Repair

Two Seats, and I Have Warnings About Both

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  7 min read

It is a Thursday, twenty past four, and the man in the chair opposite me has just said the sentence I hear more often than any other in this work.

“I’m not trying to control her. I just need her to be okay.”

I’ll call him Otis. He is forty-six, has driven straight from a site visit, and keeps checking that his phone is still face down, which is its own small courtesy. He is not a villain, and I want that established early, because the moment a reader decides we are discussing somebody worse than themselves, the article stops working.

Otis has never told his wife what to feel. He has never overruled her, never said calm down in the voice. He is, by any test I could hand him, not controlling. He would be genuinely offended at the suggestion, and I would not be able to argue him out of it, because he would have a case.

He is also, on a bad Sunday, unable to settle until she does.

So I take the pad off the arm of the chair and draw the thing I have drawn for people for years. It is a terrible drawing. It works anyway.

A car, and only two seats in it

Your emotions are a car.

It has two seats. There is a driver’s seat, which is yours, and a passenger seat, which is for company.

Then the two warnings, and they only work as a pair.

Don’t let somebody else drive your car. And don’t take the wheel of somebody else’s.

People hear the first one and nod along, because the first one has been on the internet. The second is the one that costs, and the reason it costs is that it sorts out three arrangements that look nothing alike from the inside and turn out to be the same thing in different coats.

That sorting is the whole use of the picture. Here they are.

One: you take the wheel of somebody else’s car

This is the recognizable one. You tell a person what they feel. You manage the mood, correct it, improve on it. You’re not really angry, you’re tired. You’ll be glad tomorrow. You don’t mean that.

And here is what makes it so hard to catch in ourselves: we are frequently close to right. She probably is tired. The read is good, sometimes better than theirs, and being right supplies an excellent cover story for taking the wheel of a car we do not own.

Steering almost never feels like steering. It feels like knowing.

The thing that goes missing when we do it is not accuracy. It is the fact that nobody has ever felt what that person feels, in the way they feel it, for the reasons they feel it. We are answering a question they have not finished asking, in their own interior, about a history we were not present for.

Two: you hook your car to somebody else’s engine

This is the one Otis is doing, and it is the one this whole subject is actually about.

You aren’t steering them at all. You have made no claim about their interior, corrected nothing, issued no instructions. You are parked alongside with the cables attached, using their presence to move your own state.

You’re my calm is precisely this. The person is not being driven. They are being used as the drivetrain.

And this is what makes it the hardest of the three to see: from inside, it is not visible at all. The man doing it is controlling nobody. He has told her nothing about what to feel. He has overruled her about nothing. He is idling beside her with the cables on, his engine turns over every time, and it has never once occurred to him to ask whose engine it is.

Which is how this runs for decades inside affectionate, faithful, unremarkable marriages, and why the person on the receiving end usually cannot name what is wrong either. Nothing happened. That is the complaint. Nothing keeps happening.

Three: you get out of your own seat and hand over the keys

I’m fine as long as they’re fine.

Renata, who is nineteen years into a good marriage and has organized her mornings around reading her husband’s first four sentences of the day, said that to me and thought she was describing devotion. She was describing a seating arrangement.

Here is what it looks like from the kerb. You have climbed into your own passenger seat and left the keys in the ignition for whoever arrives first. Nobody had to take anything off you. Nobody wrestled you for it. You put it on the seat.

And it is not usually generosity that does this. Steering your own car in weather like this is genuinely hard, and handing over the keys makes your whole state somebody else’s department. It feels like love and functions like an outsourcing arrangement.

Now the part I most want you to carry

Because the first half of it gets used as a weapon more than anything else in this territory.

Nobody else drives your car, and the way I drive mine can still put you in a ditch. Responsibility for the wheel doesn’t dissolve responsibility for the impact.

Those two clauses have to arrive in the same breath, or the first one becomes a licence.

“You are not responsible for my feelings” is true. It is also the most weaponizable sentence in this whole territory, because it runs backwards just as smoothly. Your hurt is your business. I only drive my own car. Delivered warmly, in a level voice, by somebody who has read more about this than you have.

Zaynab spent two years being told versions of that by a partner who could quote three books at her, and left those conversations unable to locate the injury. That is the point of the move: not to win the argument, but to dissolve the ground it would have to stand on.

Owning your own reactions was never a permit to stop caring where your driving lands. The person who has learned to say “that’s your emotional responsibility, not mine” and uses it to close a conversation has not learned emotional responsibility. They have found a more respectable way to leave the room.

What it is not: two cars in separate lanes

I have to say this because the picture invites the wrong conclusion, and the wrong conclusion is popular.

The healthy version is not two cars in separate lanes, never touching, waving politely at the lights. Two cars that never affect each other are not safe. They are parked.

That is independence doing a passable impression of maturity, and it is easy to mistake for progress, because it produces less conflict and a much calmer household. It also produces two people who are no longer available to each other, which nobody notices for about four years.

We regulate through other people’s nervous systems. That is the equipment we came with, and the aim was never to stop.

The landing, which is smaller than people expect

You can ride sometimes, by invitation, for a stretch of road, and then take the wheel back.

The problem was never riding. It’s a permanent seating chart.

A stretch of road is a description. A seat is an identity.

Otis, Renata and Zaynab are composites. Nothing here belongs to any one person; the patterns simply recur often enough to be worth drawing on a pad.

One note about the weaponized version. If someone in your life reliably uses this language to make your reactions your own fault while leaving you unable to name what happened, that is worth taking to a licensed therapist rather than to another article. Fluency in the vocabulary of responsibility is not the same as practicing it, and telling the two apart is easier with a third person in the room.