Piecing Myself and Not My Marriage

[may22]

Sorry, Alison, I just had another thought. (Also I just realized I didn't actually finish my last post. I meant I'm sure you already do this to some degree, but wonder if you could put a tiny bit of responsibility on your end, as long as you feel it-- even though his behavior is NOT condoned by you-- just to set an example.)

If, and only if, you choose to bring this up with him, here's something else you might try. I know that with my H, I usually would say something along the lines of "It isn't acceptable for you to treat me that way" and he would feel like I was the parent chastising a child. It really got his goat and generally made him feel defensive and we didn't accomplish much, except for a sulky half-a$$ed apology and both of us still feeling badly. When I decided to try a 180 on this and approach it from my perspective-- hey, it really hurt me when you said those things. Do you really think XYZ? And it made all the difference-- he said I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't say those things to you. I don't mean it. I don't know why I do it. And then we could get into a conversation about how to prevent it. Still then, I had issues when he would say "well you shouldn't do X then I wouldn't get angry" so it wasn't like a magic bullet, but it really helped even open the discussion. And for the record, I've become OK with a single like primal yell to let off steam, as long as it wasn't aimed at anyone. Prior I thought he should just be able to swallow it like I could. And that just isn't him. So kind of a compromise.

The other thing we talked about was the Gottman experiment from the love lab where, when couples were fighting and their heart rates got too high, the experimenter would stop them and say "our recording equipment is malfunctioning-- can you please stop talking for a moment while we get it back online?" And then they would wait until their heart rates dropped down to a certain rate (I can't remember exactly what it was) and then let them keep going. And each time the argument was mightily defused. I shared this with my H, who thought it was pretty interesting too, and we have tried it-- saying "I need to take a break, I feel flooded" and then taking one. I bet honestly that would help him a LOT if he could do it.