When Edgar was thinking about retirement, his wife Sarah freaked out in a way that surprised them both.
“Remember when we left Chicago and moved to Pocatello?’ Sarah asked, “and you didn’t have a job for about six months? I don’t regret the move, but you were so angry at me, shouting and breaking things –– I had to look at the ruined furniture every day . . . . It was awful.”
“But I’ve apologised,” Edgar broke in, contrite. “I haven’t done anything like that since. I’ve told you how much I regret it. I’m so sorry”
That didn’t help Sarah, who kept crying and fidgeting.
“Try this,” I said. “Edgar, don’t talk about yourself anymore, about how sorry you are and why you were struggling at the time, and how you’ve cleaned up your act, and so forth. Talk about Sarah. Express your understanding of how she felt during those six months. Do you know how she felt?”
“Well,” he said, “I think she was terrified. The person she lived with had turned into her tormenter. She was scared; our baby boy was scared. We were in a new town and had no friends yet, no place in the community. It was a nightmare for her, and she didn’t know how or when it would end. I think it was awful for her.”
Sarah was amazed. “I didn’t know you understood,” she said. “I feel so, so much better.”
“Are we going to have a terrible day,” Edgar asked. He looked worried.
“Not at all!” she said, smiling at him. “I feel so much better. I never knew you understood what it was like for me.”
She turned to me. “I had no idea I was thinking about this today. It just flew up out of my memories. Is it related to him retiring?”
I didn’t know, but I guessed, “Maybe because during those six months he’d stopped working, and you worry he could go into that kind of collapse again when he leaves his current job.
That brought us to the topics ahead –– what structure Edgar could create to replace in retirement the structure of the job he was leaving, and how each of them thought or felt about money. But, for the moment, the big deal was that Sarah’s pain of twenty-some years had been eased.
The primary insult (let’s call it abuse) hadn’t been Edgar’s screaming at Sarah and breaking furniture; it had been his indifference to her experience of it. When she finally felt seen and heard by him, her fear subsided and trust returned. We cannot trust people who don’t see us or don’t care how we feel. But even an egregious insult can start to heal when they do.