That’s what’s on this week’s episode of Non-Monogamy Help.

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Podcast Transcript

When I go to bed, I often end up processing what has happened during the day from an emotional point of view. My brain will go through the day (like a) movie in my head, identify the “danger” situation when I was angry or not in control or hurt, and that by the time I have identified what I’m feeling, felt what I’m feeling, and understood what is the unmet need underneath, my nervous system has had the time to go in overdrive, especially if I’ve not been able to verbally process what is happening (and it happens a lot when it’s something to do with my long distance polyam partner).

By the time I’ve had a chance to catch up with my nervous system and I’m ready(ish) to express my needs (and it’s massively hard for me as opposed to bottle them up and adapt), my partner has moved on (or wasn’t even aware I got hurt by something!), has expressed how annoying it is for me to “drag things up” or “bring something out of the blue” like this, and there’s a new situation and a new trigger to deal with anyway.

I feel I can’t catch a break with my processing speed and how my brain ruminates my day. It might be because my relationship with my long distance partner often triggers a fawn response in me. I’m working on it with my therapist. But I’m not sure what is a reasonable accommodation to my neurotype and what isn’t.

Response

First and foremost, I think your partner could work on not taking it personally, because it does sound like they're taking it personally. I totally, totally understand how frustrating it can be to feel like you've hurt someone and there was a chance that you could have apologised or taken it back or done something, and somebody's brought it up like way later to you, and you're kind of really frustrated by that. I get that, but I also think that you're not doing that maliciously.

There are people that do that in a way that's… bringing up things at different moments. I've experienced something similar to that, but I don't think you're doing it maliciously. I think that your partner needs to understand that you need time to process things.

And if you haven't sent something like this to your partner—your description of what's going on in your head—it might be really helpful for you to do that actually, and help them understand that this isn't a personal attack. It's not helping for them to say you're “dragging things up” or “bringing something out of the blue”, and especially saying it's annoying, because I get that it can feel that way. But to tell somebody that's trying to tell you something about your relationship that they're annoying you is really not good.

So your partner could work on being a little bit more compassionate with that. It's totally fine if they're frustrated, and you should allow them to have a bit of frustration. I'm sure you're frustrated as well. But phrasing things like "this is annoying," or "you're dragging things up," or "it's bringing it out of the blue"… they need to understand that it's not out of the blue. It's just taking you a while to address it.

The other thing that I wonder about in this situation is that most of my anxiety has happened to me during the night. There's just something about the night where your brain's like, "Ha, I'm gonna..." It's not really your brain trying to mess with you. It's your brain trying to protect you. That has been something that's really helped me with dealing with my anxiety and dealing with panic and dealing with all that sort of stuff.

It can really feel like your brain is working against you, but really your brain is trying to protect you. Until you're able to kind of respond to that kind of fear and rumination by going like, "Hey, I know you're really freaked out about this, but don't worry, we got this”, I wonder if it's necessarily helpful for you to be doing this right before bed.

Maybe you're like, "Yeah, I know it's not helpful at all. It keeps me up at night." Have you tried setting aside time for emotional processing at different times? Have you tried journaling things so that it's not just about what's in your head? Have you tried other ways of processing through situations that don't have to be right before bed and don't have to involve this sort of production? Because I think that would be really helpful.

If you can't write, if that's quite difficult for you to get all the feelings out, do voice recordings. Do little voice recording journals of what's going on, talk it out, and set some time aside that isn't right before bed to do this processing.

The other thing that I'm wondering about, because you said in the first part of your letter, "My brain will go through the day like a movie in my head, identify the danger situation when I was angry or not in control or hurt"—I'm wondering if… those aren't all the same things, right?

There are going to be things that are going to make you angry. There are definitely going to be a lot of situations where you are not in control, and that is something that you kind of have to work to accept. And then there are situations where you're hurt.

By equating all of this, I'm wondering if there is this aspect to what your brain is doing that is making you think, "I need to always identify situations where I don't feel happy with my partner, because every single time I don't feel happy, that is a sign that something needs to be solved, needs to be addressed. And if I don't address it with my partner, terrible, terrible things will happen. So I need to go through and I need to pick apart these situations, and I always need to find that danger, because if I let it go, or I let it slide, then that will make me be in even bigger danger."

I'm wondering if that's always necessary for every situation, right? There's going to be conflict in our lives. There's going to be things that kind of piss us off a little bit. Even if you're long distance, and definitely if you start living with somebody—and I don't know if you have lived with somebody before, maybe you've experienced this before—but you're going to be annoyed and irritated by some of the things that your partner does just as you’re going to be annoyed and irritated by some of the things that anyone does.

That's kind of part of dealing with life. Not every single situation where you feel anger, where you feel a "negative emotion," requires a response or requires you to address that with your partner.

