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CaringandReal -> RE: Trust- a Mexican Standoff (an asking for advice post) (11/24/2009 5:32:19 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ranja
quote:
ORIGINAL: sireninchains
we dont trust what the other person says, he has me justify everything i say, he just doesnt take me at my word, and because he does it to me, i do it to him. It starts fights. So i guess the first one, and that leads to me just not telling him things because i know ill have to justify and he wont get it.
Maybe it is not that he just doesn't take your word... maybe he genually does not quite understand you... men and women think different and understand different... if you feel you have to justify yourself you will get upset... it is your lack of patience showing... he might simply try to understand you and you feel attacked and misunderstood by that... insecure lady
if you start doing stuff back... that is petty and will not do... of course that starts fights... he will know you are being petty and he will dislike it.
You not telling him thins is bound to end things... he will lose interest in you...
You have to change how you tell him stuff and you have to stop feeling attacked by him... you do not have to justify yourself, you just have to explain again because he does not quite understand you... what is so bad about that?
There's only one thing bad about that. :( It's easy to say and to advise but it's very hard to do, particularly if your personality has certain vulnerabilities that are enhanced by your partner's. If people could do the rational obvious logical right things , they would, but sometimes they just can't. The problems run deeper than the obvious and the solutions to these problems are much more covoluted.
The trouble with these threads is that the inital post is almost always too simple and pat in presenting the problem to give responders a clear idea of what is actually going on. All sorts of important things that affect the problem are generally left out, for various reasons. And without knowledge of these other aspects of the situation, no advice is going to be much good.
But even if the problem was extremely clear and laid out just as siren wrote it, don't you think she would have done what you have suggested long ago if she were capable of it? It's not an unobvious solution. But people are complex. The ways in which they are complex sometimes make the simple, obvious solutions impossible (or appear impossible--which is pretty much the same thing for many of us).
I really don't know what to offer as an alternative. She's gotten into a bad emotional pattern, a kind of trap, and the only way she's going to get out of it is if she really wants to. It's more a matter of desire, I sense, or discovering if she has a genuine desire/need to fix something rather than performing specific actions. You have to start with desire. If someone doesn't want to get well, doesn't want to get out of a mess, wants to hang onto the old bad ways or stay in the trap, the best advice in the world will not help them, because they don't want what the advice will bring badly enough.
(Interesting, I may not have helped anybody else with the words written above, but I think I've just given myself the solution to a particularly thorny problem I am facing at the moment and have been completely baffled by. So this wasn't a total waste of words, maybe. ;) )
Ok, Siren, maybe consider this: consider you and your partner giving each other some time off: no contact at all, say, for two weeks. Then come back after this time and see how you feel about each other. It's hard to do this, but quite frankly, you're on a runaway train at the moment, and it's only a matter of time before there's going to be a bad wreck. Sometimes the presence of another person, particularly someone you see as the source of your stress, can make it hard to see the situation clearly. A break in the connecting will sometimes break the pattern enough to let you see/approach each other with new eyes. And you will miss him during that time, and he you, most likely, and that will increase your abilities to see the other outside the cloud caused by this bad emotional pattern. A fresh approach can sometimes work wonders.
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