Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 3

Photo by Alfred Coma on Unsplash   

In the aftermath of seeing a dead body, and watching Agent Benn shoot at Murphy, Harry tries to calm himself down. The way he talks to himself and uses mindful breathing and the cooler temperature outside is like, actual DBT skills. This puts an interesting context around his subsequent conversation with Murphy, in which he tries to talk to her about the events of Storm Front, and work out why she's still mad at him. 

After an initial hostile brush-off (which Dresden handles reasonably well), she explains that he lied to her and kept things from her, which was a serious breach of trust and also made it harder for her to do her job. Harry... does not respond to this constructively. But what I find interesting here is not that he's kind of a dick, but how he's kind of a dick. He doesn't, for example, point out that before he did that, she threatened and berated him, and seriously overstepped her authority in the way she tried to order him around, which would have been valid, but would also almost certainly have escalated the argument. Instead, he tries to explain how the information he withheld was dangerous, and when she reminds him that she's not his to protect, falls back on the defense that he didn't intend to piss her off, which was about the point at which I realized, I have had this conversation. Mostly, as an adult, I've been on Murphy's end of it, but as a younger person I was absolutely sometimes the Harry. 

People whose emotional and self-regulation skills are well ahead of their interpersonal skills have exactly this pattern of thinking that if they can just adequately explain their intent and their thought process, especially when the other person is more emotionally invested than they are (which is usually the case when you hurt someone's feelings by accident), it will cause their interlocutor to stop being upset; and they usually aren't aware of how condescending they sound. Harry's not that upset anymore, about how Murphy treated him in the previous book, because he undervalues his own emotions as a source of information about how an interpersonal relationship is going (while Murphy somewhat overvalues hers), so it kind of doesn't occur to him that Murphy is still hurt, and that what she needs her is an apology and some assurance that he won't do it again, much less that an accounting of why he feels his actions were justified (especially in the absence of anything to indicate that the current situation is different) is almost the opposite of that. This is arguably a failure of empathy, but empathy isn't strictly necessary if one has adequate practice. 

After deliberately thinking over Murphy's perspective (during which we get a review of what SI is and does), Harry does apologize, more or less in impulse. She asks him to also promise not to keep secrets, and when he tries to say that he can't necessarily promise that, she does something painful to his hand until he agrees. This is bad...everything, really, because you can't ever really trust a promise you coerced through violence, and she didn't give Harry a chance to lay out his perspective and thereby arrive at a compromise that she can believe and they can both live with. This is significant to the conflict at MacFinn's house, several chapters from now. Murphy's very ready to assume Harry broke his work, which is reasonable since he gave it under duress, but also she never really gave him a chance to do otherwise. 

See you on Saturday for Chapter 4. Be gay, do crimes, and read all the things.