PP's New Adventure (5) - Filing & Moving Forward

[PigPen]

Thank Dif, I don't think I've checked in on you in a bit, but appreciate you stopping by and lending me support and your thoughts.

My W was happy for me re: the TED talk, she's always been very supportive my expression. We were actually an amazing team that way - doing vision boards together, shooting YT videos for each other, brainstorming together - it was a blast. The only thing I couldn't get her to do was read what I wrote. I believe she wanted the same level of intimacy I would put on paper when I spoke with her and didn't want to hear thoughts I was willing to share with the world but not with her. Oddly enough I would talk about anything in a public speech or an article, but would clam up at home.

Thank you for the recommendation of the Imago dialogue. I'm going to look that up for sure. Listening without judging is a big one, but more than that I think it's about accepting that what's real for her may not be what my defense mechanisms are seeing.

I'm really having a hard time with the fact that I saw her for the first time in 4.5 months yesterday and hurt her feelings. I feel like I blew a great opportunity to showcase how much I've changed, but that blunder did the opposite. I spoke with my IC today about it and he said that when you burst someone's story - i.e. the story that she's created around our dog - it reveals the emotions underneath that they're using the story to cover. That it was more about her feeling like since I didn't believe her she was going to lose Woofie. Either way, I'm still upset about it.

DB'ing is still teaching me so darn much, and all of it stems around this idea that "change doesn't happen without change". Now I get why so much time is needed for all of this. Why a month or two months, or 5 months just doesn't cut it. Here I am 8 months since BD and am still learning about big issues that were an issue in my M. Learning that I haven't changed as much I thought I had, nor as much as I still can.

Big hug Dif,

PP