Triggered and coping

[time2heal]

My wife called me on acting like a pain last night. I denied I was being a pain. This morning I put it together because she told me again this morning I was acting like a pain. I fell back into my normal coping and not being nice towards her when something bothered me. I pinpointed what the cause was from the night before it was something I read that bothered me. I caught on pretty fast because someone posted a while ago about seeing it and figuring out what the cause was when it happened. I feel like I should meditate or something. When you catch yourself going back to a particular coping method how do you deal with it and moved forward? What has worked for everyone?

 

[roadrunner]

time2heal,

A relationship is hard work anyway, and when one partner is a survivor struggling with recovery that hardly helps things. The survivor is trying to deal with floods of mixed-up feelings laden with heavy judgments about himself, now here comes his wife to add to his troubles, as he sees it. The fact that what she wants and needs may be some ordinary simple thing just entirely escapes him, and soon the discussion has turned into a bickering "You did this. No I didn't." kind of argument.

What has helped me a lot has been to try to think, whenever this situation begins, of what the problem really is and what I can contribute to resolve it. That is, I try to see the situation as a problem that needs to be solved, as opposed to an argument that needs to be won. That way, instead of feeling at odds with each other, we can feel we are working together. That makes it both easier for her to support me as a survivor, and easier for me to see when I am really out of line.

Much love,
Larry