this is super helpful. Thank you for elaborating and thank you for letting me hijack your thread a bit to do it!
I really, really struggle with validating feelings while not enabling his verbal abuse of me - the only feeling I see him demonstrate most of the time is anger, and while he has every right to be angry, and I can validate anger, it is no longer healthy to sit there like a lemon going 'yes, I can see you're really angry' and 'it must be tough to be so angry' when he's throwing emotional hand grenades at me. If he's sharing his inner world, I will validate. If he's lashing out, it's verbal abuse and he can get out of my house.
The lamb and lipstick comment was lashing out. I can't remember his exact phrasing but it involved 'you getting tarted up' and it was designed to humiliate me.
There have been other times I have been able to validate his anger, and I do want to get better at it for my other relationships.
A couple of weeks ago he was talking a lot about the people at his work, who he is having trouble getting on with. He seems to spend most of the time he isn't at work at home in the dark drinking and playing computer games. He's been pulled up at work for his poor attitude and irritability. Privately, I think he doesn't know how to 'give' in relationships, and is probably treating others in a milder version of the way he treats me. What I said was 'it sounds like you just want some low pressure fun and it isn't happening, that must be really hard given how exhausting your work is' which I thought was okay - though there's room to improve.
This conversation has also helped me to think about the ways in which I communicate in ways that seek validation, and stop doing that. I do get a lot of emotional contact and empathy from my friends, and I don't really seek that anymore from H.
