But, the bitterness, hostility, pettiness, anger, huge disrespect (funny you wrote about that last night because I was going to post about it yesterday), irritability, grasping superiority, judgmentalness, dismissiveness, withholdingness, condescension, and vigilant hyper-criticalness you have toward H floods every interaction you have with him.
If you really believe this, then please STOP asking me to interact with him at this time. I feel like you're completely contradicting yourself. I can't possibly pull off what you're suggesting, because every interaction I have with him will be flooded with this list of negativity.
Absolutely it is challenging to change how you present when it is just hard to express different thoughts and questions than you usually do. Sometimes it is so hard for me to communicate something to DH that it comes out horribly despite my best intentions, even when I am aware of the problem when my thoughts involve something that connects to old pain. This happens even when I am very clear personally that the pain producing the negative body language and tone has an internal source, it is not because of DH or coming from him. So yes, it is hard to change how we present when we struggle with pain.
You CAN use email and cards and text messages to eliminate the body language and tone problems, as well as giving you a chance to edit yourself. I can talk to DH pretty well now about hard things, but I had to learn how to do so in a more detached way. Email that you craft to convey what you really want to convey helps with this.
You CAN be aware of how your own stuff colors your perceptions of H and interactions with him and try to do better.
You CAN do better for yourself and your H and your R. You can apologize when something comes out badly: "Oh geez, that sounded like blah blah and that is so not what I meant to convey..."
But nothing changes until it changes. In particular, you won't change until you change.
