Over the Shock - Detaching and GALing 3

[Thinker]

"Thinking" and Journaling:

Coach just wrote this on SmileyPerson's thread:

Your woman is challenging you to get help. She is done asking, she now has played the D card. It's all in the script for her. You now have a choice. Sweep things under the rug or deal with your issues. It's all in the LBS script. The Snake Busting is much harder than Divorce Busting. You are worth it. You can handle it.
Cheers
Coach

I have been reading through "Passionate Marriage" and he has been focused on two topics:
- Differentiation - Ones ability to maintain a clear sense of self when loved ones are pressuring for conforming and sameness.

and

- Self Validated Intimacy - the willingness and ability to open oneself up and be intimate without requiring validation from reciprocity or validation from your partner.

I find that these concepts really strike home with me emotionally. Particularly Self Validated Intimacy.

Schnarch wrote the following paragraph which I find particularly Painful:

I don't expect you to agree with me. You weren't put on the face of this earth to validate and reinforce me. But I want you to love me -- and you can't really do that if you don't know me. I don't want your rejection -- but I must face that possibility if I'm ever to feel accepted or secure with you. It's time to show myself to you and confront my separateness and mortality. One day when we are no longer together on this earth, I want to know you knew me.

Every time I read that paragraph I feel a yearning that is so strong it is physically painful, matched with an equal and opposite paralyzing fear.

So of course I am probing at the wound, reading it again and again.

What is it about that paragraph?

My answer so far is as follows:
For so long I have carefully thought and analyzed before ever asking, saying or doing; fearing, predicting and controlling the response from those around me. It has kept me from really connecting.

I don't want to do that any more!

I know where it comes from, but I don't know how to stop. I don't know where to start.

I don't know what would happen if I really started to honestly open up right now with my W. It certainly would not be pretty. I am very good at being in control, but crap at relaxing control without losing control; expressing emotions without becoming a wreck.

Still working through it...