Moved Back from Overseas to Figure This Out...

[S4tk]

So I caught up with your other thread and WOW! there is no doubt, you like to control things.

Let your W do what she needs to do through this, you can still love her but you have a lot of work to do before she will believe that you have fundamentally changed. Ad, as usual, gave you some very good advice.

My concern is everything you do sounds tactical, directed at your W to get her to change by seeing you differently. Not that you are different but you want to seem that you are.

Even tho she said nothing for 11 years it doesn't mean it wasn't an issue. My guess would be that she did say things, but you brushed them off as not important. Dig deep in your memory, anything there?

I'd like to see your thread focus more on you and less on your W.

Goals, GAL???

Labug - thank you for your input. I get what you are saying, but aren't DB and DR (to a certain extent) "tactical" books/ideas designed to improve ourselves, which may lead to the spouse changing as well, and thus potentially save our M's?

Therefore, detaching would be the idea that even though this ^^^ is our desire and our goal, we will be happy no matter what the other decides because they are autonomous individuals capable of their own decisions, solutions, etc?

I had read the livestrong detachment page a week or two ago, but just read it again at your suggestion.

I am thinking about control a lot, and some examples of what that might look like. For example, a few months before BD, W had decided to delete her Facebook account. She actually did it. I, not knowing she could reverse the decision for up to a month (Facebook rules), was a little annoyed with her doing it without telling me because we worked for the same organization, and keeping connected to others through FB was important for our fundraising efforts. When she found out about my annoyance, she reinstated her account.

We didn't mention it since. I guess I can fathom the idea of it as control, but I think control is such a hard thing to define. Even DR has a step called, "Ask for what you want." What is the difference? Where does it become control?

That said, I do agree with MUCH of what W has brought up in terms of emotional disconnection, being too unavailable to her, etc. But the control thing is taking a while for me to get to the root.