You have made a great decision to stand for your marriage. You are on the right track. The way you interact with your H is in so many ways very much like me.
One of the things I'm beginning to comprehend (see my last post on my thread) is that though I am trying so hard to be understanding and loving and forgiving, in my H's eyes, it is still all about ME and my efforts, my feelings, my goals. He feels controlled by my behavior...positive or negative is beside the point. He's not free to just be himself and go through what he needs to go through on his own.
I know (from personal experience) that when conversations about our relationships happen, you feel the need to lay it all out there for him. If there's an opening, then I should take it! But I am starting to see that this very thing is standing in his way. It's almost like it sets him back to square one every time I turn my attention to the elephant in the room.
Honey, you are doing the best you know how to keep your man. But you do have to go back to the list of what-not-to-do in the book and get down to some really hard work on that list. The whole "work on yourself" thing sounds like a lot of b.s. until you really get that your M will not change unless/until you do some serious soul-searching and make some real changes. It's HARD, so hard to see how we contribute to dysfunction, but the only way to get past the problems is to change ourselves.
