I definitely agree with what you posted last. And the question you ask yourself is very good.
The bottom line is if and when you're ready to leave, you will. I don't think it's a mistake to keep working on this, and I don't think it's a mistake to bail. Either one could be a very good decision. Also making no decision and going with the flow is good, too.
I just listened to an entire Byron Katie audiobook "Loving What Is" and I'm feeling very in tune with my life.
Youll figure it out, you're a smart girl. If I were to hazard a guess, probably when your ready to be honest, or when you are fed up.
My desire to flee when things are getting better is due to the fact that my experience has taught me that they will get worse again and yet I feel like it would be cruel to flee when things are bad.
Intimacy is scary and thats where you are headed when things get better.
Dr. Harley gives a very very good description on the process of going from withdrawal to conflict to intimacy. I was going to remind HD of it. check. dun. got it off my list now.
Fear encourages us to self protect, which in turn causes us to behave in ways that lead us right to what we dont want.
Fear always has to be rationalized, its a truly amazing thing to see, when you are constantly observing and controlling people who are in extreme fear inducing activities, how it always has to be rationalized. The worse the fear the worse the verbal output, sometimes it just indiciferable vocalizations, or the really funny ones, when words are strung together into sentences without meaning. I have been ruminating on how people when challanged mentally or pyschologically, often step up and really show some outstanding strength and behavior, much like the body improves when it is challanged. Stop challanging it, and it turns weak, mushy, unpredictable, and not very reliable. Of course if you over tax them, it will crack, break and become temporarily (hopefully) incapacitated.
"I can't be the one who comforts you when I'm the one who hurt you. You are crazy to seek comfort from the one who hurt you." That is a very true statement. It makes complete sense to me. I would tell my children the same thing in regards to a bully. Men who insist on 'loving their wife no matter what she does to me' while she disrespectfully pounds on his emotions would do well to take that advice also.
why dont you ask him why he wants to hurt you. or reply that its equally crazy that he would want to hurt his wife. His efforts to 'push' you towards the higher function Mojo may be off slightly, but Im sure equally matched by your emotional reactivity. Well your less surrendered now, but equally less HD... is that really the only way for a woman to remain HD? Sigh. and if so why are they constantly trying to change their perspective to not be. Right this second, I actually regret posting here, if its changed any womans perspective and 'hurt' her so she is less HD.
Also, if I'm going to be honest, I will say that if I don't cry when he yells at me then that is because it didn't hurt so I'm just some sort of manipulative liar if I stand there without tears in my eyes and say "It hurts. A lot.".
yep. if it no longer hurts you, then reply however you want.
because sometimes Daddy would yell at me and send me to my room but later he would always hug me and make it better too.
reminds me of a slightly similar dynamic in my M. I would say something teasing, joking or 'mean' and when she would get pouty, I would hug her or give her a kiss and she wouldnt refuse but she would 'resist' or push and complain, 'I dont want to kiss you, why do you always want a kiss from me after you are mean to me.' LOL. Cause she was so cute when she was mad.
Or the times when I would 'yell' (I can count on one hand the number of times I have litterally raised my voice at a woman 3 of them were within weeks of the Bomb ) Ill come in 10 minutes later and smack her on the ass or rumple her hair and say 'are you still upset about that, that was like... 3 days ago. Im hungry what are you fixing for dinner?' LOL.
The hero is the man so manly that he is able to overcome her resistance to giving up her independence and provide her with a safe harbor in which she can express her femininity.
Huh. Imagine that. I cant imagine why women would find those books the slightest bit provocative and be so rapt by them. Personally Id rather just look at some naked T&A.
So from your POV, women are sort of needy to have the scene in the novel in which the woman's masculine style resistance or desire for independence is overcome by the man's manliness play over and over again in their lives No not at all. Its loads of fun and makes for great sex. Of course there are times when its --n o t possible. Sort of like, a woman is not capable of being a visually appealing sexually available gymnast right after she had a kid.
Does that make it ok for the guy to lose his attraction? Yep. Does that make it ok for the guy to bang someone else who is, or leave her? Nope.
I'm kind of thinking you might have to go to France or somewhere like that where the women are better trained in the feminine arts to find the kind of woman you are looking for. Done that What BF needs is to find a woman who had a really good relationship with her father AND her mother growing up. That woman will like men AND she will like herself. When BF starts "doing nothing" and stops being "Daddy" she will simply switch over to "mothering" herself in order to self-validate her femininity Done that too. Well close to it. upon closer inspection there were some pesky details... but still ....Im pretty sure the problem is (pointing at self) right here ------> (BF).
