How do you guys handle her misquoting you?

[Atom Smasher]

Ok, guys, young and old, take old Atom Smasher to school and help him firgure out how to handle women's propensity to misquote in an argument.

I've noticed that every girlfriend I've ever had did the following routinely:

1) Regard their "feelings" about a statement as fact. In other words, they value their own emotion derived from my statement as an actual fact and they proceed as if their feeling or interpretation were absolute fact.

Example off the top of my head:
Girl: "You said that I never do ANYTHING right and that I'll never get it right."
Atom: "I never said or implied anything of the kind. Those words never left my mouth. My exact words were "I need you to approach me with respect and talk with me, not at me."

2) As in the example above, they continually misquote and claim that I said the wildest, most outlandish things. Sometimes what they quote and what I actually said is as far apart as the East is from the West.

We all know that they do this, but I'd like some tips on how you guys handle it. Every time it happens my jaw drops and I mentally enter "WTF" land, a land that I hate to visit. I've yet to come up with a good method to handle these things, if indeed a method even exists.

Help a brother out, men. Any good ideas to either handle it effectively or at least to take it with a grain of salt? TIA.

 

[handle]

I have not had this experience with girlfriends. Some girl said something like that to me once though and we stopped seeing each other.

I'm curious as to whether or not other have this happen regularly.

 

[Atom Smasher]

Yes, I'm curious about how global this is myself.

I literally have never had a girlfriend who was not like this. It may just be the type of girl that I attract.

All insights and opinions are welcome here.

 

[Let's Get Real]

Here's my insight: because this is the only example I can refer to...maybe she hears with a filter that people are always critizing her...or that you always critize her. Then, no matter what you say she is going to listen for anything that makes her think you are critizing her. If you look at what you said it's easy to see that you made her wrong for "talking at you" instead of "talking with you." Therefore, she heard that she was wrong and felt like she can do no right. She may have a few other filters as well.

The best way to handle this is to compliment her about something or comfort her. Then, place the blame on yourself for you feeling like she was "talking at you" as opposed to "talking with you." Tell her something like, "sometimes I feel disrespected. I want to feel like you and I are talking with each other as opposed to at each other. Are you down to improve the way we talk with each other? Good. Let's talk with each other from now on. Now spread your legs."