"A difficult, effortful and often painful soul-searching experience, but absolutely worth it! I learned an enormous amount about myself and my partner."
How I did it: I realised that for me to want to stay in the relationship, things would have to get better, so I worked out two lists...
The first was of things happening in our relationship that were significantly diminishing or eradicating my ability to feel safe with my partner or be intimate with him. For me, this included the days (sometimes weeks) of silent treatment and stonewalling whenever I displeased him, disappearing from the room emotionally at the first sign of difficulty, lying, and turning minor things into big dramas or crises.
The second list was of things missing from our relationship that I really felt I needed. These included a high level of consistency from him and an ability to sometimes laugh at things (Boyfriend tends to take himself exTREMEly seriously)
The two lists started off a bit longer, but I went through them and only kept items that were absolute must haves. I gave the list to my partner and started talking to him about it. We talked a LOT. In the end, we decided on an approach where we would pick one item from the list each week and focus only on that. This was probably the single best decision we have ever made in our relationship. It has worked wonders and we've made great progress. Over time, this system has become a rallying point, a way for us to team up against challenges and we have come to see each other as partners rather than combatants.
For each focus, we would read a lot about the issue, see what various people had to say and discuss our personal reactions and points of view. My reactions were often relief and a sense of validation. My boyfriend has said that for him it helped him to separate himself from the problem and to see himself from the outside.
Another big part of this whole process was our discovery that he was being triggered by his past - his parents' highly acrimonious divorce. I tend to see disagreements as normal and necessary to our personal growth, whereas D associates it with extreme anger, even verbal abuse, hatred, rejection and abandonment. For him a disagreement is not a disagreement. A fight is not a fight. It is the threat of a love dying and a family torn apart.
On my part, I have made an effort to become educated about divorce and how it affects the kids who live through it, I have listened to his stories of what it was like, and when things get heated, I try to remember that he is vulnerable to panic.
For his part, he has made an effort to keep an eye on his panic level and to tell me when he thinks it has risen too high. At these points we often stop for a while and just sit looking at each other. He says that within a minute, he stops seeing flashbacks from the past and starts seeing the woman in front of him asking for his help. The funniest thing. All these years I've been trying to tell him, when I needn't say nothing at all.
Lessons & tips: Let me tell you something you should not do if you are a woman having this problem - do not speak to your woman friends/family about it. Honestly, I have never felt so unsupported in my life. The responses I got left me feeling that I had no right to complain as men are idiots and can't help themselves and that I was therefore emotionally responsible for him and his actions. If he was doing something that was mean, painful, petty or abusive it was my own fault really as I clearly hadn't handled him properly. I mean for goodness sake, I'm his lover not his parent.
I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd rocked up with 2 black eyes and they'd told me to stop aggravating him as he'd probably had a bad day at work and, poor guy, he just didn't know how to express himself.
In my experience, many woman have very high expectations of other woman and very low expectations of men. Sharing with people like that is extremely demoralizing and damaging, so be sure that the women you choose to talk to are capable of seeing men as fully adult human beings or you will be in for a pretty crushing experience.
(PS Needless to say, I have extricated myself from those relationships and am developing those ones that have proved more supportive and reasonable of me)
Resources: Google! The internet was the best place to find lots of points of view and to read about the things we were struggling with.
3 people found this helpful
Dec 11, 06:01AM PST
| 5 comments
| 4 cheers
