Quote: Keep highlighting your positive changes and keep DBing for you!!!
This I plan to do! You know, I look back and do not entirely recognize that old me. Not that I've become someone else at all or that I didn't like who I was, I don't mean that.
But a long time ago I came to see how my H was feeling about his life-- some of this is rightly assigned to how we were communicating in our M and some is more about his life. And where I had responsibility to change, I feel I have taken it, been really honest with myself, and become a better person for that.
I also know that our comm. deteriorated badly during the first part of our sitch-- in some ways we were telling each other everything-- being so honest on some levels. But H was also withholding and being dishonest about his A and I was screaming, judging and psychoanalyzing him to death. It was bad for a while.
In the past 10 months, all of that has changed on my end and some on his end too, though of course I still need to work at not talking too much when he is sharing or pushing OR conversations further when H starts them.
And all of this did seem to be bringing us closer and making H reevaluate why he was leaving. Somehow, he has been transported back into the days before the bomb. It's almost like H is so focused on that old pattern of communication, he's determined to re-create it just to show he is right. I don't get that.
What I feel -- and yes, I'm assuming here based on what he DOES say -- is that he is holding on to resentment from the past.
(Joanne's thread with Michele--which I saw for the first time last night-- describes very much how my H described his feelings then.)
I have been trying to figure out what I was doing differently during that time, and it was a little more attention, appreciation, listening more and really making certain I am clear when I speak with him about things, asking if he felt I was clear, etc. I am thinking this may be pressure (he says it's not).
It feels as though he has put back up a wall that had come down and that he is trying very hard NOT to have any kind of real intimacy with me. It's like he's going to hold on to that negativity about us come he!! or high water! Otherwise, he is "giving me hope."
But he isn't going to say why the D that was previously not the right thing to do is now a necessity. OW seems an obvious factor here, but not one H has even mentioned.
I guess it's a cheeseless tunnel to ask him these questions, though I feel that as his W, I should be offered something better than a rehash of situations 2 years old.
When I ask directly about his feelings, following up on things he is saying to me about them, he mostly answers with silence or avoidance-- or worse, answers with something about me: whether we are friends is up to me (I'm asking how HE feels about the idea!), etc. I am gently telling him I want to hear HIS feelings, opinions, thoughts. I don't want to hear about ME. H says things are about me, and I feel H is the one who keeps turning them that way.
This is baffling to me. It's clear no one is asking him the tough questions.
Oh well.
What does it mean to keep DBing at this point? What does that look like?
