Puppy Advice

[steady]

why would you think dropping the rope would work in my sitch?
esp if i know that he's indecisive and tends to deflect the blame on to me.

It's not about dropping the rope so the WAS comes back. It can have that affect, but if you do it for that reason then you're just using another manipulation/control technique.

Dropping the rope is something which an emotionally healthy individual does when faced with a R with someone who does not want to be with them. People aren't possessions. They aren't ours to push and control in one direction or another. One of the common threads I see on this board is most of us are codependent and have an unhealthy and distorted sense of R. I once created a post asking how many people came from alcoholic homes and quickly got quite a few responses.

Dropping the rope is healthy for YOU. When you use it as a tactic to get something you want it will probably backfire. Just my opinion based on my own experience with attempting to control people/places/things.

you and gucci don't believe he left me for his parents.
but all he does now is call his parents, take vacations with his parents, flies home to see his parents.
he calls them every day. anything that he is unsure of, he calls them. it got worse and worse as the months went on.

did he leave me for them? i don't know what else to believe - hence me asking why you or gucci disagree. i'm not looking for a debate. i'm just looking for another perspective.

I have a different perspective. He jumped from one caregiver/decision maker to another. Based on the information you wrote above it seems your husband relied on you to make the decisions. You grew to resent this. When you were no longer his decision maker he went back to the source of his problem - his original decision makers...probably his mommy.

I imagine his mother has control issues and if she's anything like my mom was, she has a my way or the highway kind of mentality. No matter what he did there was criticism. It got to the point where it was just safer and easier to just let her make the decisions for him. So now she's playing her role, and he's playing his. His original definition of 'Love'.

I would also imagine you have a control issue also. Let me backfill you on my dynamics with my W. My dad was very laid back to the point where he didn't like conflict. My mom had the 'if only people did things my way' the world would be just fine mentality - albeit subconsciously. She would never admit this nor do I think she could actually see it.

My mother was the decision maker. As long as you did what was in line with what she thought was right all was good. When you didn't, you'd get hit with passive aggressive treatment. Silent treatment, attitude, etc... After a few days she would act like everything was just fine. Nothing was ever dealt with. She was very critical and it didn't matter how much good you did she would always zero in on the 'bad'. She once told me when I was making some big internal improvements - "You're doing ok. You're at about 80%"...lol. 80% of what??

When my parents would argue my mom would be the more aggressive one and my dad would retreat to the basement and drink. Grinding his teeth and mumbling under his breath. He was a great guy and everyone loved him but he didn't have a healthy and clear definition of self respect.

Fast forward some decades later and I married a woman who was just like my mother. At first the playing field was level. Over time my W's control issues, her 'she can do no wrong and I could do no right' issue eroded my self respect and self worth.

It was just easier not to fight back. Of course this created a hug rift and resentment from both sides. My W also hyper-critical and she also focused on the parts that were not done the way she thought they should be. Her mother was/is the same exact way. We learn our patterns from our parents. Those patterns stick until we see them and change them - if that's what we decide to do.

One day I realized I was just like my dad. I decided to change that. When I started standing up for myself things got worse. The more I pushed the harder she pushed back. I can clearly see our issues together were like throwing gasoline on a fire.

When I read your post above where you talk about catastrophizing - our first therapist told my W she was a catastrophizer. Of course after that we stopped going to her. My W is incapable at this point in her life of looking at and accepting her issues which contributed to the erosion of our M.

One thing that I remember saying over and over in my M was this - "Can't we go more than a week or two without you finding something to criticize about me?"

You're looking for definitions - what makes a woman attractive, what's the line between confident and bitchy, etc...

Take a closer look at your R dynamics. A brutally honest assessment. Be careful of rationalizations - "I did it that way because he....."; filter those out. When you can do that you'll see the answers to some of your questions.

I'll give you an example: My H never makes decisions. I hate that in him. "I make all the decisions because he...." Is it possible there was a time when he did make decisions? When he did, they weren't the 'right' decisions based on what you thought should be done, the criticism was delivered, his low self image took a hit, he felt like cr@p, got to the point where it was just easier to defer to you rather than feel that feeling of being small and inadequate (I'm not talking about his Johnson here).

Just my dollar fifty. (post is way too long to only be called 2 cents)