So another thing that I'd think about, in addition to how you process it, is to ask yourself: Is this about a need? Are you trying to prevent yourself from ever experiencing any negativity towards your partner? Because that is not realistic for you to do. You're going to have some negativity towards anyone that you associate with, and the standard that you're putting forth here—if what you're trying to do is go through all of the day's actions and find all the negative bits, and then get rid of them, confront them, have a discussion about every single negative bit, and then never have any problems—I totally get that.

It's quite funny actually, because I used to, in my relationships, feel like any disagreement or any conflict we had was like a little crack in it. And if the more we had disagreements or the more we had conflicts, it was like the crack would get bigger and bigger and bigger. Every time we had a little disagreement or anything like that, I would get more and more freaked out.

I definitely was somebody who believed "don't go to bed angry." I believed in that. Any problem we had needed to be solved. It needed to be fixed, because the crack has to be fixed, because if it's not fixed, it's going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then we're going to break up.

Yet, at the same time, I was in communities where we would have conflicts all the time, and I actually liked that. I actually felt really frustrated when I would go into communities, and we'd have a disagreement, we'd start having a debate, we'd start having a discussion, and then the mods would come in and be like, "No, no, let's stop. Stop talking about this."

I'd be so frustrated because I was like, "It's good for us to talk, it's good for us to disagree. This is how we learn things. This is how we can actually grow stronger as a community if we talk through things and we disagree, and as long as we're respectful towards one another, what's the problem in disagreeing?"

I had these two contradictory things going on, and my therapist pointed it out to me, and was like, "You notice you're pissed off in communities where you're not allowed to disagree, but you think that if you have one disagreement with your partner, everything's going to shatter into a million pieces."

So I'm wondering if you're experiencing kind of a similar thing, where every single negative emotion or conflict experience you have, you feel like you need to process it. You feel like you need to pick it apart, and we need to dust it off, and then we need to examine it, and then we need to discuss it. Not every single conflict you have needs to be discussed and examined. It's okay if you have conflicts.

Now, if you're hurt by something, I think the thing that you should ask yourself is: Is this a need? Are you trying to avoid having any negative feelings? Because I understand that you may want that, but it's not realistic for you to have that kind of high expectation of both yourself and your partner. And it's also going to continue to create conflict on top of conflict on top of conflict.

It makes me wonder—and I don't know what these conflicts are about, so it's really hard for me to say I don’t wanna say legitimate or not—but it's hard for me to say whether or not these are things which you can deal with on your own without having to involve your partner in the processing of that. Because there are some things that your partner is going to be able to fix, and there are some things that your partner is not going to be able to fix, right?

There are ways to reach out if you're feeling a certain way that don't involve, "Hey, you said this little thing, and I want this negative feeling to never happen again. So I want to tell you to not say this little thing again." It really depends on what was said, how it hurt, things like that. But I would encourage you to think about this:

When you experience this negative feeling, is there something that my partner can actually do to help with this feeling? Can I experience this feeling without feeling an immediate need to respond to it? Does it need a response? Is this just an emotion that I'm having?

Because I do wonder if the need that you're having is to not have these emotions, and I don't think that's realistic. You're going to have some negative emotions. That's all right. You process those, you deal with those. But what can your partner actually do to help with this?

One of the things that I encourage people to think about when asking for reassurance or asking for something from their partner is: Are there situations where your partner's not going to be able to do anything about the situation?

A very good example of this: you're long distance. Long distance is hard for both of the people involved. You both are not with each other. That's going to create lots of situations that are going to suck. You may experience negative emotions when your partner is talking about dates—like, "Oh, I went on a date with so and so last week," or "Oh, I hung out with so and so last week." You're going to maybe experience jealousy and negative emotions from that, because they have access to your partner in a way that you do not, and that is going to cause some negative emotions.

But what can your partner actually do about that? They can't really do anything other than pretending like they never see another human being other than maybe their work colleagues, which is not really reasonable to expect. They can't really fix the situation.

So if this is the kind of thing that you're bringing up again and again, like, "Oh, you said you were meeting with so and so, and it made me really sad"—it's not invalid that you feel sad, but there really is nothing that your partner can do about that. Because you're both in the situation of being long distance, you're both in the situation of not being able to see each other, and they're also suffering too. Even if they have someone else who they've gone on dates with, they're still in that shit situation too.

Now you can say, "Hey, I really miss you." Especially if you're long distance, I think it's really important to spend the time that you have with one another being in the moment with one another. And that may be why your partner's so frustrated about you bringing this up. They're not expressing it in the best way from the words that you're giving me, but you could spend all your time as two long distance people talking about how sad you are that you're not together, how much you miss each other.

There's a certain amount of that that's understandable, but if you spend all of your time focused on how much it sucks that you're not in the same place, it's really a big freaking drag. And it's not your fault, it's not your partner's fault, but you want to make sure that the time you have spent together is actually spent doing stuff together, building memories, having little dates, things like that, and not spent dealing with the emotional processing of all of the negative emotions that come with being long distance.

