Quote: The question is, does she really know what she wants? When she demands things from you, you assume that's really what she wants, but I think that women sometimes need someone who can tell them "no" and stand up to them. What she may really be doing is "testing" you to see if you're just going to cave, or if you're going to stay in charge of the situation.
Yes, I think there is a fair degree of testing going on. This came up in therapy yesterday - the fact that she's not communicating directly, not taking responsibility for her own needs and then blaming everyone around her in her life (with an extra dose of anger for me) for not noticing or responding to her neediness. She seems to only see an effective response to her neediness as caring (she wants to be rescued from her pain). The importance of boundaries is what I came away from this session with. The trouble for me is that what you call staying in charge of the situation is not really a dynamic I want - staying in charge of my interests in the situation, maybe, but I shouldn't have any responsibility to stay in charge of her interests. To me this is codependency - me doing what's right for her despite her verbalized desire for something else.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
