"I hear your anger and resentment coming through clearly in what you’ve written. It still, to me, sounds rather accusatory and combative, particularly the “If you cannot behave...” bit. It feels rather abrupt and short and my guess would be that it wouldn’t go down very well and may not help you work through divorce in a way that will minimise the hurt and damage to everyone concerned.
I get and understand that you are angry about the way you feel you have been treated. It’s tough but maybe this is not the time to address those issues. I’m not suggesting that you don’t stand your ground if you are treated in those ways in the future. More that you stand your ground on an incident by incident basis. If and when they occur maybe something like, “I really don’t appreciate you <criticising my mother/whatever>. I find it offensive and upsetting and an unwarranted and unnecessary personal attack. I’d like us to be able to work together on the divorce and get it done in a calm way without fighting or criticism each other. I’m asking you to stop <criticising my mother/whatever> ” so that we can concentrate on getting through the divorce in an adult way.”
You probably need to tweak the words according to what sounds right to you and how you normally speak. Have you come across Non-violent Communication? I can’t remember the web site but I’m sure that Google knows about it.
I’m wondering if the time to raise all of the long standing issues about the past is after the divorce is over and you have some time and distance to put forward your feelings in more considered way. My feeling is that what I’d try to do is to give your wife an assurance that you want to work on the divorce together and that you’ll proceed with it when you get back from your month away; that you need some time to come to terms with what’s happening and to figure out what you want. You can also point out that the month isn’t going to make very much difference to the length of time it will take. Then use that month to work through some of things above, do some work around how you want to communicate with her, where your lines in the sand are and how you are going to handle those thing if they come up. Doing some role play around your responses might help too."
I disagree with him that now is not the time. L
M58, xW54 S22, D18 M 1984, D 2016 Living a new life.