When I need "rescuing" and feel like there is nobody to rescue me, I naturally try to become my own "Daddy" because that is who rescued me when I was young. If I can become my own "Mommy" when I need rescuing then I can rescue myself without forsaking my femininity. This is kind of what I was trying to do in a subconscious self-destructive manner when I fed myself cookies for comfort David Deida says if she can be her own masculine energy, then what does she need you for? If you cant give it to her she isnt going to want you, and if she wont let you provide it for her, then he is going to go find someone who will
And sometimes I'm going to throw my little jingle ball against a wall and nobody is going to come out to play with me There is just something about the jingle ball analogy that is so.... sad. I can see the little girl in her sunday dress playing listlessly with the jingle ball, but I cant hear it, and it makes me want to go see why its not jingling anymore.
Its reallly Annnoyyyinggg, because when I lived in the country as a kid, I used to pitch to myself against the front steps, and play tennis against the side of the barn, and wander around the fields throwing corn stalks at the crows and cats, but I was never lonely doing it.
As far as your friend and her marrage, 2nd marriage, remarriage, adnauseum all I have to say is Deut 24:2-4.
A lot of women validate their femininity by being maternal. Some women validate their femininity by interacting with other women Nod. That doesnt help me. Keep thinking and if you run across one thats single, give me a jingle.
No not at all. Its loads of fun and makes for great sex. Of course there are times when its --n o t possible. Sort of like, a woman is not capable of being a visually appealing sexually available gymnast right after she had a kid.
Does that make it ok for the guy to lose his attraction? Yep. Does that make it ok for the guy to bang someone else who is, or leave her? Nope.
I hope you would be in agreement with me that it also doesn't make it okay for the guy to passive-aggressively manifest LD behavior and choose to MB to porn rather than be honest with his wife about his loss of attraction to her and it wouldn't be okay for his wife to then respond to this form of rejection by manifesting inappropriate HD behavior.
Thinking about this scenario which I did experience in my own marriage I have to ask myself how would I play my role differently if I had to do it again? Let's say that my H had been mature, brave or differentiated enough to approach me and broach the subject in a loving fashion. Maybe he could have said "Honey, I know you are probably expecting that we should be resuming our sex life at this juncture and I hate to disappoint you because I love you. However, I'm feeling less attraction to you right now because of the way your body changed during pregnancy and perhaps some stress I am feeling about taking on the responsibility of being a father.". Then super high self-esteem, self-accepting, self-aware, not likely to manifest inappropriate HD behavior Mojo could have said "Thank you for being honest with me. I still feel like you are a physically attractive man but as a woman I am most sexually attracted to men who manifest strong sexual desire for me, so your lack of physical attraction to me is going to result in me experiencing a lack of emotional attraction to you. So, clearly we have some problems we need to work on if we are going to continue to have a satisfactory sex life. I'll try to lose some weight and dress/act less like a Mommy and perhaps you can try to widen your perspective about what you "see" as sexually attractive and work on your career in a way that will lessen the stress of the responsibilities of being a father. Of course, I am open to any other suggestions or ideas for solutions that you might have about the matter....Well, if we're not going to have any sex tonight, do you want to go rent some movies? I'll make the popcorn. No butter for me (sigh)."
Knowing what I know now, I would hazard to guess that IF it had played out in that way, the odds that we actually would have had sex before the popcorn was done popping would have been very high. Though, of course, in order for our sex life to continue to improve we both would have had to honor our commitments to work on our problems.
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why dont you ask him why he wants to hurt you. or reply that its equally crazy that he would want to hurt his wife.
I know what his answer would be. He would say that he doesn't want to hurt me but he is unable to stop manifesting the behaviors that cause me to feel hurt. He would say that he knows that his behavior is "crazy" but that knowledge doesn't change it. When I called him on yelling at me just recently, he sort of collapsed. He said "There's something wrong with me and none of this is fixing it." and pointed to the various herbs and medications on his dresser.
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Right this second, I actually regret posting here, if its changed any womans perspective and 'hurt' her so she is less HD.
Awww, you are such a sweetie. Don't worry about me. I am as impressionable as Silly Putty but just as able to change. Also, I'm really not such a baby even though I've been ridiculously self-indulging my inner child on the BB lately. Let me explain what I mean about my little jingle ball.
