Dealing With Ambivalence

[Bagheera]

I wasn't typing very coherently late lsat night, apparently;

Second -- my opinion is that you should set a deadline for seeing some kind of significant progress in your relationship --> some moves on her part to start meeting *your* needs / desires for a change, and not just her continued focus on her needs and her anger about the past.

Before delivering any such "ultimatums" I would check with your therapist (privately) after she's had a couple of private sessions on her own. See if he can give you some clues as to what is going on, and what the prognosis looks like. In other words, if there are some underlying long-term issues beneith her intransigence, then you may need to adjust your strategy accordingly.

All I can advise you to do here is: do what feels NATURAL and AFFECTION to **you**, regardless of her response. If you are feeling honest affection and want to show it, then do it, for your own selfish (non-sexual) pleasure, in addition to whatever she gets out of it.

That sentence got butchered. In other words, I know that you are trying to meet her need to feel connected with you via non-sexual touch (a biggy in the self-help books), but again, modify this to fit your particular situation. She may not needs as much as other women, or she may be so angry still that she can't bring herself to respond in kind to your shows of affection. My poorly worded point was: it's OK to push yourself to show her genuine affection, but don't push your envelope so hard that you start to begrudge it too. If you're doing it grudgingly, and she's stonewalling you over it, then neither of you benefit from it.

-- B.