RCR, Thank you again for your time. Your article, by the way, was fabulous and very well written. I think that, as we talked about on the Deliverance thread, I am at a place to really "get" it. I don't think I was ready back when it was written.
Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I e-mailed my H some of the stuff BB and I were discussing. I don't know why her posts got to me the way they did. I am sure others (Probably Betsey and Meredith, and of course my H himself!) tried to tell me the same things, but this time it really hit home. I actually felt sick that this was the way I was communicating to my H. I didn't want him to feel punished or not listened to by me. It was awful to feel all of those emotions. So, as I said, I e-mailed him some of the exchange. I then apologized for making him feel this way. I explained to him that I knew he tried to tell me some of those things, but it took an outsider explaining my patterns for me to be able to see them more clearly. I told him that I didn't expect anything in return, I just wanted him to know that I was so very sorry.
He wrote back. He told me that I was correct, that he has been telling me the same things for a year or so. He then said: "I think one of the problems is that you had to hear it from an outsider." I am not sure how to take that. I don't know if he meant that he sees now that he couldn't be the one to get through to me, or that it is a problem that I needed an outsider to tell me something that he tried to tell me himself. That is the problem with e-mails and posts. Things can be taken in so many ways.
He went on to say that he has been telling me that I don't listen. He said that I get something in my head and I try to make it happen, whether it is good or bad.
He said that BB was right, that it doesn't take much to scare him off, given our history.
He also said that I need to be with someone who can get through my communication style and who won't take things to heart .
One thing that really hurt me (not as if the previous stuff didn't, but this really stung) is that he said that I look at the things I say in how it affects me instead of the people around me. This, he said, gives me license to say whatever I want. He, on the other hand, looks at how things affect others, and this results in him rarely talking.
He told me he hoped it made sense and said maybe we could talk about it another time.
I know that the optimists in the crowd will say, "hey, he opened up to you!" But it still makes me sad that this is who I am to him. It makes me sad that I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong. I knew something was wrong, but I just couldn't see my way out of it. I wanted to fix it, but kept overshooting the problem and going straight to piecing before I was anywhere near it. Of course this always resulted in feelings of failure and pain for both H and I. I am sorry that I didn't understand his pain. I was too wrapped up in mine. I hate that I was that selfish.
