Wonderful thread, love all the posts.
I see two entirely different issues here, which can easily get tangled up.
I found that in my "toxic" family it was extremely important to be liked by the adults. As a child I expected that being liked would result in not getting hurt. Now that I am an adult and have witnessed other "toxic" families I realize that I was wrong. There was _nothing_ I could have done to protect myself. My alcoholic parents were completely random in their behavior. I could have been a potted plant and would have been treated exactly the same.
The problem was that as a child I could not understand that, so those random times when I did get some non-injurious attention I _believed_ that it had been my behavior that had protected me. A whole childhood of that resulted in a deep belief that in order to get "love" of any kind I had to "buy" it with my behavior. I had to do something physical in order to be worthy. Mop up the vomit, fix meals for my younger brother, listen attentively to my mother's incoherent, drunken blubbering, lie to the school teacher about my health, etc. etc.
As an adult I brought those old "love lessons" with me. I felt that in order to be a loveable man I had to perform physical duties. Work late, maintain the cars, paint the house, build furniture, mow the lawn. I had no concept that being the "handyman" around the house was _not_ the way to be loved. I believed that love is something I "purchase".
My early attempts at dating were failures. I showered my date with gifts and favors. She got a little tired of that and wanted an emotional connection. I detected her displeasure and reacted with even _more_ gifts and favors, she got more tired and we quickly spiraled out of the relationship.
When I learned how to have a _balance_ between emotional connection and physical activity I was able to have meaningful relationships. Due to my poor health I am no longer able to mow lawns or paint walls. My g/f doesn't care, she'd rather we hire it done and that I just hug her tight and let her vent all about her stressful job. (She works for the school system with severly ******** children)
Working with family is a whole different kettle of problems. My ex wife and I were both very entreprenurial. At one point we had _three_ different companies going at the same time.
what worked for us was to _completely_ separate work from family. We _never_ talked shop at home. Kept a separate corner of a room for work stuff, and when we moved into bigger digs used the spare bedroom. We _never_ talked about family stuff at work.
In addition, we treated our business relationship as business. She owned 51% of one business, which made her the _boss_ and me the employee. I gave my suggestions and let her make the decisions, good or bad. Other times I would own 51% of another business. Those times when we forgot those rules our emotions got very tangled very quickly.
We also kept our money separate. Different checking accounts, different investments, different ownership. I owned my car and she owned hers. She owned one house and I paid rent, we had some rental property which I owned and she paid as an investor would. The result of all this is that we never fought over money. Not ever. We were completely independent of each other in financial and business matters, which allowed us to focus our marital time on marital issues.
If you are into 12 step recovery groups it's part of Tradition 2 and 7.
Following the traditions in our marriage worked very well for us. Until her pill addiction took over we were able to get along wonderfuly well and never had more than mild differences of opinion. We did get tangled up in our issues from time to time. Sometimes she would get into over-working as a result of her own ACoA issues, sometimes I would. We were able to work thru those without major drama because we followed the AA traditions and removed the big stumbling blocks of money, property and prestige from our relationship.
Mike
