Quoting sage:I AM going to suggest, though, that you convince yourself NOT to bring up the affair, your hurt about it, etc. in the midst of a conversation/argument about something else -- in this case, her hurt/anger over what she thought was an insensitivity on your part.
I know how difficult it is to NOT do this -- I've posted before about how sometimes when my h. gets angry with me about something or other I feel internally outraged "how dare you get mad at me at this trivial incident...." but I think it's really, really important -- not just for you but for your wife, too.
You're right, of course. I'm committed to never using the A to bludgeon my W in an argument, but what I did came pretty close to just that. That's not really what I meant to do. I guess in my mind I wasn't trying to make her feel guilty, but rather to make her see that her old pain over her father's death is not comparable to what I've recently gone through. But I should separate the 2 things - what I went through does not justify being dumb/insensitive to her.
I too get outraged when my W gets angry over some trivial thing. Part of that, no doubt, stems from how much we have suppressed during our DBing. There have been many times over the last few months when I would refuse to argue with her or get angry with her over something relatively small (in comparison to getting your M back, every issue is relatively small, eh?) So it makes me all the more enraged when she doesn't return the favor, and let something trivial pass. I wonder how long it will be before we stop feeling this sense that our S's have lost their right to ever be angry with us.