When I first came to this BB I felt like I was madly "in love" with my H and made miserable by it due to his constant rejection which caused me to manifest inappropriate HD behavior. Then I tried to improve my self-esteem by doing things such as losing weight. This just made me angry and HD rather than miserable and HD. So then I tried to improve my self-esteem by manifesting less inappropriate HD behavior. For instance, I told myself that I wasn't taking very good care of myself by manifesting the behavior of hugging someone who rejected my hugs rather than returning them. There was a feeling of affection and attraction that would well up inside me and make me want to hug my H but in order to take better care of myself, I trained myself to not hug where my hugs were not wanted. At first this was very hard, I had to fight against the urge to hug him but eventually I developed the habit of "not hugging". For a while after I lost the habit of hugging, I was not hugging but I still had access to the feelings that made me want to hug him. I would feel the feelings but choose not to act on them. But now, for the most part, I have lost access to those feelings. I don't even have the feeling like those feelings are there but I am trying to push them down in order to avoid being hurt. I did have that feeling for a while but not any longer. I want to feel warm huggy feelings but the best I can do is sort of squeeze a bit of the feeling out like trying to get the last of the toothpaste out of the tube. I don't like feeling this way so my thought was if I lost the feeling by simply not performing the act of hugging maybe I can regain the feeling by simply starting to hug more again. The problem is that when I do this my H still does not consistently return my hug, even though he is better about it and he does initiate hugs with me more often. So the feeling that I want to hug him is the jingle in my ball. Basically, I trained myself to manifest less inappropriate HD behavior in order to raise my self-esteem but the result is that I feel more LD even though I am not manifesting LD behavior. The reason I see myself as a little girl with the jingle bell is that I feel like some aspect of th loss of my jingle is equivalent to a loss of innocence. The loss of a naive belief that if I felt nice feelings like wanting to hug someone or did nice things like actually hug them then that feeling or that action would be returned.
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That doesnt help me. Keep thinking and if you run across one thats single, give me a jingle.
Well, if you really want a challenge I could set you up with my bi-sexual baby sister who doesn't believe in gender roles. She recently ended a long term relationship and she told me that she is thinking about dating straight men.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Your H is not very well, he is suffering from depression. Has he seen the doctor about this? Does he know he is depressed? You are losing your jingle because he has sucked it right out of you, that's what depressed people do to those close to them. Everything I read about your H reminds me of mine, peas in a pod, and your comment about being cranky when he really wants to cry resonated very strongly. They put up "don't come near me" walls/barbed wire/machine gun nests when they are losing it and can't cope. Being nice to someone else at that point is more than they can handle.
I don't know what you can do, I don't think it is healthy for you though :-(
If a w/h were paralyzed from the waist down what should the healthy spouse do about their sex life? That's not the question, the question is: what should the paralyzed one do about the spouse's sex life. Give BJ's, give them their blessing to head to the massage parlour? OG-Lou if BB is too old/sick to have a sex life anymore does that give her the right to deny you one? Mojo if your H is too depressed/sad to have fun anymore does that give him the right to deny fun to you? Yes of course the well spouse should have compassion for the unwell spouse but it should not be a one way street. The unwell should have compassion for the well who have to shift without them. It's too easy - and we've all done it I'm sure - to say "I'm the one who's suffering here" and not see that we have our end of the bargain to keep up. When my H couldn't cope after DS was born all I could think of was "I'm the one that just gave birth" - I needed to have done better than that, I needed to have had compassion for him.
If your H cares for you he should be able to say (even if you have to give him the script) Mojo I'm sick and depressed and I can't see a way to enjoy my life right now, however that doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy yours. Go and have fun in any way you can, bring home a little sunshine and don't feel bad if that sunshine doesn't warm me up. Finding a way for me to get happy is my job not yours.
It's freezing here too, 4 inches of snow last night, which is unheard of in London.
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
I'm always up by 4 or 5 but I have a tendency towards "can't get back to sleep" insomnia so if I wake in the middle of the night that's it for me.
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Your H is not very well, he is suffering from depression. Has he seen the doctor about this? Does he know he is depressed? You are losing your jingle because he has sucked it right out of you, that's what depressed people do to those close to them. Everything I read about your H reminds me of mine, peas in a pod, and your comment about being cranky when he really wants to cry resonated very strongly. They put up "don't come near me" walls/barbed wire/machine gun nests when they are losing it and can't cope. Being nice to someone else at that point is more than they can handle.
He does know that he suffers from dysthymia. He has been treated for it off and on over the years. He is back on Wellbutrin since last week and and hopefully he'll stay on it. He has the tendency to quit taking anti-depressants because he doesn't like the side effects.
I'm glad that you posted with this thought because I was kind of thinking along those lines. My thought was "I have lost my jingle because I am trying to empathize with someone who is depressive.". It's kind of like trying to empathize with someone who is in a coma. I shouldn't let myself go to that place.
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If your H cares for you he should be able to say (even if you have to give him the script) Mojo I'm sick and depressed and I can't see a way to enjoy my life right now, however that doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy yours. Go and have fun in any way you can, bring home a little sunshine and don't feel bad if that sunshine doesn't warm me up. Finding a way for me to get happy is my job not yours.
