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I told her that if she is interested in R, she will also have to work on herself too.
The three biggest things she's dealing with right now are fear and uncertainty about the future, guilt for what she's doing to you and your son, and anger and resentment over your role in pushing her to this point.
Everything you do right now is going to make her either more resentful, or less resentful.
If you increase her guilt, by blaming, shaming, or making her responsible for your emotional state, she's going to resent you more.
If you give her space, it’s going to make her less resentful.
If you live your own life, and are happy and joyful for your own sake, it’s going to make her less resentful.
If you are respectful in your communications with her, but not intimate, it’s going to make her less resentful.
*Eventually* she will burn through that big pile of resentment.
*Eventually* she will process her anger at you and it will dissipate.
UNTIL she goes through both of those processes, she will not see you as anything other than she believes you to be based on her prior training.
WHILE she is processing her anger and resentment, YOU work on your changes. You do it slowly and methodically *for you*.
If you're a 2 today, you don't focus on being a 10, you focus on being a 3. Then you focus on being a 4. You be kind to yourself.
While her anger and resentment are burning down, your changes are building up.
When eventually she's had enough time and space that she can SEE YOU again, she'll be surprised by what she sees, and she'll question for the first time the assumptions she has held about you.
THAT is the beginning of your opportunity to turn things around, but you CANNOT control how long it will take her to process her anger and resentment, and you CANNOT accelerate it.
Buckle your seatbelt, it’s a marathon and you have to be patient and surrender to the fact that this relationship is NOT something you can control right now.
That's an uncomfortable feeling, but the sooner you own that fact, the better you'll do.
Originally Posted by PeterB
She went off the rails - "what have I done?", "it's all you", "you have treated me poorly", "i have done nothing wrong", "you are not owning up to your problems" etc.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to play the long game.
Even if you do everything 100% perfectly starting today, this is still a months/years-long turnaround.
When you live with someone, there is a huge motivation to keep the peace. Everyone wants peace in their lives. If you blew up over every little thing that happened between you, you would both be miserable.
As such, you push things down and gloss over them as you live together, and the consequence of that is that resentment builds.
If resentment builds too much over time, eventually it becomes "too much" and people start contemplating an exit from the relationship. During this period, the relationship is really "on trial" but the other party is usually totally unaware of it.
Once the trial is over and the person has more or less resolved to leave, you're on the tail end of a year’s long process. It goes "things are overall good, but this stuff is annoying" -> "These things are really annoying but not bad enough that I want to leave" -> "These things are really annoying and I don't know if I can stay" -> "These things are really annoying and now I have to get out"
Unfortunately, in many cases the "annoying things" were never even articulated, or if they were, not with enough gravity. Once the "I need to leave" point is reached, whatever those things are get magnified and new ones get invented to help convince the departing partner that they are making the right choice, fort an act in self-reinforcement which sometimes requires lots of fabrication.
Over time, you have *trained each other* what to expect from the other. She knows how you will react to any given situation, what you will say, how you will act, and she has decided that's not compatible with what she wants.
If you decide you don't want that either, and decide to make a change for yourself, initially she'll think you're just doing it as a gambit to get her back and as soon as she lets her guard down, you'll revert to who you "really are" in terms of who you've trained her that you are.
In order to turn this around she needs to *fully believe* that you've changed, and that you're not doing it just to get her back.
How do you convince her of that?
(1) Repetition, lots and lots of repetition in terms of reacting differently, acting differently, than you have historically.
(2) Acting differently when no one is looking
(3) Finding a life for your new self that doesn't require her. That's the only way you make it credible that your changes are for you. She won't even see them until she believes that you don't need her.
