I am not able to validate him yet

[unicorn2014]

 

If you are going to respond to my thread can you please make only constructive comments? Calling my situation a train wreck is not helpful to me. If that is how you see my situation, please do not respond.

I pulled a quote from this again from my closed thread on poor executive control that I wanted to discuss further.

this again wrote on December 30th at 6:34pm

A few times yesterday and today I've pointed something out to you and asked if you understand why he could be feeling frustrated. I don't recall you responding to any of those. I know you don't feel like understanding his feelings right now, and I get it. We've all been there. But the kind, low-conflict thing to do when you're unable to understand and validate his feelings is to take a break, get some space, take some time for yourself. You can't be in an active, talking-every-day relationship with someone who you don't want to validate or empathize with.

Today my partner got a call back from his divorce attorney and has an appointment on Thursday.

I have not facetimed with my partner in 6 days. Yesterday when my partner asked me to delete some messages he had wrote that he didn't want me to read, I stopped sharing my location with him when I deleted those messages.

On Wednesday when I told my partner I needed to take some space he asked me if he could check in with me in the morning and the evening and I said that would be fine.

These were messages I woke up to.

​

2:46am

Hi Baby

Good morning

Hope were able to sleep and you feel a little better

I will update the calendar after 7am PST

I love you

8:18am

Hi dear

I called you twice this morning

And left messages both times

I love you

I responded with these messages

Ty I will check

Ty for the messages I heard them

I love you too

Then he responded with these messages, including mine, which I will italicize for clarity.

Good morning dear

I will wait to here from you

Will not be contacting you

###

Ty for the messages I heard them

I love you too



Wow

At that point I called him because I wanted to read his message out loud to him where he said wow and let him know how he effected me. I wasn't going no contact with him, I was going lo contact with him until he showed me he had filed for divorce which he assured me would happen by the end of the month.

After we got off the phone I sent him this text.

I apologize for any invalidating comments I have made. They are one of the reasons I am taking a time out. I also had an idea as to why Meyers Briggs is so important to you which I would be happy to share with you next time we talk if you are interested.

This was his reply. The italic part is a piece of my message that he cut and pasted, thereby distorting its meaning.

​

I know why it is important to me

If you would like to hear why I would be glad to explain. Myself

I will not be communicating to you further until you are ready to normalize our relationship.

###

Meyers Briggs is so important to you which I would be happy to share with you next time we talk if you are interested.

Perhaps in the future you could learn to ask me why something is important to me.

I will not be communicating to you further until you are ready to normalize our relationship.

###

-

I sent you a small amount of money this morning

Let me know when you will be turing find friends back on

I love you and look fwd to a normalized relationship with you

I love you

I love you

My reply to him:

I love you too. All I am doing is temporarily pausing our close relationship while you take concrete steps to get divorced. Calling the lawyer was the first step. Making an appointment was the second step. Going to the appointment on Thursday will be the third step.

He has not replied to me.

[unicorn2014]

(Note to the moderators, my update timed out and I was not able to post it, please delete my original and keep this one)


If you are going to respond to my thread can you please make only constructive comments? Calling my situation a train wreck is not helpful to me. If that is how you see my situation, please do not respond.

I pulled a quote from this again from my closed thread on poor executive control that I wanted to discuss further.

this again wrote on December 30th at 6:34pm

A few times yesterday and today I've pointed something out to you and asked if you understand why he could be feeling frustrated. I don't recall you responding to any of those. I know you don't feel like understanding his feelings right now, and I get it. We've all been there. But the kind, low-conflict thing to do when you're unable to understand and validate his feelings is to take a break, get some space, take some time for yourself. You can't be in an active, talking-every-day relationship with someone who you don't want to validate or empathize with.

Today my partner got a call back from his divorce attorney and has an appointment on Thursday.

I have not facetimed with my partner in 6 days. Yesterday when my partner asked me to delete some messages he had wrote that he didn't want me to read, I stopped sharing my location with him when I deleted those messages.

On Wednesday when I told my partner I needed to take some space he asked me if he could check in with me in the morning and the evening and I said that would be fine.

