Can Turtles climb?

[zig]

hi hopeful - i got further insight into my role in this over the years tonight.

i was trying to lead- but not in the way that KD suggested one should do - it was more elephant style - elbowing my way into position, insisting that my way was the right way.

tonight i realized that i never gave h a chance to step up and show what he was capable of.

as i drove home i started crying when i realized what a disservice i had done to him in his role as a father.

i have talked to my mom about this in the past - how i grew up watching her take over the parenting 100% and not giving my dad any role in it whatsoever. she insisted he didn't want it. and i assumed the same about h. i was very wrong. not only did he want it - way different from my father, but he is also good at it.

so i feel ashamed tonight of how i did not understand how i functioned.

one big thing that came up tonight was that s is absolutely not willing to confess in front of h - never has been. h acknowledged to me afterwards that it was probably because he was so intolerant of anything except perfect behavior, and we talked a bit about how we needed to explore that further so that s would feel it was okay to not be perfect in h's eyes.

i told h that it was something i always saw in s - it was unbearable to s that h would ever find out that he misbehaved or did something that wasn't appropriate.

so h is really thinking about his own role in how people respond to him based on the strong messages he has given over the years. that's a big step, in my eyes. i know that i facilitated that by acknowledging my own feelings about how he had made me feel over the years today and him seeming to be genuinely surprised that i had hurts that he had caused.

So breaking the pattern of H not stepping up to the plate, forcing us to be the fixers.

for me what seemed to work was to blatantly give up that role today . also to state really clearly and equivocally that i was not willing to continue being the one h could fall on when he needed help! i also started expecting him to do more. for e.g.. just stated as if i didn't care very much that i guess he would have to go pick up a violin for s because i didn't care to make the time.

i've been thinking about the under and over-compensating dynamic in relationships. if it works one way then it has to work the other. so i think what i've been doing over the last few weeks was just started to under-compensate. which has in turn caused h to begin compensating more to fill the gap. he can hardly tell s that he doesn't feel like getting the violin when s needs it at school. so then he has to fix, because i don't care to any longer....


do you think that's something you could apply in your own sitch?

thanks for popping in:)

zig