Damn, girl, this part of your story sounds so familiar to me! My wife and I had pretty much the same patterns. They're pretty hard to break, but it IS doable, and gets easier with time and practice.
My wife is a very "feeling" type of person, whose thoughts kinda bouce back and forth with the moment. I had to learn to just let her talk, to "think out loud", and let her thoughts and feelings run full-circle before I "interupted" her with my thoughts.
On the other hand, my thoughts and feelings often run pretty deep, I've been stewing on them for awhile, and it takes me awhile to actually get around to my point. Which frustrated the hell out of my wife.
Quite often, too, we had been having OUR part of the conversation going on for so long in our heads, that we kinda jumped in with it in the middle of our thoughts, and the other party had absolutely no idea on what initial thoughts lead up to this point!
We came up with a "code-phrase" that we started most deep conversations with, which was "I'm just thinking out loud here", which helped to remind us both of the fact that we were in a "safe-zone" to talk. That we wanted to be listened to, without interuption, and that neither of us wanted anything solved, and that we weren't trying to "attack" the other person. It was VERY unnatural at first, but it helped us both to put things in perspective, and helped to set some ground rules for the purpose of the conversation. We still use this a LOT!
JJ
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