u/Gnarwhal8982

I just discovered this song and to me it’s so amazing and fresh.

At the end of the first part of the second chorus at 1:18-1:20, when he says “you’re gonna have to pay for that” he does something different from the first verse and adds what sounds to me like a chromatic walk up.

My ears and theory are rusty, and he plays this song tuned down a half step on guitar, so the shapes are different chords- but he seems to be playing an Ab but I can’t tell if it’s a I or a IV, because there’s also an Eb and a Bb in there somewhere.

But when the chorus comes around it sounds like an Eb to a Bbsus4, or something like that: and the second time around there’s, at 1:18-1:20, there’s a walk up from the Bb to a B to the C of the Ab to the main riff

I’m curious that’s progression is and if any of this is right, I’m really going off memory as I’m not able to listen to the song right now.

This disease has diminished my capacities immensely.

I was an A+ student in college, taking 20 hours a semester, working, practicing my craft, taking care of myself, in a relationship etc.

After college I had a really good job and was working hard etc.

Then it all fell apart.

My brain is so foggy I can barely put together a grocery list.

I’m so physically tired, things like brushing my teeth are demanding.

I lost my job and have been struggling ever since.

Yet, when I try to talk about these things it seems like I’m making excuses.

For example- I want to go back to school so I can continue my education and have better opportunities. One day, I was trying to read a book and I just couldn’t comprehend what I was reading- this happens regularly, to the point I’ve given up reading.

I was talking with my partner about my concerns about going back to school, like if I’m having trouble reading a book how am I going to be able to study textbooks and take tests and write papers?

Her response was “well, you just have to try!”

I feel like me reading is me trying!

I’ve been trying for a decade!

And same partner - we don’t get along, it’s volatile. I want to get out but am not working nor do I have any where to go etc.

Everyone says “well you’ll just have to get a job”

One of the last jobs I had I was working part-time, like 15-20hrs/wk and it was too much. I couldn’t do it.

After that I became a mail man, because I thought being outside and walking would be good for me, maybe I’d start to feel better. I think that was a royal mistake because of what I now know is PEM. The effort required by that job really lowered my capacity in a way that I haven’t recovered from.

I’ve been trying to keep my head above water for a decade and it’s not working.

But I’m so exhausted by not being able to have limitations, according to everyone else.

But the reality is no one else really understands. Even all of us with the same symptoms, we can’t really understand each other. I mean we can relate in a lot of ways, but we can’t really know, I don’t think. But when people who don’t experience these same symptoms here us talk about fatigue, they just say “everyone’s tired” like yeah, I get it, but it’s not the same.

I’m frustrated, man. I just want to be able to express my experience without it seeming like I’m complaining or coming across like I’m letting my limitations get in the way.

The truth is the limitations are in the way regardless of what I do.

I want to say my anger is new, but I’ve been angry my entire life.

I’m sure there are reasons for it, but I can’t say what they are.

I definitely changed after I found myself in an abusive relationship in 2017. I’d never experienced such insanity in my life and I snapped. Now it feels like my baseline.

But, my anger didn’t really become a problem until the last few years.

4yrs ago I was working at a job I loved and new team members were brought on- they were honestly awful. I did my best to train them, communicate and work with them and it was just not working. I spoke with management countless time nothing changed and I snapped.

It’s funny- one of my coworkers said “I changed”. They had been out of town for months and when they came back they said “I’d changed”. The change I see is that we started working directly with each other and they had poor communication skills, poor cooperation skills and a shitty attitude- they made my job more difficult. What changed was they came back lol.

My management blamed everything on my “anger problems” and found nothing wrong with my coworkers failing to communicate or do their job etc.

The next job I quit when after emailing a coworker to ask them about a process, my manager came out and accused me of making my coworker do my job for me. I tried to explain the situation, I was literally asking a question and she just repeated her self. I blew up and left.

Recently, I was talking with my mom and she has a bad habit of interrupting me, talking over me, and not listening to me. Frankly I don’t like her and it wouldn’t bother me if I never interacted with her ever again.

We were talking and she’s just doing her thing- interrupting me, talking over me, and her responses are just whatever she was going to already say- and I fucking lost it.

Then she says “well maybe I’d listen to you if you didn’t yell at me”

She’s so childish. It’s ridiculous

I know I’m overreacting, I know I’m losing, I know I’m not okay.

She can’t acknowledge that she doesn’t listen to me. She blames her actions on my response her actions. Lol

And my partner does a lot of the same things.

The other day we were just talking and I brought up her lip looked swollen from the dentist and she snapped at me and said “no it’s not!”

And that set me off

But me getting set off becomes the problem, not the reason I blew up. The reason never matters, it’s only “blaming her”.

I know I’ve burned a lot of bridges, spurned a lot of jobs, and I know it’s because of my anger.

But I feel justified.

I don’t think I was in the wrong.

I know I don’t handle things well, but I’m exhausted and burned out dealing with idiocy every day. My patience is gone. Little, trivial things just set me off and I lose it over the smallest things and I feel constantly angry

Trying to be rational, compassionate, level-headed and professional and it never works out and then I lose it.

I feel like our relationship has fallen into a pattern where my reaction becomes the entire focus, while the thing that triggered it gets dismissed as me “blaming” her.

Today we were unloading groceries while she was talking about her rough morning.
I noticed her son started playing video games, and because we have rules around that, I asked if it was okay.

That turned into a conversation about his behavior in general and whether we’re doing him a disservice by continuing certain patterns when consequences and explanations don’t seem to change anything.

I was getting a little worked up, because it’s a heightened subject, but I genuinely thought we were just having a discussion.

