I think there's a bit of conflict between the DB principles and retrovaille...I've been struggling to figure out what I should be doing. Thur I attempted to detach, but now I think I should have discussed my feelings about it. I'm going to put DB in the backseat for a time and focus on what we're doing in the followup sessions.
Could You let us know what some of differences you saw between the two?
Well, I'm just thinking of Thursday. I think according to what we've been working on in retrovaille, I should have talked to her about how her missing the game, staying on the phone for hours, and not apologizing made me feel (alone, unimportant, etc). You aren't supposed to actually talk about the whys or anything, just the feelings (for now anyway).
For DBing, I assumed that I should detach and not approach it. I guess I should have done a 180 and seemed upbeat, or even acted as if she didn't do anything wrong. Detaching simply made her think I was being ignorant to her and she mentioned it repeatedly until I opened up, and then it all went to hell (I guess I failed in DB and retrov when that happened).
It's really confusing for me because on one hand, my wife hasn't said "I want to work on it" (she just says "I dunno"), but she would prefer to just act like everything is fine. If I just pretended I was happy all the time, I don't think she'd ever want to talk about anything...she'd just think something was working and go about her business. That doesn't mean she'd be good to me, but she'd be content.
Now that I think about it, the best thing for me is probably for me to pretend I'm fine....at least until we get thru the retrovaille program and can work thru the issues. Right now, I'm afraid approaching it continually is just driving her further and further away. She doesn't really want to change and she doesn't really want to talk about it.
