Nice to start the day with a LMFAO!!! and a smiley too!
I was reading over in Luke's and bug's threads and my thought of the day today is that I'm so wrapped up in how H affects ME, with all his yelling and criticizing and texting of complaints, and I've been trying since March 8 to get him to spend a few minutes with me talking face to face about coparenting so we can keep the dialog going even though we were just really stressed and in disagreement the last time. I was so upset and scared because he seems to disrespect my parenting and thinks the solution is to send my son away to boarding school. He makes fun of me wanting to talk and reason, by saying I just want to be his best friend. We ended up just arguing, and much later SOME of his viewpoint made more sense to me and I've been trying to incorporate a broader range of techniques. I've been wanting to have a followup discussion and I've been racking up items to discuss because H cancelled and never rescheduled despite two requests from me. Items I've racked up include: S snuck out of the house during a grounding, S has now been to a drug counselor and how that went, and some of the new consequences that weren't on the table before. S snuck out practically a month ago and it's turning into just stuff I've dealt with and is history, while the weekend he did it, when I asked H to talk with me, it was a critical recent escalation in our challenges. Anyway, too much backstory.
The point is, there probably is a very strong negative response H is experiencing when we have an emotionally charged interaction, like what Acc calls a shame response, that H would want to shut down from, run from, or avoid at all costs. I can see it happening, it just was mystifying to me. He's a very assertive seeming, strongly opinionated person, very masculine, loud and confident, and he's known me since we were kids out of college. So acting, I don't know, intimidated by me, has never computed.
But it explains how he got from my message in Florida, "thank you so much for taking care of the kids, but could you not yell so much we're trying to have a respectful home": stop over-reacting and don't do anything about the drugs you're finding in the house this week. That is what he told me I told him. And I was so surprised he didn't respond with questions to clarify such a weird message coming from me. I thought he knew me better than that. I was getting this feeling from him that I had morphed into someone he didn't know who made no sense but mustn't be aggravated, just back away slowly..... Did not compute.
And then he practically assaulted me with text messages of bongs and stuff while I was grocery shopping, but when I came home and sat across the table and heard him telling me no-privileges, take away everything, no friends no phone nothing but school and home and if that doesn't work boarding school, and I was trying to tell him we needed to try to work together and combine our different strengths in getting through, and it was tense. He does NOT like conversations where there are two sides that go back and forth. He likes to say what is going to happen and it just happens, no discussion. If he has said something, he's done and fails to see the point why I'm still talking (my perception). I was trying to get to a meeting of the minds. I left it with wanting to make this an ongoing conversation so we could hear each other and try to get on the same page for coparenting. But he cancelled our appointment and is still avoiding it. Oh yeah, I also asked if we could talk about it with a referee like IC so we could be more effective at hearing each other and he told me to go by myself and report back to him what she said, which he predicted would be that I'm wrong and he's right. Argh. Back to the point. I think the point is that as uncomfortable and frustrating this is for me, and as much as I want to avoid it... H might have hated it even more. I was so much more interested in how hard it was for ME.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is. I think it has to do with recognizing how and when to moderate myself.
Boundaries (per Pia Mellody) are for protecting your reality - how most of the people I see here need to learn to use them, but they are also for CONTAINING your reality, and for me that was equally if not more necessary to learn. I like to express myself and I express myself strongly and colorfully by habit, training, and personality. I love words and I love struggling to convey a message in just the way that someone will hear it. But I tend to have trouble moderating it sometimes, recognizing where my reality ends and where I'm imposing on someone else's, recognizing where just turning up the volume isn't the right response to someone not hearing me.
I want so much to be heard, understood, known. Really known by someone. But with H I think in spite of how I thought he was, I know think I need to dial it way back. He creates such a void and I find it nearly impossible not to fill it up with my own thoughts and beliefs.
That was a big thought for the day. BTW I'm strongly considering going to EE. I've been thinking of recommending it for my niece who's in trouble, but I would like to see what I might be capable of with a solid weekend of opening my mind. There are some things I don't discuss here much that I could really improve.
Adinva 51, S20, S18 M24 total 6/15/11-12/1/12 From IDLY to H moving out 9/15/15-3/7/17 From negotiating SA to final D at age 50 5/8/17-now: New relationship with an old friend __ Happiness is a warm puppy.
