Loving, Listening, and Letting Go..

[aeolianchaos]

Do you believe you are smarter than her?

On the surface, yes. But not once you dig down. I think she has plenty of intelligence but it is just not necessarily in the same places as mine. That is a big part of what attracted me to her -- for everything we have in common, she isn't just like me.

If I was so smart - I wouldn't have been the last one to figure out that something was seriously wrong.

How you will get by without her. How you will take care of yourself.
^^^This should be your focus.

I can see this. I agree. It is my focus -- its what I'm worried about too!

Do you see defending yourself as a point of weakness or a point of strength?

Both. It is useful to the degree that I wouldn't want to just internalize whatever judgements she might make upon me. It is useful to see my own worth.

It is a weakness if it comes from a reptilian place - blindly defending myself when I need to look carefully at what she is saying and see the truth in it.

I saw that you felt compelled to defend yourself and your ideas quite a bit. Do you attach yourself to these ideas?

Which ideas?
I didn't feel attacked this afternoon.

What have you SHOWN her that you have changed?
That you have grown?
That you understand her better today than when she decided to leave?

Well, in what sense?

I have been taking much better care of myself.

I have not pursued her at all. Even these R conversations, while I don't pretend 'everythings a ok' I don't push them.. she brings it up. I don't ask for a second chance. I don't beg or plead. I stay very calm and have willingly owned my half of this mess whenever she has brought it up.

in the past - I was very very defensive about things that really I should have owned.

I stopped pursuing a career that she was always afraid to tell me she thought I wasn't going to succeed at. After 7 years of schooling, 10 years of pursuing it, and about 46000 in student loans. I didn't stop for her - I stopped because it's time to make a change, but its still huge. Enormous. She knows it too, because she is still pursuing basically the same career.

I have been keeping the apartment clean whereas before I was always.. resistant.. to that. When she commented on this, I told her that I appreciated how much it took to keep the place
clean before.

I stopped looking after her cat. If being a doormat was part of the problem, this was a step away from that.

I don't yell at her or intellectually overwhelm her like I used to. I listen a lot more and acknowledge what she says.

I am very careful about doing anything controlling. I dont know if that means I always succeed, but I am acutely aware of it and do my best to avoid it.

In terms of understanding her better - I don't know what I can do to show that. She feels like I understand her better than anyone else in the world (her words..). So what could I do to show that I understand her better? I think that it isn't my lack of understanding her that frustrates her.. if anything I suspect its the opposite - there are things that I see and others see that she does not see or really doesn't want to see.