You nailed it, Lillamy. After my XAH does something nice, which he has been lately, those very same thoughts that you describe go round and round my head like a virus that no antibiotic will cure.
I KNOW better. But I STILL find myself responding as if I was wrong and single-handedly destroyed the marriage of the universe and caused HIM so much pain that I should make amends....
The worst recently was when he wanted to commission me to design a ring with a chocolate diamond for his new lady who "made me feel fabulous, exactly like I felt when I met you 20 years ago"... Eventually I responded that brown diamonds used to be considered debris after the real diamonds are found and cut, and most of the stones marketed as "chocolate diamonds" are really just quartz. I've had to be in contact over the last financial items fom the divorce, and, like you, it stirs up stuff that should just stay on the bottom of the emotional ocean floor.
Like you, it still takes me 2 days to 2 weeks to get that virus out of my head and get back to real.
Need to find the "What does the fox say" song.
When I visited Texas, being from the Northeast, I was very surprised to see roads with dips in them that were like very deep gulleys. When I asked why there were yardsticks stuck in the gulleys, some of them over 6 feet tall, I was told that it was so that drivers during flashfloods would know how deep the water was as it raged through those gulleys that had looked like such innocent dips in the road. Sometimes cars got carried away in those torrents and people drowned.
In New England, we would have built little bridges over them so that the road bed remained level.
That's how I still feel now and then. Like I thought the road was level now, didn't see the dip, or thought it was non-consequential, only to watch myself wash away in that unexpected current of emotions.
Hammer, I'm just waiting for the repartee response from the Texan engineer that I know you are.....
ShootingStar1