Giving Support vs. Taking Offense

People get frustrated. People have bad days. It's just how life is.

When a child is handed a blue cup rather than a pink cup, they may choose to get frustrated. When a child has a bad day at school and comes home angry or sad...

Do you immediately feel offended?  Run to your room and cry that you aren't good enough? Maybe if you were good enough, or prettier or thinner or wore cuter clothes or cleaned the house better, then they wouldn't be frustrated, angry, or sad.

Obviously that's ridiculous! Their feelings of frustration, anger, or sadness have nothing to do with you.

But, we do this to our spouses all the time...Tage was having such a frustrating time with his school work. I wanted to fix it, but I knew that all he needed from me was, "That sucks. Anything I can do?" What he didn't need from me was; "Why don't you just this or that? Or maybe if you would do this it would work." He is a really smart man that is capable of fixing his problems and even when I might have the answer it's better to give  him my confidence rather than my ingeniousness.:) Read how he was feeling here.

I am learning that when he has a bad day, or a frustrating moment, that it very rarely has to do with me. And, I need to take myself out of the situation in order to be supportive and simply be a friend. 

If you had a bad day you wouldn't want your spouse to be offended by your grumpiness, you would want them to say, "Hey grumpy, you okay? What can I do? I love you. It's going to be okay."