Keep Your Hands Offa My Mojo

[Kettricken]

The problem with driving decisions based on emotion is that our emotional status is often quite erratic and mutable (not to mention, affected by many more variables than our partners' behavior), but we tend to forget that and proceed to project our current emotional state both backwards and forwards. You screw yourself up royally if you deny or obscure your emotions, but you solve that by accepting them from moment to moment as a *factor* in the situation, not enshrining them and then bowing down to worship, or worse, expecting others to do so as well.

It seems pretty wise to expect a natural ebb and flow of passion, connection, good humor, engagement, etc in a marriage. I'm inclined to agree with Smiley that the root fail in many cases seems to reside in viewing problems or natural wave troughs as the death knell of the relationship. There's a reason we have seasons.

At the risk of continuing a threadjack (and at the risk of dating myself), I felt a little like that deaf, dumb, and blind kid, Tommy. I'd been told for so long that I couldn't/shouldn't/didn't or was a bad person for feeling hurt, anger or resentment that I couldn't even use those words in session at first. It was weird.

It was past the semantics of just not using the words. I really didn't know what that feeling was that I was talking about and I'd have to ask her. I'd relate an event, she'd ask me how I felt and I'd give her a description. And she'd say, "So you felt angry?" And I'd deny it. But she was right.

<shrug>

/end threadjack

No wonder we relate.

I wonder how short the step is between "*I* can't/shouldn't be having these dark emotions of my own volition" to "YOU must be MAKING me feel that way, so I need to get away from you."