Parenting conversations feel especially difficult because it feels like if I question a decision, it seems like she hears it as criticism of her as a mother rather than me trying to talk through something together. To be honest, she just seems really insecure- I’m not judging her, that’s just the way it seems to me.

Then I made an offhand comment that her lip looked swollen, because it did, and she immediately snapped, “No it’s not!”

Something about the tone hit me the wrong way, and I responded sarcastically: “Okay, it’s not swollen then.”

From there, everything escalated.

She said I was exploding and overreacting. And honestly, I was overreacting. I know I’m responsible for my reactions, and I know there are better ways I couldve respond.

But what I struggle with is feeling like I’m not allowed to talk about what led to my reaction without it being framed as me “blaming” her.

I feel like I can say I wouldn’t have acted the way I did without her giving me the attitude she did and that that’s not me just blaming her- its cause and effect. It doesn’t negate my responsiblity to respond better, or mean that my response was okay or that I was in the right, and it doesn’t mean she was at fault either.

she had reasons for being short with me— She had a rough morning, she was stressed, overwhelmed, hungry. I get that.
But me, I only have “blame”.

But I the way we act affects each other. Our tone, eye rolls, snapping, dismissiveness, and attitudes wear people down. My overreaction doesn’t come from a vacuum

For example, recently there was a time where she kept asking me a question I genuinely didn’t know the answer to. I kept saying “I don’t know,” until eventually I said it in an exasperated tone. She rolled her eyes at me and I got pissed.
Then the entire argument became about my overreaction, while the frustration leading up to it was treated as me “blaming her”.

Another time she gave me some attitude and when she later apologized I told her I wasn’t ready to accept it. I know she’s sorry but I don’t think an apology is going to leader to changed behavior- but she thought I was not accepting her apology because I was being intentionally petty, and so it became another argument.

And because I said I didn’t think her behavior would change, she thinks I think she’s not capable of change- it seems like she takes the worst and most immature interpretations of what I say. My point is an apology isn’t enough, I want to see a change in behavior. Not that I don’t think she’s capable, but the apology doesn’t mean much to me if the behavior isn’t going to change.

Everything just feels so fucked up.

As I’m writing this I’m realizing this is so hard for me because I’ve been in two genuinely abusive relationships before where I was constantly antagonized until I finally snapped, and then suddenly the only thing that mattered was my reaction. I wasn’t able to have a reason, justification or defense for my behavior.

Prior to those relationships, I was with someone for 8yrs and we rarely argued and almost never treated each other with contempt or had stttiudes towards each other. Those abusive relationships changed me.

I’m not saying this relationship is abusive, and I’m not comparing her to those people. I know we’re both stressed, exhausted, reactive, and carrying our own baggage. But this cycle touches something in me that’s deeply confusing and painful.

I’m not trying to paint myself as rational and her as irrational. I know I’m reactive. I know I contribute to this dynamic. I just feel exhausted by this cycle and honestly don’t know how to take it anymore. But even normal every day conversations feel like minefields

How can we improve our communication so that we can understand each other?

**TL;DR** When my partner and I get into an argument, if I overreact, she says I’m blaming her if I try to point out how her behavior affected me- I don’t feel like I’m blaming her, and I feel like she won’t allow herself to see how her behavior affects me because of how I overreact.
how can you communicate to come to understand each other?

Our 5yo is discovering dishonesty.

He recently stole chocolates from the grocery store, ate them in his room and hid the wrappers. He clearly knew it was wrong, but did it anyways.

My wife confronted him and explained why it’s wrong, saying that he has broken our trust, and basically saying that he needs to be trustworthy if he wants to have a good life. I agree with her sentiment but I don’t think quite gets it

She asked him if he understood why it was wrong, and he said “because I’ll get in trouble”.

Clearly, not doing immoral or unethical things because you want to avoid the consequences isn’t a good motivation. So avoiding trouble isn’t what we want him to take away from this.

I’m just not sure how to instill the understanding of values and morals in him so that he understands that he does things because they’re right, not because he can or will try to hide things to avoid getting in trouble.

Honestly, I’m sensing a really rough road ahead with this kid, who is going to do his damnedest to do what he wants and out-reason everyone to get his way and I want to nip that shit in the bud right now because it’s tough to deal with at 5- it’s gonna be hell when he’s a teenager or older and I don’t want to see him become an addict or go to jail or just be a generally self-centered asshole.

so any advice would be helpful.

Raising a son (5m) both my wife and I (35, M, F) have realized we don’t know how to regulate, or often feel, our emotions.

Our son has a lot of emotions, and big ones at that, and he feels a lot, and we’re trying to help him feel his emotions and self-regulate (without suppressing his feelings) and we are struggling to do so because we never learned how, our parents didn’t show or tell us how to do so (and frankly it seems like they were part of an entire generation that just shoved everything down)

We can tell him what not to do (eg; we don’t hit when we’re angry) but we don’t know what to tell him to do, how to act etc.

I think it’s especially difficult because, at least for myself, growing up so emotionally suppressed, it can be hard to give him the space and time to feel and express his feelings, like I don’t have the tolerance for all of his emotions, and I just worry about how hes going to be as an adult, like I don’t want him to experience the same struggles that we are dealing with, I want him to be able to have healthy emotions.

and one thing that is telling, I think it’s Eckhart Tolle that says something about the expression of health in a person is how short-lived their emotions are. our son gets over and through things quickly while we hang on to things, it’s like legitimate baggage.

i don’t know- if anyone has been through this and has some advice it’s much appreciated