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In Search of Dirty Words

slice_of_slife's picture

Submitted by slice_of_slife on Tue, 02/03/2015 - 11:33am

Justify-verb- show to be right or reasonable

Lately, any disagreement DW and I have ( most are over skids) quickly circles back to DW saying that I do not want to change my attitudes, my behavior or my actions, I just want to JUSTIFY (said dripping with contempt). She never addresses any of my reasoning, she just attacks the fact that I am "JUSTIFYING" again. While in my mind I want to emphatically state that, "NO, I do not want to change for the sake of change. YES, by all means, let's apply REASON to this situation , and let's try to eliminate some emotion." But I know that means that someone will become upset (or even REALLY upset), some people may feel left out occasionally, some people will yell (giving in is NOT the way to fix that) some people will (gasp) sit in their room and cry, etc. So instead I just say nothing, and am considered inflexible. I am not perfect, and I have changed a lot of things, though when upset DW will deny this fact. This is not about being RIGHT, I want go make semi-consistent decisions based on REASON rather than emotion, and let time show me if they wise or folly. When did "justify" become.a dirty word? What is the "dirty word" in your situation?

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misSTEP's picture

Submitted by misSTEP on Tue, 02/03/2015 - 12:24pm

Sometimes they try to deflect and you have to try to circle back to the issue.

My DH was the type where, if I said something he felt was derogatory towards the skids, he would respond with: "Well, YOUR son did x,y,z"

I finally started saying: "We are not discussing my son right now. If you have a problem with something my son did, by all means let me know. But right now we are talking about x."

Maybe in your case, it could be something like, "My motivation is not what we are discussing right now. Right now, we are discussing a solution for (whatever)"