Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Brooklyn for another installment of of “Dad, Interrupted.”
This week, I’d like to explore a topic that many dads should explore: anger. Getting mad. Yelling. Getting red in the face. You know what I mean. It is something I need to curb, and I know I am not alone, and there are a few moms out there who should pay some mind to this tendency, too.
This week’s installment pokes a little fun at one part of this issue, but the main thing is to master this emotion, for your sake and your family’s.
I call this story, “The Man in the Light Blue Suit.”
Whole Foods sack in hand, I was on the subway platform, headed home. The R train had arrived and I stood aside, waiting to board, as the exiting riders streamed out the door. Then, suddenly, there was a blur on my right. It was so fast it almost created a vortex that set my grocery bag spinning.
Apparently, a twentysomething man had dashed into the train in front of me, colliding with the tide of departing passengers and creating a commotion. Many riders were upset, and some yelled in anger. “Let them off first, you creep,” one well-dressed woman said. “Animal!” shouted someone else.
What about me? I just smiled benignly and thought kind thoughts about the young man who rushed in. Perhaps, I speculated, he was racing into the train because his wife was in labor. Or perhaps he was late to pick up his frail mother from her bingo game. Yes, I thought, it must be some domestic necessity like that. I hoped everything would turn out okay for that nice-looking young man in his well-fitted light blue suit.
Now, before therapy, I would have joined other riders in lashing out at this guy. I probably would have called him a selfish asshole and told him to wait for the all-asshole train. The fact is, I have long had a habit of exploding volcanically when I witness bad behavior. Jeanette has chastised me often about this, and insisted that I tell my therapist, which I reluctantly did. Then my therapist took that ball and ran with it.
At first, I resented all this concern. Yes, at times I do yell and sometimes get into confrontations with these malefactors. But I feel like I am standing up for justice. Something needs to be said to a driver who, for example, speeds through a red light and nearly shears off the front two wheels of a baby stroller.
If not me, who?
But now, after several weeks of therapy, I am becoming a new man or at least tempering my vigilante predisposition. My therapist has told me all about a thing called reframing. Instead of leaping to the worst conclusions about someone’s motives and flying into a frothing rage, she said, I should think of a few of the many possible good reasons that a person might do something that appears bad.
T subway incident with the man in the blue suit had happened early one recent November. I was in the middle of Week 2 of the new, reframing me. In Week 1, when a shopper on a crowded subway placed her bags on two subway seats and sat herself down in a third, I did not ask if her bags had also paid a fare. I have been known to do that in similar situations in the past. “Maybe she has arthritis of the spine,” the new me thought. “So maybe that would make it painful for her to put the bags on the floor.”
To tell the truth, I liked the new, sweet-thinking me. I was learning that, if you put your mind to it, there are almost no “bad” behaviors that cannot be explained in a charitable way. Did a delivery guy’s e-bike nearly flatten you as you stood on the sidewalk watering your roses? Well, maybe he’s desperate to send money back home to fix his son’s cleft palate. What’s mere flower gardening compared to that?
As I entered Week 4 of my reframing therapy, I saw the virtues of reframing so clearly that I wanted to share them with others, even convert them. For example, take another controversial subway behavior: manspreading. That’s the habit of some men of spreading their legs wide when seated and taking up more room than necessary. I totally agree with my wife, Jeanette, that men should close their legs to make room for another person to sit.
But the new gentle me disagreed when she asserted that men manspread consciously in order to, um, display their wares. Speaking as a guy, I tell her this is wildly implausible. Men spend almost no time thinking about showing off their own stuff because they are usually thinking about women’s stuff.
“Also, men are not that devious,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Have you ever been to Italy?”
We left it there, you win some and you lose some, but a few weeks later my own doubts about reframing emerged. My problem stemmed from the fact that I have been trained in two empirically based professions — law and journalism. Although I liked the new me, I struggled to square reframing with my belief in the primacy of fact.
In other words, I became skeptical because I believe that truth is the ultimate yardstick, the acid test of whether an act is good or not good. Benign explanations of bad behavior are always theoretically possible, but are those explanations true? Does the restaurant delivery guy really have a kid with a cleft palate? And, thinking of just last weekend, what are the odds that the swanky couple who recently swiped our cab at the Standard Hotel really didn’t notice us waiting at the cab line — especially given Jeanette’s valise-size purse?
So, I told my therapist that the only way to know for sure if a person acting badly has benign motives is to interview them and find out. She said that, given my record of street confrontations, this was not wise. Jeanette very swiftly agreed with her.
“Anyway,” my therapist said, “the point of reframing is to walk on the sunny side of the street. At least some of the people who litter, or run red lights, or leave dog poop on the sidewalk, are not doing it for bad reasons. So why not assume the best?”
“Because truth matters,” I said. “That guy on the subway in the light blue suit? I don’t really think he was picking up his frail mom from bingo, do you? I think he was a lowlife who wanted to snatch a seat before some poor limping old lady!”
The therapist changed tacks. “Even if a person does something bad for a bad reason,” she said, “there is often a valid psychological explanation for it. Maybe the man in the suit was abused as a child. Maybe he has a cognitive deficit. So, if you just expand your definition of ‘facts’ you will see that reframing is empirically sound.”
Of course she was right. Many, many people are burdened with past afflictions that impact their current behavior. For example, I myself have two older sisters who are unbeatably saintly. Growing up, I realized that I myself could not act in a saintly way because my sisters had monopolized saintliness. They’d occupied the field. They were the Google of saintliness. It was their BRAND, and there was no room in it for me.
So, I had to go in the opposite direction.
In other words, when I acted out as a teenager, it was only because I had been emotionally hobbled by my saintly sisters. Did I drink too much with my buddies one Saturday night and fall asleep on the lawn? Did my mother see her prostrate son sprawled on the grass that morning, and almost have a stroke thinking I was dead?
It was not my fault, people. I was only searching for my own identity.
A few days after I had this insight, I was sitting on the R train, editing a difficult paragraph in my newspaper editing job. The editing got more difficult when a troupe of gymnasts swept into the car and started swinging on the poles to some recorded disco music.
I tried to enter reframing mode: “Perhaps they are on a mission to bring the arts to the people,” I thought. I put in my earplugs and returned to the tangled paragraph.
But reframing wasn’t working anymore. I still understood my therapist’s point that everybody — the man in the light blue suit, the swanky couple that swiped our cab, the subway rider who commandeered multiple seats — had a good explanation for bad behavior, either in the past or in the present. But what had changed was that I now understood that that “everybody” included me.
“My teenage acting out, my volcanic eruptions at wrongdoers?” I thought to myself. “They’re all just my way of creating an identity distinct from my two saintly sisters.”
I smiled thinly and turned to have a word with the disco gymnasts.
The Man in the Light Blue Suit