love?

[beccy]

I am finding so many of the things my bf says/the way he says them to leave me feeling too hated/insecure. He goes back on things he says and says he didn't mean them that way, his reason for everything is that he's triggered. Maybe he is. I am just finding it very hard to really trust him. I feel like I've been a sucker for years. It's been too long to live like this and today I just felt too much under pressure to say 'I love You', hug, pretend I feel fine and happy.

To me we feel barely even friends. The fact is, he doesn't say enough about the things that really matter to him at the moment, to the detriment of all conversation. Instead he is mean to me in subtle ways. I find all of this incredibly hard to notice as and when it's happening and spend time after worrying I'm exaggerating. I just don't feel I can stay on my toes with it all. And I do need to stay on my toes, because otherwise the result is nervousness, anxiety and low self esteme.

Honestly, I just feel like I've been sitting there saying, ''hey, it's ok, you can treat me like shit, I won't notice. I'll still come grovelling and begging for your love, desperate and adoring''.

I can't do it anymore. I feel so bad today about the way I was with him earlier about the whole love issue. I'm just losing the ability to keep all the trimmings when everything else feels like a joke to me. And now I feel horribly guilty. I want to be able to give him all the love I know he must be needing right now, but it's not making enough sense to me with the way I feel.

Maybe this is to do with the process I'm going through at the moment?


I feel like he's scared of me. Funny that, cause I've felt quite scared of him really. Maybe we're just really not right for each other.

I think our best solution to this currently, is to spend hardly any time together. It's just the whole love thing, I don't know what to do about that.......


Dreading talking once the kids are in bed,


peace
Beccy

 

[SAR]

beccy

Tell me to go to hell if you want, but I see a pattern in some of your posts where you feel vulnerable or angry about some aspect of the relationship and the solution you propose to your boyfriend is ultimately about control-- whether you want to call the shots in terms of intimacy or communication or time spent together, it is about you calling the shots.

Do you feel like it is your availability to him that makes you vulnerable, or do you feel taken for granted and believe that if you put him on a "starvation diet" he will treat you more like you want to be treated? I am not saying you are wrong; if you feel like you need to set a boundary in a certain place you have that right and should be honest about it. And your feelings are your own. I just hope you are acting not reacting.

It is normal for partners to feel anxious or vulnerable about change, even positive change, and maybe it is because things are looking up that you now feel safe enough to get angry about how things have been in the past. I just hope that you are thinking about the future in a positive way too; not just "we should spend less time together because I am feeling tense and afraid" but also "what can we both do to lessen those feelings in ourselves and get comfortable spending time together again..." do you know what I mean?

SAR

 

[beccy]

I know exactly what you mean SAR.

I am going through some kind of transition, where I'm just starting to notice the certain ways in which I definately feel taken for granted/emotionally abused. I think possibly at some point earlier on in our relationship, I did used to have more trust in my own perceptions/feelings than I do now, but gradually over the years, it appears it faded out of existence. It is coming back now, with therapy/homeopathy and it certainly has taken it's time. The point I would like to get to now, is one where I notice these feelings as they happen, and express them clearly one way or another. That way they don't gather more anger and leave me feeling like there's nothing i can do to defend myself from being treated badly. Don't get me wrong, I understand these things are not my bf's fault, which is why I felt so sad about it all as the day went on. On the one hand, I felt like I was beginning to get more in touch with my own experience of this, and then, I felt badly about the rejection of it and how that couldn't possibly be a good thing for bf or me.

What can I do to enable myself to acknowledge and validate my own feelings/perceptions better?
I think there might be a useful worksheet/cognitive exercise i could do for exactly this one senario which might help(from one of the sites that Bunny suggested).

We have talked tonight. I told him I felt bad about how I'd handled it. We had a good talk about a number of different things. We're deciding one thing we can do is complement and show appreciation to each other for the things which we DO like and which DO make us happy, Try to make it a bit of a habit.

I do spend very much time thinking about how to improve the time we spend together. I think a lot about emotional issues in general. I've just had a lot of dysfunctions myself and I'm trying all the time to improve them. I'm a thinking person. I think about my faults, face them and change them fairly quickly really. That was one fantastic bit of parenting I was lucky enough to have as a child. Isn't it just a shame though, that you have to SEE the faults in the first place to be able to change them

Dysfunctions.......


peace
Beccy