Summer of Growth and Acceptance

[V2pt0]

Thanks all. I am taking everyone's advice to heart, especially yours, Zues. I clearly have a ton of work to do and I am willing to put in the time. I just need to figure out how to compartmentalize the A and remember that it is a by product of his pain and years of living in an unhappy M.

I am not going to have a huge confrontation with H, but I feel I have to at least have some short conversation with him after requesting time to talk about our M/living situation. I think part of it is that I am getting too influenced from friends. I need to pull back on sharing too much with them. I will keep it light, be compassionate, and will not demanding. All I really want is for home to be more comfortable for us both, especially H, so he feels he wants to spend time here. I just need some tension to go away and it seems that would be something he wants too.

I do have two questions:

1) Any time I have shown compassion and empathy for what my H has had to endure in our M and have shown emotion and remorse for my behavior, he gets upset and tells me I need to stop beating myself up that he is also to blame. Is it because I am saying it versus just leaving it to my actions? It is not that I say stuff constantly, but only in a couple of conversations.

2) At one point early on, H asked about my changes and said I hope you are not doing that for me. I said no primarily for myself, but also moving forward regardless if it is with him or for another M/ person, I need to make the changes. A couple of weeks ago, he brought this up and made a comment about how I am just changing for the next guy anyway. That was his take away from that conversation.

Any insight on both of these?