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Old 03-16-2011, 10:06 AM
  # 29 (permalink)  
FindingPeace1
Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: rural west
Posts: 1,375
Thanks, y'all! Obviously this is very helpful to me, too. To get it out. To validate myself and be validated.
I love my AH. He's a good guy...AND he can be full of it.
It doesn't occur like he's full of it when he says stuff like that. It occurs and frustrating and confusing and worrying and mixed up. It makes me self doubt. It makes me feel like I'm stuck at a dead end in the conversation and my emotional progression. It makes me doubt myself. It makes me hear a voice that says, "maybe he's right...what if he's right?" It freezes me, in a way. Don't want to progress with taking actions in my life because of my feeling unhappy (because he's telling me I'M unfair and I am making him unhappy, so maybe I should be focusing on THAT). Don't want to get closer to him becasue the whole thing makes me feel confused and sad and ick. So I get caught in amber.

Wanna know what's crazy? When I engage in trying to get him to acknowldege reality like I see it, I am "gaslighting" him! I am trying to control HIS version of reality and make him self doubt himself. Even if I think it's true.
That's disconcerting.
This "remembering" aspect is one more area where I feel my controlling him (not that it looks or feels like control in the moment) feels justified.

Self reminder: I don't get to choose his actions, his communication level, his words, his honesty, his beliefs, his memory.
And I have to hold on to mine.

We are both sick, I think. To argue what "really happened" for over a year (on both our parts) is not healthy. I can see that.

We've stopped talking about it for the most part.
Occasionally these conversations resurface and we rehash...like the dying throes of a fish on the shore. Spasms of the same conversation and frustration and tears.

They are getting more infrequent.
I am letting go, on millimeter at a time.
I am telling you. It is SUCH a SLOW process of letting go for me.
Two steps forward, one step back.
Wash, repeat.
Try old controlling, codependent behaviors...fail...feel sad and numb. Stay stuck...research a bit about divorce...get distracted by a nice life, otherwise...talk to my AH and get upset...try old controlling, codie behaviors...etc.

I am making (painfully slow) progress.

I love you all.
peace
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