> Your first example was clearly meta about the partners behavior pattern.

Bringing up history is not meta. Meta would be starting an argument about the way your partner argues, or similar.

Ah, that is insightful, thanks.

So next time she does that, I will tell her that that's not a good way to argue because I read that on HN, right. :-)

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - that reads as a pretty fair question to me. I can't tell what makes the meta argument meta. But I can tell why one is going to lead to a much worse argument than the other:

Saying "when you do that, it brings up all the times my parents..." suggests that the problem lies in what the speaker is thinking and the speaker clearly knows it.

Compared to "see, honey, there's a pattern here where you ..." - the problem is still in what the speaker is thinking, but that sentence suggests the speaker doesn't understand that and is about to present their thinking as historical fact. If they phrased it "honey, what you just did made me think there's a pattern here where you..." would probably still be a bruising conversation but it will probably end in a much better place. The speaker has, based on a lot of arguments I've seen, almost certainly misunderstood the pattern they think they see.