I've been here a while - since just after my H moved out for what turned out to be an eight month separation. He's been back in the family home now for just over a year. I won't recap our entire history, only to say there were long standing issues going back to a period of extremely severe PND I had well over a decade ago. We both have stressful jobs. He was a SAHD for a while and it never suited him. We were stuck, hopelessly, in a SSM and a pursuer-distancer dynamic that affected every aspect of our lives together. There was an intense, short lived EA on his part, some bullying and verbal abusive behaviours, conflicts in parenting styles, and a lot of resentment, bitterness, emotional manipulation and controlling behaviour on my part.
Where we are now is firmly in piecing. He is transparent on his devises and whereabouts and I don't worry that he is unfaithful. He has a tendency to resort to distancing when stressed or anxious, and I have a tendency to resort to pursuit-type behaviours in the face of that, and sometimes it still escalates into nastiness and verbal abuse from him, though I am 100% better at not taking that nonsense personally. The SSM is a work in progress, we're still very vulnerable in that area but the conversations are happening and I do see some changes.
I think I have noticed that i use my thread to moan about things he does that I don't like, and not to reflect properly on my own goals. I have a tendency to concentrate on the negative, play the victim a bit - even still - and I am getting lazy with my GAL. I do have a tendency to get in a low mood and expect too much of H to snap me out of it. I have huge huge huge problems with trust, which means I am hyper-vigilant about the flaws in our marriage, and don't let myself enjoy the good parts.
So I want to work on all these things, and want to concentrate my thread on me rather than him. He's a good man with some very very irritating flaws, and we're built differently, and we have a dynamic that doesn't work for either of us that is being changed, but is still in progress. He is committed and so am I.
