"No, but I'd have been entitled to have been upset"

saying "i'd have been entitled to be upset" is a surreptitious grudge

From my perspective, it would mostly depend on how moany your voice sounded when you said it. If it was said in rebuke I would have none of it.

I do think you can bring things up later, though, as long as the timing is considerate.

And mark, maybe it wasn't the kind of thing that was a one-off to forget, but an ongoing part of a friendship , relationship or work dealing.

It's a bit like debates over jokes that cause offence. Whose offence is important/righteous/reasonable enough to warrant behaviour modification?

Then later you try to do a similar thing and they kick up a fuss and say it upsets them and please would you not do it.

That's the scenario I was talking about.

I think the thing is that a lot of what appears to be good-natured indulgence actually does upset people, only they don't complain -- not out of natural good-naturedness, but out of controlled and purposeful politeness. Which is why I sort of understand the line in the thread title. If someone does something that irks me, chances are I won't take them to task for it, cause this never seems worth it to me. So sometimes it's a little bothersome when that someone turns around and takes me to task over something similar: the "I'd have been entitled" is basically a way of saying "look, I guess you didn't notice at the time but I let you slide on something; how about you return the favor?"

But some people really don't go for that, and would rather have everything hashed out as soon as it happens -- and I can understand this, cause some people really do go to insane lengths of cataloging little mental slights that they're letting you slide on, to the point where they have whole complicated tally sheets in their heads that you're never even aware of until they suddenly reach a crisis point. Though I'd like to think there's a mid-ground between that and people constantly going at one another whenever the slightest think bugs them.

And that's even if you don't take into account whether you express your upset in combative way. Whether your behaviour gives off the air of "I am upset, therefore you shouldn't have done that which made me upset; you are bad to me"

Working is the field of psychiatric care & having got my training in America, I entered the field zealously convinced that what we'd learned at my school was The Truth For All People Hurrah! I'm not so sure any more. I mean: biologically speaking, you're less likely to get high blood pressure if every time there's a minor annoyance in your life, you somehow find an outlet for that annoyed feeling. But what exactly that means for human interaction is another question. Certainly I think American culture is sicker than ever with respect to expression of emotion, particularly anger, even though Americans generally think of themselves as people who "say what's on their minds." So to my mind there must be some models of behavior and self-expression that allow for "ventilation" without just pissing everybody else off! I think the work remains to be done on what those models might look like, though.

Having said that, I'd still say (understanding "upset" to encompass a broad range of feeling from "slightly ticked" to "fairly angry": after all, my stomach can be a little upset, or I can be vomiting, but I've got an upset stomach either way) that "I could have been upset" means "I was a little upset, but didn't want to say as much because I'd have thought myself petty or oversensitive if I'd've actually been properly upset" which I do think of as unhealthy

what a long boring post, sorry

John -

"I could have been upset" means "I was a little upset, but didn't want to say as much because I'd have thought myself petty or oversensitive if I'd've actually been properly upset" which I do think of as unhealthy

I don't think that's an accurate paraphrasing of what would go through my head in such a situation at all. It's not about not wanting to express an emotion that has only mildly bothered me. Yes, I might keep quiet about it, maybe on the grounds that it wasn't a big deal and I didn't want them thinking it was, or I could have gently told the person "That bothers me a little, but I accept that I'm only part of the equation and if it's important to you, carry on doing it" . Depending on the situation, it could go either way. But the important thing in my question was that I really wasn't nearly as upset as the other person was in a later reversed situation.

There's no way I attempt to bottle up my anger on the grounds that 'worse things happen at sea and I shouldn't be so silly'. I do hold my tongue rather than scream at them, cause I think screaming and shouting rarely works, though it does occasionally. But it's out of a desire to make things better rather than worse. It's not from a 'must reserve shouting for really serious things' rule.

I just don't get angry (even inwardly) very often at all, so this is all a bit weird for me to talk about. Maybe someone would argue I just bottle them up further upstream.

Right - there's no scale of "x ought to inspire y amount of anger," etc. - if there were, life'd be easier, but we'd also be robots. If one truly wasn't annoyed, then your original question is almost meaningless - the whole notion of "entitled to be upset" is where you go wrong - that way lies madness, or at least frustration along the lines of "you ought to love me," "the things that give you pleasure are in fact perverse," "only people without souls don't cry when they listen to the Stockholm Monsters," etc

How can something be "mildly a strong word"???

When I'm "upset" but don't say anything it's because I quietly slink away and then sit around pondering whether I'm entirely justified in being upset -- half the time I need to run it past someone else and get an objective opinion on whether I really have grounds for complaint. It's possible that I err too much on the side of caution like that, but I want to argue that the thing in general isn't "repression," just "politeness" -- maybe it's bad for your blood pressure not to just go off when you're pissed, but surely it's just as bad for other people's blood pressure to have you going off on them over something you might realize a day later wasn't a big deal or wasn't even their fault.

So but Nick, what you're talking about sounds to me like the great roommate-cleanliness divide in action: i.e., two people have different standards of how much effort should be put into making something work right. The battle becomes whose standard wins, whether the person who really doesn't care whether there's mail on the table has to pick it up or whether the person who gets bent out of shape about it has to just chill out and enjoy letting it pile up a little. Except in the situation you describe, the neat-freak has left the mail on the table a few times himself, so I think that means you win.

(I have the other form of this problem with my roommate, cause we both do plenty of annoying shit and for the most part neither of us are bothered -- but then suddenly he'll randomly start nagging me about one particular thing. Suddenly it indicates some "lack of respect" that I never take out the trash, and I'm forced to wonder what it indicates that I cover his bills when he's broke, which is always, since he has no job.)

In an ideal situation you would always say that something has upset you, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes, if something has upset me I like to think about it before airing my views so that I can determine whether it was in fact what had been said that upset me & if it was reasonable. I have a very close relationship my my b/f, but sometimes if he upsets me, I don't always discuss it straight away.

I'll read the rest of this later. I have no idea why I started this thread.

Last year I had a massive argument with a friend about money. I think money is an area where this issue is quite important actually.

We had a big row about money when he bought me a double whiskey, with my own money I had given him to get himself a drink, after me expressly saying I didn't want one. The row got quite nasty, I said he could pay me for the whiskey cos I didn't want it, and he was welcome to it.

Anyway the focus of the row then became incidents over the past few months, I brought up occasions where I'd given him money, two separate occasions, about 15 euro each time. Thing is he got the arse then because I had said at the time "there is no need to pay me back". I did mean that too.

But as N asks is it wrong to call in the goodwill of a gesture like that even, to say afterwards "well I did that".

It's a weird issue, it was the only major row I've ever had with that friend, that I can remember.