Annie Lane writes the Dear Annie advice column.
Dear Annie: My husband, “John,” and I are dancers, and we give dance lessons. But we are very different in terms of our personal needs for emotional healing, and this has become a problem because we are trying to deal with the aftermath of a tragic accident involving several of our friends.
Not everyone survived; not everyone has recovered; and those who survived are traumatized. All of us are grieving. But John is dealing with this in one of two ways. Either he needs a high-energy crowd interaction, where he is the center of the dance floor or the charming entertainment at any class we teach, or he needs complete silence where he wants to be left alone, as in, “Don’t touch me; don’t look at me; I’m going to put my headphones in.”
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