Originally Posted by
lizatola 
It's funny, I just came back to this today and looked at my calendar. AH and I have our marriage counselor today. He's made some minor changes on the surface, maybe I'll see if in counseling if they are real heart changes or just those apparently surface changes? And, yes, with my AH it's the same old complaints and condemnations week after week. And, quite frankly, I'm no better because I get caught in the same defensive patterns over and over.
Yeah, I try so hard to detach and not answer his judgements and criticisms and get pulled into defending myself but then I do. I leave feeling shaken and sometimes almost suicidal. And then I realised just the other day, that, no - if the point of this is to help "us" communicate, revisiting and outpouring more rage is not going to help that. So I told him no. The negative self talk about me is an issue in any case, but it's an issue he needs to own and deal with, on his time with his sponsor and his therapist, not on "my" time or "our" time. Because that's not something *I* can can change, how he views me.