Things are continuing to go well. I think we'll be in pretty good shape for the Retrouvaille weekend coming up next Fri/Sat/Sun. A big inner 'sea change' for me last week when H came to my place for his birthday celebration. His birthday is the first of the important 'anniversary triggers', and I was proud of myself for going forward instead of back and we had a really very nice day/evening/night. I talked to H about this yesterday when I saw him and found out there was no 'sea change' for him, he feels we are just steadily going forward and overcoming obstacles as they come up, so the change is really in my own psyche -- I'm pretty sure what I have done is to start to let go of the resentments and hurt produced by the EMA in favor of going forward. Also, I'm just starting to get a glimmer of the fact that I was responsible of a multitude of smaller hurts delivered to H during the few years before/during/after the EMA and I'm starting to explore some of these things with H and to apologize. H said "I hurt you more", but I replied "I'm not keeping score anymore".
On Cat's current thread Audi wrote that her H reacted to being booted out of the house after EMA the same way mine did -- as if this action/reaction on our part was equivalent to the hurtful wounding they delivered to us with the EMA. Like Audi, I also found this idea outrageous. Then I realized that since it did in fact cause H a lot of pain & depression I would have to address it with him -- which I did a few times, trying to show him how justified I was in doing what I did, how I was only trying to protect myself. All to no avail. Never any answering resonance from H on this and I finally gave in and acted as if it was an equivalent hurt. It is really hard to do this, but is reaping a lot of benefits. It made me feel like less of a sucker to find out that Audi's H insisted on the same equivalence that my H did. It's like they are all suffering from some kind of a sydrome, when they're in full crisis mode they say the same words and phrases to spouse, it's as if they've all read the same textbook. So maybe when they're recovering they have a lot of the same things going on regarding their interpretation of events.
