Surfacey session

Yes!!! Exactly!!! You each have your own way of dealing with it and they are both okay!

Yes, men overall want to minimize their problems or fix them right away. Women just need to vent. I read this book by Deborah Tannen, "You Just Don't Understand" where she explains this. My husband did the same thing. I just explained this to him and he adjusted how he responded to me (he needed reminding sometimes).

You don't know why someone does something unless you ask them and they explain. For myself, after I got it wrong everytime! (Making my assumptions of why someone did something) I finally stopped doing this and now I don't know unless I ask them. I have been on the receiving end of this too. I have a neighbor who assumed all sorts of stuff about why I did a few things. She was very wrong! She projected all sorts of negative things onto me!

Thanks for the IN-vite, BlueMoon. I'll get back to the main topic in a separate reply but first, a little about vantage points and such.

Don't be so quick to make yourself wrong. (You could be wrong about that, too, you know. )

As I see it, your point of view is whatever point of view, out of many potentially available to you, you're taking at that moment. I'm not sure how useful it ever is to pronounce a point of view "wrong;" anyway, the only way to do that is by considering how it fits or clashes with your other points of view that you're more attached to. Appealing to authority doesn't get you off the hook since you'd have to consider what the authority says, make that another of your points of view, maybe add still others about how far you understand or trust authorities like that one -- and go back to considering.

For me the way out is to step back (or up, if you like) (Are we disoriented yet?) to a point of view where you get to watch yourself have points of view without making any of them wrong. You can even watch yourself making yourself wrong, if you don't buy into it.

Suppose one day you imagine there's a bear in your kitchen. You go check and find no sign of one. You could say (one point of view): "I was wrong. There isn't a bear in my kitchen. I'm so embarrassed. I simply have to stop imagining bears in my kitchen." Or you could say, from a higher-up or farther-back point of view: "I imagined there was a bear in my kitchen. It turned out that physically, there wasn't one." Perfectly true, you're not making yourself wrong -- and in the (unlikely) event that one day a physical bear should somehow get into your kitchen, you won't be handicapping yourself by not even allowing yourself to consider the possibility.

Perhaps someone who's been closer to borderline than I have can tell me: does being borderline make you get attached to one point of view (and perhaps a different one tomorrow) so that you have difficulty choosing to switch to others when you want to?

Colluding with the last few posters to help hijack this thread in the direction it seems to be going:

I usually find myself bending over backwards not to buy into Mars-and-Venus-style explanations of how men differ from women. It may be that I favor one style over the other but I don't want to get stuck in operating like a "typical" man any more than I want to get stuck operating like a typical woman.

I remember reading the Deborah Tannen book several years ago. I can't find my copy right now but here's a sample of it.

I doubt that the do-something-about-it approach and the just-vent approach are anywhere close to being our only options. I think both (all) have their upsides and their downsides and what I like best is being able to choose from among them. I manage that better on some occasions that on others.

If I'm in a situation -- take a work-related one as an example -- where I'm not satisfied but don't feel I can do anything about it, I'll want to vent (at least to myself! lol) but I'll also keep looking for ways to resolve the problem -- to make a difference and/or to get out. Occasionally, though, after considering my options, I'll choose to stay in the situation, work on dealing with it more gracefully, and see what I learn from the process. That's often been enough to turn a "bad" situation into quite a valuable one for me.

In situations where there is no solution -- someone's died or left and isn't coming back, or I'll have to live on what's in the refrigerator until I can go grocery shopping -- I'll usually concentrate on making the best of whatever I have left to work with. I'll most likely wait to "vent" until I've had time to make a halfway decent story out of it. If I do complain to someone in that situation, I'd rather they "just get it" than cheerlead me to get over it or make the best of it -- which, after all, I'm already doing as far as I'm willing.

If I'm miserable, apparently stuck in a situation, and finding no opportunities in it that I can make use of, it's going to be pretty difficult to say anything to me that I won't shrug off or resent for the moment. I'd expect "We're all so sorry you're depressed!" not to do much for me, since I probably won't be up to appreciating it much. Advising me to snap out of it and pull myself up by my own bootstraps will only make the adviser my most immediate problem; after dispatching them I'll want to resume brooding. What I prefer to do (to the extent that I can) with someone else in that situation is to join them for a while if they'll let me, invite them to explore their situation with me, and see if I can invite them up to some viewpoint where they can see their options a little more clearly and become aware of some of the choices they're making. I'm not all that good at it. I gather it's something that therapists (some therapists?) are trained to do.

I actually COULD follow the bear analogy For me, I think being borderline in some ways makes all points of view a possiblity. And I cannot chose, if someone choses for me, and I like that point of view, its mine! That is ONE possible point of view. But I do weight things against what feels right. And when it comes to feelings, that is where I can get very inconsistent. The view I might hold depends on what emotioal state I happen to be in.

Is all of that lovely????

I can be this way, too. If I have done the best I could with a situation, I dont want solutions. The other day a friend wanted me to do some driving (with a bunch of kids) that I couldnt do. If I had not made plans to do this or that, I could have done the driving. Her plans included some kids being driven over to her house, hopefully by me. When I told her I had my day planned tightly, she went into how I could change this or that in my day in order to do the driving. I told her I just could not, but was not happy with her looking for solutions to a problem that didnt exist for me! I couldnt do the driving