WOW! I can already see the change in you attitude and lowered defensiveness. Maybe that because you’re talking to HP rather than me. But still a noticeable change.
The crucible is just Schnarch’s term for confronting oneself about something like making a hard choice, facing your issues. In your case, your H puts himself into his own crucible when he is nasty to you, but then feels guilty about it. He knows he was wrong but doesn’t want to confront himself as to why he acted like that. So he projects blame onto you.
Holding onto yourself is not allowing him to do this to you to or accept that projection. It is his issue, his crucible, and unless you rescue him by accepting responsibility for his behavior, sooner or later he will have to come to terms that he is the only one responsible for acting like that. Once this acknowledgement is made, once he “owns” his stuff, then he can start working on change.
Nonetheless, this may be the kind of conversing I need to learn how to do....man just that one sentence scares the crap out of me. Sheesh, what does that say about me?????
Dunno. What does it say? Why does that scare you? I’ll bet 10-to-1 it has to do with your FOO.
Thanks HP, those are really encouraging words and just what I need. When we start talking about changing the way I communicate with H and identifying when he is making ridiculous attempts to make it All About Heather, I get so freaked out because how do I know for sure what he's doing? How do I know for sure if he's truly telling me his feelings, in which case I should try to understand and validate or if he's just creating a diversion, in which case I need to make a boundary and refuse to be dragged into the conversation in the direction he tries to take it?? This is HARD.
Why does it matter whether or not you know why he is doing something? Even if you really, really think you know, you may not. So if you can convince yourself you know, you are calm. If you convince yourself you don’t know, you panic. But you still don’t know, so why the opposite reactions? Because you are still depending on him to set how you feel, see? Only time and the consistency of his actions to build a level of trust will cure this. So stop being the puppet on a string.
You’re doing great. It took me SOOOO long to learn what you’re learning now!!
