Don't Trade Our Love For Tea & Sympathy

[Ophelia]

I struggle daily with feeling like I am inauthentic, b/c I want to sit him down and tell him all the things he is NOT doing, can't he see it? blah blah. I don't, I won't, but I fight it daily. I swallow this bitter pill all the time.

Don't we all wish we could sit them down and make them see the things they don't? I've read so much on these forums over the last month in particular that I reckon I probably know H's mind better than he knows it himself right now. I desperately wish there were some way to make him face the reality of how destructive he's being to himself, (nevermind to me, or to our M).

Then I read this part in one of theoden's posts, (love the username BTW, I'm gonna go right ahead and assume you're a Lord of the Rings fan?)....

I began to see how I loved the self-pity, holding the moral high ground and the self-righteousness I had in our marriage crisis. It really struck me and I confessed it to God. One evening I was talking to my wife and I told her that throughout this process I was being very self-righteous and would she forgive me for that? She started to cry.

....and it hit me like a bolt outta the blue that I too have been self-righteous throughout this ordeal. Even now I'm still doing it, with the wanting to find a way to explain to him how much better I understand him now. Part of my wanting to tell him that is so that I can feel like I'm the one in control because I know so much about him. And as right as I may be about how his mind is working right now, I can't tell him that because it's not my place to tell him how to feel. He's gotta work it out for himself. The frustration I have, (and maybe this is the same for you BI, seeing as you mentioned his passivity pissing you off), is that he won't realise it himself, so that scares me, and it just fuels my wanting to "fix" him (and in turn, fix us) even more, which in turn just makes me more self-righteous.

BI, we've gotta accept that we can't fix them! As terrifying as it is to leave them to their own devices to figure themselves out, somehow we've gotta find a way to do just that. We've gotta give up whatever control it is we think we have over them, because it's all just in our heads anyway, and we just end up making ourselves crazier when we spend so much time and effort worrying about them, and if we're more crazy, then the situation won't ever improve.

The situation won't change until someone in the situation changes, and as much as it sucks, and as impossible as it feels to do it, we have to be the ones to let them go and trust them to be able to manage their own issues, the prospect of which is scary as all hell!

Dammit, why is it that there's gotta be so much, "easier said than done" stuff when it comes to good DBing.

Hang in there BI.