So this is piecing...

[trustinginHim]

H surprised me and called me early tonight. It seems he will be out even later than he first thought tonight and felt he should call me BEFORE he went out. He says he is going to another mixer, but tonight he will be out with the "boys" and thus it will be a REALLY late night. Lovely.

Anyway, he had been asking me about my day and I mentioned that I had been fighting some back and neck pain and was in the process of applying heat to the areas that were hurting. He kind of teasingly said that the location of the pain suggested I must be experiencing some stress and tension in my life. I shocked him and said that, "Yes, I am."

He did a sharp intake of breath and asked me, "Really? Why? What's wrong?"

That instigated a long talk between us that was somewhat productive, but with him out-of-state until late tomorrow, I didn't think that it was prudent to have a real "nuts and bolts" long distance discussion. So I kept it somewhat light, but I did tell him that I was not happy any longer with the status quo because I think we have addressed very few, if any, of the underlying causes of our marital problems. Instead, we seemed to have swept everything aside like nothing was ever wrong.

He did agree that he probably was still depressed and will re-start his ADs again upon returning home. We all know how well he has been keeping promises lately, so we will see on that.

I also mentioned that we needed to continue our joint counseling and our individual counseling. He resisted mightily to this. He absolutely refuses to discuss anything related to his/our past because he is convinced it will be solely to hurt him which in turn he said will cause him to develop further feelings of bitterness and resentment toward me again. He claims he has cut the past off and left it behind. He does NOT want to revisit it under any circumstances because of the intense pain he will feel upon doing so. That tells me that he still just refuses to accept his responsibility for his part in the failure of our marriage AND his first marriage.

Interestingly on that note, during last night's phone call since we were on the subject of his XW, he mentioned in the line of our conversation that he has never been able to forgive her for embarrassing him in public in front of a bunch of his friends when she caught him with another woman in a bar when they were still married. I didn't say anything because she wasn't any more faithful to him than he was to her, but I was thinking that I couldn't believe that he still harbored the resentment and bitterness toward her for that situation, and refused to validate her feelings and understand why she might have been a bit upset with the whole scenario.

Of course now he is panicky and more depressed. He asked me if I was going to be moved out again when he got home from this conference. I reassured him that was not happening.

Well, I need to collect my thoughts and prepare for upcoming discussions. I told him that I needed to make a list of things I felt we needed to address and that freaked him out! He said, "You need to make a list???!!! There is that much to discuss?????"

Sigh. I hope I am doing the right thing. All I know is that I am unhappy and feel ready to move to the next level and finally address issues bothering me that do not appear to be resolving themselves with time. He seems to act as if everything was ok in his world and that I have blind-sided him. I now wonder, am I doing the right thing? Is this bad DBing, or has bad DBing brought me to this point?

LG--praying that she can do this correctly without dissolving into a puddle when her H goes into his angry man mode during discussions