I have a few episodes on being long distance, and a whole section on my website under "issues"—I think I've been meaning to switch that to "tags," but my website theme is based off of a newspaper or something, so it says "issues." Anyway, there is a tag for long distance, and I would definitely recommend you listen to other long distance episodes or read other long distance columns that I've done.

I definitely think that it's important for you to have the time together that is joyous and happy and fun. It's not to say you can't ask for reassurance. It's not to say you can't emotionally process things. But again, what can your partner actually help with? Is there something that can actually change about the situation? Is this just a mutual suck situation—which happens a lot in long distance—and they can't really change it or fix it? Is there a change in their behaviour needed? Is that change in their behaviour really realistic?

The example that I gave before: they have another partner, and they off hand mention to you, "Yeah, I hung out with so and so yesterday." Are you expecting them to pretend like they don't have other partners? Are you expecting them to pretend like they don't meet up with other people?

There's a certain amount of detail that's not necessarily needed, and I definitely encourage people, especially in long distance situations, to not go into detail. In the same way that if you had a best friend who just lost their mother or something, and you had a nice Mother's Day with your mom, it's not that you would pretend like Mother's Day didn't happen or didn't exist, but you might not be like, "Oh yeah, yesterday I took my mom out to a restaurant. It was amazing, it was so great. I love spending time..." You would have some awareness of the situation, and maybe if they asked about it, you might mention it, but you wouldn't necessarily lead with that information.

There are ways to deal with the emotional difficulties that long distance can bring without necessarily having to hide things or pretend. It's a balance, right? It's nuanced. But I can definitely understand why your partner might be frustrated if the time that you have together ends up being spent processing things that are things that they can't control or fix.

Again, it really depends. I don't know what your triggers are. I don't necessarily know what the things you're bringing up to your partner are, but I would definitely think about it when you're doing your processing. And again, I really would recommend you not do this before bed. I'm sure you know that.

Can you journal about it? Can you do something else about it? Can you talk about it in some other way? Try to find a different way to deal with this and process this. And then maybe think about what can your partner actually do to help this?

It may be that you're feeling a little bit sad that day, and they mentioned that they went out on a cruise ship with—I don't know, I'm making things up now—but you can be like, "Oh, you know, I'm not feeling too hot today. Do you miss me? I just want to know that you're feeling something, so I'm not alone in how I'm feeling." That's fine. That's absolutely fine.

But I think figuring out what can they actually do to help you? Is there anything that they can actually do? Are you putting yourself into an expectation that any negative emotion you have needs to be addressed, needs to be solved between the two of you, because you think that any negative feeling you have represents a threat to your relationship? Which isn't necessarily true.

I've kind of summed up a little bit, but I'll sum up again:

Your partner can work a little bit on not taking this personally. Try to reach out and help them understand what your brain is doing. You're not choosing this. It's not like you're like, "Yeah, this is so fun. I love ruminating on this." Make sure that they understand that this isn't personal. This isn't you keeping things aside and waiting for a bad moment to bring it up. You're not being intentionally manipulative or anything like that. Show them what you wrote to me if you need to. Be like, "This is how my brain works. I'm trying really hard," and hope that they have compassion for that.

Think about whether you have this expectation when you're doing this rumination of not having any negative feelings or not having any conflict, or not experiencing any negative emotions. When you're doing this rumination and this focus on "is this actually a need? Is this actually something your partner can help you with?" or is this just your expectation that feeling a negative emotion is an existential threat to your relationship?

There may be situations that make you upset and angry that don't necessarily have solutions, that can't really be solved by discussing them. Is that what you're trying to do? Trying to pick that apart a little bit with your therapist might help.

And then also try emotional processing some other time than right before bed. I totally get it. I have done it before. I had been up until 4 AM having a stupid discussion with somebody and going over all the little details. It's such a terrible thing to do. Sleep is so important. It's so important for your brain to work properly.

I may be preaching to the choir here, but if there's one thing that you can do in this situation, it's try to move that rumination out of bedtime. Because then you create this association with your bed and this rumination, and that makes it even harder for you to sleep. Your bed should be a safe, calm place where you can rest and relax. It should not be this place where you're picking apart things and examining things.

If you need to get up, if you start doing it, get out of bed. Go walk around. Walk around your house for a little bit. Do not allow your bed to become associated with rumination. As much as possible, try to avoid that. You can ruminate—if you gotta pick apart things, do it in a journal. Pick some other time in the day. Pick some other time and try really hard to move that away.

Because even if you don't solve anything else, just the exhaustion alone is going to impact you, especially as a neurodivergent person. It's really going to impact you and make it really hard for your life overall.

So yeah, I hope that helps, and good luck.