remembering, "Anger is a poison you drink to kill your enemy."  I don't want to die like that.  Sure, I'm mad - don't get me started - but I want to be HAPPY.

So far, I have found only a few blogs where the parents are both able to put their kids front and center, and have reached a place where they are living lives that aren't a testimony to anger and pain.  Here's my list, in case there are others out there, like myself, who are looking for a little inspiration in the divorce department. 

The first one, which is also the first one I found, is Molly Monet's Postcards from a  Peaceful Divorce.  Molly and her ex meet for dinners with their kids, she speaks kindly of him, she reflects on the marriage positively even though she is glad she is no longer in that marriage.  I have grown very fond of Molly - a woman I've never met, or conversed with, and who likely has no clue who I am - and I've been rather in awe of her.  Hers is the standard to which I have held myself, and mostly, I have felt like a miserable failure as a result.  Overall, she comes across as a hip, happy, successful, well rounded woman who not only raises her kids with love and patience and joy, but manages to have a successful career, a commitment to yoga (and all of its health and social benefits), AND a dating life.  I have spent hours trying to figure out how to be more like Molly, and how to achieve her brand of divorce.  I hate to admit it, but recently when she admitted to some struggles that she's been going through, I felt a tiny bit of relief, because she's actually human, and her revealed humanity helped me to be gentler with myself.  (And I hate that I would revel even a tiny bit in someone else's suffering - really, am I that small?!  But I am incredibly grateful to Molly for putting it all out there, for me to look up to, and I'm also grateful to her for revealing that everything isn't perfect, because that gives me permission to be imperfect as well.)

Another blog, which I discovered more recently, is Cuckoo Mama's This Cuckoo's Nest.  (Like me, Cuckoo Mama is blogging anonymously.)  Cuckoo Mama isn't all Zen like Molly: actually, she gets pretty pissed off and blows off steam on her blog about her "beer monkey" ex and his shenanigans.  But still, she puts her kids' needs front and center, even where the ex is involved.  The kids stay in the house, and she and the ex take turns "birdnesting" in that house, so that the parents have to move in and out, but the kids stay there.  This is an act of selfless love that only someone who has resorted to divorce could possibly understand: deciding that the marriage is too broken to continue, but sharing a physical space with that person, takes the patience of Job.  Cuckoo Mama writes funny rants about dirty dishes left in the sink, and she threatens with her purse brick, but she puts it front and center that she's glad to do this for her kids, and that it works because her ex is a decent guy.  I may aspire to be just like Molly, all peaceful compassion, but I relate to Cuckoo Mama, because she is angry but she does the right thing for her kids anyway.

Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy is a blog about many things, including divorce.  Big Little Wolf is wise, compassionate, and contemplative, and whatever she's writing about, I tend to love it.  (Although I don't share her passion for Mad Men, but don't tell her, because she's a cool kid and I want her to like me, and she's crazy for Mad Men.)  Recently I commented on a post of hers about where truth lies in divorce, and she gently told me that it is much easier to see truth a few years out from divorce, rather than right in the middle, as I am.  Maybe this is why she seems to be so at ease with her divorce: she's no longer living it, she's moved past it, and it no longer defines her.  I need to go back and read her archives (they go back to 2009), because I'd like to get to where she is now, but she's right, that's going to take me a few years.  In the meantime, maybe I can read about how she got there....

An unusual - and therefore refreshing - blog is When The Flames Go Up, by ex-spouses LOD and AskMoxie.  They take turns blogging their perspectives on divorce, and they are thoughtful and considerate of one another.  This proves that it CAN be done, and I cling to their blog for that particular piece of hope.  They don't want to be married any more, but they are still kind to one another, and that makes them great co-parents.  Beautiful, don't you think?

There are lots of angry divorcee' blogs, to go along with the ones I've listed here.  In William Quincy Belle's post The War of the Divorcees, he mentions the possibility that maybe, as a man, he should wear a cup when he reads some women's divorce blogs.  I don't deny that there are reasons to be angry: when I read The Bitter Divorcee's description of how her son needed stitches after her son's drunken father hurt him, and how he doesn't even pay pittance child support, I don't blame her for being bitter (and I admire the grace with which she handles herself, given the circumstances; I enjoy her blog, too, even though it's not the model of divorce I'm hoping for, because she's wise and thoughtful even in her circumstances.)

But what I've learned in searching out blogs about "good divorces" is that really, decent divorces are few and far between.  When I read The Huffington Post's Divorce section, it seems that the world has gone mad, and it's mostly about adults behaving like over-tired toddlers, screaming for the sake of screaming.  The type of divorce I'm still envisioning isn't easy to come by, and most of the time, when I tell people my vision, they look at me as if I'm deluded.

I want to act like that too.  But don't you think I'm too old?!

Then again, those are the same people who told me that NO WAY could Bryan and I live in the same house with Katherine together for a year after deciding to get divorced.  They told me that it was impossible.  They told me that I'd never make it.

It has been lonely, it has been isolating, it has been frustrating, it has been exhausting....but it's been a year.  The high road is lonely, but I'm glad that I've got a few havens on the internet to show me that I'm not truly alone in my approach, and that maybe, just maybe, I can make this work for everyone.

Do you read other divorce blogs?  Which ones?  What inspires you?  What makes you laugh?  Where do you find intelligent discussions about divorce?  Do you have a divorce blog?  Please, let me know....especially if you've found others who are taking the high road.  I look forward to hearing from you.