You will know if your W is participating or not. Mine didn’t so I stopped going after 3-4 sessions.
Pretty sure this MC won't use 5LL, but he did talk next week about working an exercise on communication (not about the kids, but about, well, anything). This will be an opportunity to gauge my W's participation. It is an opportunity for me to air out what I am feeling, really anything I want to say, and her job as listener is to just listen.
On that note, I do have to consider what I would talk about. There's so much that could be said, but the more words, the more it dilutes the message.
I'm fairly sure I will bring up an incident about 7 months ago, long before I realized I was in limbo. W and I were having a chat in the living room, and she transitioned into unloading on me for, by my count, at least 12 different things she was upset about. It was a verbal barrage. Then she just got up mid-conversation and went to sleep and left me there. She was upset about: Xmas gifts, lack of emotional intimacy, feeling I made no progress in IC, accused me of a PA, accused me of a porn addiction, said I was financially controlling, all the changes I made from MC1 were not helping, on and on and on. I call this the sh*t tsunami. She tied it off saying this is why she felt no desire for physical intimacy (knowing that was something I was missing).
It perfectly encapsulates the important issues I would want her to address:
- Quietly stewing, mind-reading, building up resentment, then periodically erupting, then acting like nothing happened. Repeat. - Complete lack of communication - no willingness to find common ground, or work through conflict, or talk about serious issues with an open mind and heart - Trust issues - Ignoring or diminishing my needs
Finally, there is a tinge of her tendency to "therapize" me -- and that alone may be enough to say this MR is over. That is a power dynamic that really makes it impossible to have a loving relationship.
Oh, and all this happened while fireworks were going off in the distance. It was NYE. I recall lying in bed wide awake for a couple hours thinking: "Something needs to change, I can't keep living like this."
At the time, I handled this fairly well I thinkl. I was not in "fear of losing the marriage" mode. I listened non-defensively, validated, stayed calm. I had been reading a lot about couples communication the prior several months during our first MC go-round. I responded the next day with an e-mail to acknowledge what I heard, let her know I cared about her feelings, suggested we work on how to address some of the items, and that I thought we should go to a new MC. No response. No acknowledgement that I even responded.
