“Are you mad at me?” is one of the questions I have asked most often in every romantic relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s a relic of trauma, neural leftovers from a childhood where my dad being mad at me meant I was about to be shouted down into a triggered puddle of sludge. If you learn something is dangerous to you, dangerous to your wellbeing and your world as you know it, you’ll do your best to avoid that thing in future – and for me, it feels very, very dangerous for someone to be angry with me. Especially someone important to me. Especially if I don’t know whether they’re actually mad, and so the question hangs in the air like a raincloud threatening to burst open and pour.
It’s only been the past year or two that I’ve even felt comfortable referring to my childhood experiences of emotional abuse as abuse, as trauma. Prior to that, I didn’t have that language (or at least, didn’t feel able to claim it), and so I found myself unable to adequately explain why I kept asking partners “Are you mad at me?” The question became a Chinese finger trap with some of my more reactive partners: the more I pulled, the more painful the situation got. Their irritation level would creep up gradually with each iteration of the question, so that “Of course not!” became “No” which then became a gruff “I already told you: no.”
They didn’t understand that I wasn’t just asking out of some insecure curiosity (which, frankly, should’ve been alright too) – I was asking because the possibility of my partner being mad at me felt like a potentially world-ending risk. I was asking because the difference between “yes” and “no” was also the difference, in my body, between panic-inducing terror and happy relaxation. I was asking because I needed to know.
The flipside of this Chinese finger trap analogy is that if you want to escape the trap, the best way is to approach it gently and slowly, rather than yanking with your full fury. The gentlest way a partner can answer this question is to say some version of “No, not at all,” and to answer in that same way every time the question is asked (if indeed that is true). Paradoxically, the annoyance of being asked the question multiple times in one day is only likely to transpire if the question is answered with irritability. If it is treated as a normal, neutral, non-annoying question, and answered as such, then the asking becomes less and less urgent, and thus less and less frequent.