WI, what you mention here about the mindset seems to me to be depression and anxiety. It's a way of maintaining blame for her state of mind on me. My actions necessitate an emotional response from her. If I frustrate her she gets enraged. I can't eliminate my frustrating behavior. I do what I can, but it frustrates her when I try and figure out if we have enough money to go do something - she wants a quick answer from me, I want to be accurate and both share this responsibility.
It's not up to me to turn everything around. I can't. I can only remain as close to the middle as I can stand to be, hoping she'll decide to meet me there. I can only remain as emotionally available as possible. This is especially difficult when I feel like I'm constantly under attack, when I'm constantly criticized and blamed. But it has provided me with an enormous opportunity to improve in adverse circumstances. Like climbing a mountian with a 300 pound backpack on in a snowstorm.
I am proud of my progress regarding sharing my feelings. I have responded as often as I could if I felt hurt. I told her that I felt really judged by the way she responded to something I said yesterday (when we got to the mall I asked her if she remembered where the store was - she got snotty with me, and then was trying to get me to explain why I asked. I told her and she basically told me she thought I was stupid for asking) and it felt good to express my feelings rather than stew and not say anything. This is significant progress and it is valuable to me in my life, regardless of where I end up.
Ben, I'm not sure how I feel about what you wrote here. I know my intentions are good. So in this sense I'm not doing anything bad. But if my W is hurt by what I do, am I not doing something wrong? I do need to consider the response on some level, right? Otherwise I'm being entirely narcisistic - seeing my perspective as absolute. I don't believe it's so, but I also want to trust myself more. You're right that my W is unhappy with her life. She does need to set the expectation in some way (and if she's doing that now by showing me that she wants to live like a princess and be taken care of her whole life, I should file now - I want a partner, not a dependant, not someone I need to buy things left and right for to fill the void inside her. I never thought she was this superficial before.) in order to be satisfied by the results. This is specifically the reason I keep asking her "what would it look like if I were to convey my feelings about you accurately through my actions?" She won't tell me how I should act, rather that I'm always acting wrong. If she doesn't know how she wants to be treated (she probably does at some level but doesn't want to share it with me because she wants to continue to believe that our personalities preclude us from working together) than how can she ask me to figure it out? I have to empirically try every possibility? She did tell me that I had to do the exact opposite of everything I was currently doing though.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