This is true and the bit of advice about (even if you have to give him the script) is right on target. To give my H some credit he did give me the note on my Bday indicating that he owed me about 10 years of fun. It's really incredibly sad that he recognizes this but is still unable to do anything about it. That is why I felt sorry for him when he couldn't manage to get me some flowers later in the day. Which, now that I think about it, points directly to my problem at the moment. When he apologized for not getting me flowers, I said "That's okay. Just give me your charge card and I'll order a bunch of garden seed and have lots of flowers this summer." BUT I never went ahead and ordered the seeds. I wasn't able to take care of myself in that way because feeling sorry for him was making me feel sorry for myself.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Let's say that my H had been mature, brave or differentiated enough to approach me and broach the subject in a loving fashion. Maybe he could have said "Honey, I know you are probably expecting that we should be resuming our sex life at this juncture and I hate to disappoint you because I love you. However, I'm feeling less attraction to you right now because of the way your body changed during pregnancy and perhaps some stress I am feeling about taking on the responsibility of being a father.". Then super high self-esteem, self-accepting, self-aware, not likely to manifest inappropriate HD behavior Mojo could have said "Thank you for being honest with me. I still feel like you are a physically attractive man but as a woman I am most sexually attracted to men who manifest strong sexual desire for me, so your lack of physical attraction to me is going to result in me experiencing a lack of emotional attraction to you. So, clearly we have some problems we need to work on if we are going to continue to have a satisfactory sex life
I'm assuming that was your "ideal world" response and not something you actually consider possible in the "real world." Name me one man who would come right out to his W that he was no longer attracted to her after she just gave birth to his children. Even if that is the honest thought, is it an appropriate thing to say? What woman will embrace that statement? I think it is fairly mean, not ideal at all. No one is THAT differentiated. Or am I way off here? Maybe it is the right response and I'm still too undifferentiated to see the benefits. But it reminds me of the Cobra comments about the boob job. I'd be pissed. And I wouldn't soon forget those comments either. Who would. This is probably why I had such horrible fights with my H about our SL. And he never came out and said anything so drastic until after we were separated, but I certainly sensed it. I take it way too personally. But I'm only human. If a man says he is not sexually attracted to me, I tend to lose attraction for him. Helpful when I'm in a romantic R, not so helpful when I'm in a M.
Have you talked to your H any about his issues from a guilt perspective? Well, actually I guess some of that applies to you too, but I keep getting the same message from his actions - he does not do all that he should (or could) because he feels guilty from not "doing the right thing" in some earlier situation, which angers himself, causing him to feel guilty and renders him incapable (at least in his mind) of stepping up to the plate and “doing the right thing” in the current situation, which makes him feel guilty … and on and on.
Maybe you help this cycle to an extent by keeping his shortcomings in front of his face, which reminds him of his guilt, even though your intentions may be good, KWIM? One way you might do this is by keeping the sex issue on the front burner – could he associate your need to have sex with all his other shortcomings and guilt, sort of a Pavlovian response? If so, what could you do to short-circuit this recurring cycle?
I'm assuming that was your "ideal world" response and not something you actually consider possible in the "real world."
I was just trying to figure out what my most differentiated, honest response might have been. Actually, I think what my H did in real life was much worse than what I had him say in my scenario. In real life he just avoided having sex with me and when I pinned him down and asked him "Why?" after being rejected when I initiated many times, he told me it was because I was "too fat" and his suggestion for solving the problem was that we should watch porn together. Stupid, stupid, idiot me agreed to this solution because I wasn't honest with myself about how far from a sexually ideal situation it was for me to have sex with a man who was being turned on by looking at other women's bodies.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
One way you might do this is by keeping the sex issue on the front burner – could he associate your need to have sex with all his other shortcomings and guilt, sort of a Pavlovian response? If so, what could you do to short-circuit this recurring cycle?
Well, I haven't initiated sex in monthes so I really don't think I've been keeping the sex problem on the front burner. I gotta tell you to me it seems like whatever I do put on the front burner is what we're going to end up having problems with. He has told me that he knows that he loves me because he hates to disappoint me. Maybe on some level he is choosing to disappoint me in order to feel his love. He feels closest to me when I am hurt because then my feelings are more in sync with his down near the abyss.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
There's this dynamic my H and I have had in the past ( which still affects me) and I am wondering if it resonates with you and your H as well. I have noticed that my H seems to do something hurtful towards me, and the resultant guilt he feels makes him want to make up for this, which drives his sexuality. IOw, it goes like this: Hurt IHJ...feel bad...want to make up for it...feel sexual. Over time, I began to shut down, which lead to a whole different scenario. How cool it would have been if H and I were able to have this talk with me saying, " Look, you have some need to hurt me. It would really be great if you could try to bypass this step. I'll try not to personalize it in the meantime, while you work on yourself, and I'll try to see what behaviors I am doing to perhaps cause you to want to act in this fashion. Now let's make some popcorn." And then I'd have to ponder if I am getting distracted in fantasy-land and this is my H's way of getting my attention.
Maybe the brutal honesty stuff is the way to go and Cobra is just ahead of us all.
