He talked about how I never give him any affection. How he doesn't feel loved by me. How he is a very affectionate type person and needs affection all the time.
During these two speeches, the counselor told me he noticed some "fear" in my eyes. I didn't even realize it was there. We started talking about how I feel when my AH talks in an intense tone of voice. I told him I just can't think. Everything goes out of my brain and I don't know what to say. I tend to withdraw inside myself. We then learned that this is a conditional behavior that stems back to when I was a very small child. My parents were never very affectionate with us. We hardly ever said I love you. I never felt like I could do anything right no matter what I did or said, because it wasn't the what they thought I should do. Therefore I spent my entire childhood trying to get their attention by doing things to hurt myself. Once I had children, though, I couldn't do that anymore, because I didn't want to hurt them too. So I started putting on a mask and pretending to be who I thought they (my AH's) wanted me to be so that I wouldn't be rejected by them.
Wow! I could have wrote this myself! My A and I went to counceling 3 times durring our marrage, and all 3 times we had the same problems and we ended up devorced. Now I am living back there (went back hoping to work it out) but now I am staying till my son gets through his senior year of high school. Nine more months!!!! I am beginning to think that my X (my A) and I get allong SO much better when we do not live together. I have known him since I was 4 (39 years!!) and cannot think of him not being in my life! I do not want to ruin that by making bad memories now, because I am really thinking that I will leave when this is all over. I think we are toxic to each other in the same house!
I hope things work out for you. I know when we devorced and I moved out, it was such a liberating feeling. Like being free! Only bad thing was that he had the kids, and I missed them!