Gillian asked her husband to hang the curtains; she had been asking him for weeks. Each time, he had promised to do it, but it didn’t happen. When she asked for the fourth time, he angrily responded, “For Christ’s sake, how many times are you going to ask me? I heard you the first 10 times; it’s on my list. I’m not your puppet.”
Gillian stayed silent, and even though silence felt terrible, she didn’t know what else to do. She was paralyzed, stuck in a fight-flight-freeze state, frozen. The next day, the curtains were hung; however, her husband’s aggression went unaddressed.
