Triggering the "Done Swithch"

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I thought of two questions today, based on two experiences I was thinking about.

First, the experiences:

1) After being sexually harassed on the job when I was 18 for being gay, I was a mess for some months. I told people what happened, but nothing made me feel any better. Then, one day, someone said, "I'm really angry that that happened to you!" She was a radical lesbian separatist who was a passionate person and a poet, so I took her statement to be authentic. I didn't have to guess what was going on, based on reading her facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, then putting that together with her words, which doesn't always work for me. Instead, I really got what she was saying, and I believed her. After that, I found I was able to sleep at night.

2) Yesterday, I came home after an unsuccessful attempt at buying a flannel night shirt, in the right size and of a nice looking sort, for my girlfriend. They're apparently not in style for this year around here. I was not horribly upset, but I was very disappointed and pretty tired. It was the one Christmas present I'd hoped to actually surprise her with, because everything else was stuff she needed to try on or be consulted about. I got home before she did, and I simply sat in the truck, moping about it all. When she arrived, she didn't notice me there right away. Instead, she went into the house, looked for me, and came back to the garage when she couldn't find me in the house. She wasn't worried or angry, because I was okay and not really all that hard to find. I wasn't hiding from her deliberately or anything. I told her of my failed adventure, and she said she was sorry about it. I then felt better and came into the house. She's also found me in my little blanket tent, on the living room couch, when I haven't responded to her arrival home because of being upset, and it's also resulted in my being able to feel better.

What I've concluded is that I'm not trying to deliberately manipulate anyone. I probably would've stayed in the truck for quite a while and then gone into the house on my own if I hadn't expected her until much later for some reason, so the behavior was independent of her actions. But feeling better had a lot to do with being found, just as relief came in the first example when someone used certain words that were very clear. It has to do with what lets me know I'm really being heard and makes me understand the reaction I'm getting. In the second example, being found made me feel heard; it wasn't just my girlfriend's words of response that helped. I did a thing that's different from what I usually do, and she responded to it with what she did. Ordinarily, I'd keep complaining all evening, but this resulted in my only having done so once. So, because I had my "done switch" triggered, I didn't have to keep saying it, and she didn't have to keep hearing about it. This was good for both of us. My "done switch" was also triggered by the words of the woman hearing about my having been harassed, because both the meaning of her words and her sincerity were so unmistakeable, so I was able to sleep at night again and start to think about other things in life.

I think this is about making what's hard to read - someone's acknowledgement of my feelings and expression of sympathy - easy to read, so that I actually get the attention and sympathy another person intends to give. I don't keep looking for it after I actually take it in, so I'm not just an attention hound or something. I only need what other people reasonably would, but my "done switch" often doesn't get triggered, because I can't read what they're sending, sometimes even with accompanying words. Once it gets triggered, I stop, just like everybody else (unless an ongoing, unresolved situation keeps provoking me, which is not strange, because that's something that would cause others to keep complaining, too).

Now I know I need at least one of three things when I feel bad and reach out to another person: words that clarify (more than just something like "that's terrible", which doesn't tell me if I'm upsetting the person by saying a terrible thing or actually getting sympathy because the thing that happened to me is being considered terrible) and/or some kind of action, so that I know I'm not just getting an automatic response without any real feeling behind it (more than just "oh, I'm sorry about that", which a person can say casually, without listening more than enough to simply know you're unhappy, so they might not really know or care why) and/or practical help to resolve a problem, if the trouble is that an ongoing situation is hanging over me that could be corrected if I only knew what to do about it.

Now for my questions:

1) If you talk to someone about feeling bad about something, what, if anything, have you noticed triggers your "done switch", so that you feel able to move on from an emotional upset?

2) Do you feel able to discuss this openly with anyone, so that you can plan ahead and arrange for what you need without being taken as trying to control or manipulate anyone for extra, unwarranted amounts of sympathy and attention (or getting some other kind of negative response)?

Oh wow this sounds so much like me. I've never put a lot of thought into it though so I'll have to ponder awhile to figure out how this works for me.

The first thing that comes to mind, is that the situations where I usually need this are the ones where I don't know if I really understand what happened in the first place. For instance it is not just that I feel stressed or irritated about something, but I get stuck because I'm wondering if I interpreted the situation correctly. I need to have it explained to me in a way that I can understand clearly so that I can finally let it go.

For instance I had a horrible falling out with a friend that baffled me and took years to resolve. I was not able to let it go until I told the whole story to someone and they explained to me, very directly, that I did not do anything wrong. Once I heard that, I was finally able to put the thing to rest. Up until that point, I had talked to other people about and gotten a variety of responses ranging from sympathy to disinterest but I didn't know how to interpret any of those responses. So all it did was to leave me with even more underlying anxiety that there was something going on I didn't understand.