Like I said, my H will not go to another MC. I need to figure it out with the one I have, before H quits altogehter. I would love to lose him...
HIs answer to my questions regarding experience is - over twenty five years working with couples, he has worked with a lot of infidelity and he knows it can be worked through. He just tells me my H isn't "doing the work".
I personally love "hold me tight" and gave it to my H to read. I doubt he has. His response was "I don't want you to get your hopes up." Because it had! I knew if we could do this work, we could do this. But he's not ready I guess.
We see the MC - who was my IC (but I since have a new IC), and like I said, our C goals were not clear...H promised to work on the M, agreed to look at our M problems, to give it a try...then he gets angry and defensive any time those are brought up.
And yes, he has always had a hostile, angry, even verbally abusive side. My problem is that I have let it throw me into anxiety and I have fought back. And this is what he looks at when he says "we never had a good R to begin with" the fighting I did. NOt his part. Yes I fought loud and hard back. I'm no saint. And his anger got worse after the affair. THe past few months, since MC it's gotten less - I don't know if he's happy that he told me he's gone and feels relieved and his mind is made up so he doesn't care anymore, or if it means he's warming up to me again. I thought he was warming up for a while then the big "I am not coming back and I"ve had a gf all this time" speech. Right around the anniversary of when we split up last year. So again, it reeked of revenge for me.
I was walking on eggshells for a long time, and I felt like I lived in an emotional war zone for a long time, but I also had not done the work on me in terms of boundaries, self soothing, walking away, time outs, taking care of me, etc etc etc all the stuff I'm working on now that it's (presumably) too late. Hard to not believe him when he says that. But I still in my heart love him and am not going to leave and am working on myself.
I love the above paragraph you posted. I have said very similar things. It's funny you mention putting the knives away because just recently H used the same analogy. but his answer is always the same "If two people have knives out when they are together, it's best for them not to be together. We just have bad chemistry, bad things just happen when we're together. It's like a volcano that can erupt at any time - best to just stay away from the volcano".
WHat I have not confronted him on is the fact that he's seeing someone else. I have basically said I do not want to talk about her because she is irrelevant to me.
