Reacting to Reddit Comments Part 2

My wife had hosted my parents for Thanksgiving. Our turkey was a bit too big for the roasting pan, and juices from the legs dripped onto the oven and then smoked up the kitchen. We rigged something up together with aluminum foil to catch the juice, and my parents quietly stepped in to open up windows and fan the doors to get rid of the smoke. Later, my wife admitted that she'd been bracing herself the whole time for them to yell at us or throw out accusations of how incompetent we were. I said, I don't understand. It was. It was an accident. Why wouldn't they yell at us? That was when she began to understand what her childhood had really been like. She is using her own experience from her own childhood. Your subconscious mind doesn't understand if you're 5 years old or 50 years old. Everything is relative. So when she had an experience that may have been similar to something she experienced when she was a child, her husband's parents were the same as her parents. She was seeing them as authority figures. How do authority figures respond when you make a mistake? Her parents would have probably yelled and screamed at her, accused her of being incompetent, as she said. But these parents didn't. Her husband grew up in a completely different world than she did. She grew up in a very angry, frustrated world. Her parents blaming, yelling, screaming when things went wrong. So she was dealing with experiences from her childhood that was then affecting the way she was responding as an adult. Because her mind uses those old experiences, her trauma from her childhood, to respond, respond to what's happening now.