These were messages I woke up to.

unicorn's partner wrote

​

2:46am

Hi Baby

Good morning

Hope were able to sleep and you feel a little better

I will update the calendar after 7am PST

I love you

8:18am

Hi dear

I called you twice this morning

And left messages both times

I love you

I responded with these messages

unicorn wrote:

Ty I will check

Ty for the messages I heard them

I love you too

Then he responded with these messages, including mine, which I will italicize for clarity.

unicorn's partner wrote:

Good morning dear

I will wait to here from you

Will not be contacting you

###

Ty for the messages I heard them

I love you too



Wow

At that point I called him because I wanted to read his message out loud to him where he said wow and let him know how he effected me. I wasn't going no contact with him, I was going lo contact with him until he showed me he had filed for divorce which he assured me would happen by the end of the month.

After we got off the phone he sent me a bunch of texts:

unicorn's partner wrote:

• It is a game you ate playing
  
  



• I will give you one more chance



• I am calling you now



• Ok you have your chance
  
  You screws it up



• I am sry you are sick but I am not in the mood for your games today
  
  



• I have given you another chance because you are sick
  
  And again you screwed it up
  
  No I will not be contacting you further today
  
  



• ###



• If you apologize to me we can resume if not interested



• >I am



• ###



• Ok I have zero need to be treated like this



• Now you are avoiding my calls



• I an not going to indulge you with this kind of behavior further



• ###



• No thank you on your idea about contact it will fail



• When you are ready to normalize our relationship I will take your call
  
  Until then I see no point. I will not be reaching out as I am out of rope



• I will not be communicating to you further until you are ready to normalize our relationship.



• Until then
  
  I love you

I did not read all those messages but I did apologize to him for telling him on the phone that I did not care what he had to say. I had wanted to read his text message out loud to him, the one where he said

unicorn's partner wrote with unicorn's message quoted:

Ty for the messages I heard them

I love you too

Wow

and when he tried to cut me off I told him I didn't care what he had to say, according to him. I thought about this, which is why I wrote this thread after looking up this again's post. I also sent this to text him because I realize what this again said is right, I can't validate my partner right now because of the elephant in the room, as the people on the board referred to it.

unicorn wrote:

I apologize for any invalidating comments I have made. They are one of the reasons I am taking a time out. I also had an idea as to why Meyers Briggs is so important to you which I would be happy to share with you next time we talk if you are interested.

This was his reply. The italic part is a piece of my message that he cut and pasted, thereby distorting its meaning.

unicorn's partner wrote:

​

I know why it is important to me

If you would like to hear why I would be glad to explain. Myself

I will not be communicating to you further until you are ready to normalize our relationship.

###

Meyers Briggs is so important to you which I would be happy to share with you next time we talk if you are interested.

Perhaps in the future you could learn to ask me why something is important to me.

I will not be communicating to you further until you are ready to normalize our relationship.

###

-

I sent you a small amount of money this morning

Let me know when you will be turing find friends back on

I love you and look fwd to a normalized relationship with you

I love you

I love you

My reply to him:

unicorn wrote:

I love you too. All I am doing is temporarily pausing our close relationship while you take concrete steps to get divorced. Calling the lawyer was the first step. Making an appointment was the second step. Going to the appointment on Thursday will be the third step.

He has not replied to me.

He thinks what I am doing is experimenting with the relationship, and that my having low contact with him until he shows me he filed will not work. I don't think there is anything else I can say to him. I would have liked to do a morning and evening check in but apparently he's not interested in that and wants to do things his way or no way so it looks like I have to let it go.

My initial time out was no facetime over new year's and the weekend, but that has proved to be not enough space for me.

[adventurer]

It's just my impression, reading this and trying to take in and understand what happened, is that whatever sort of rules and boundaries you are trying to set up are extremely unclear.  Maybe this is just because you are abridging the story here to try and keep the post shorter.

You told your partner you needed to take some space but he was allowed to check in with you in the morning and evening.  Was this 'check in' clearly defined to him?  Was it to be text message only?  How many text messages?  Was he to expect a response or not?  For what time period were you requesting this space from him?  This feels kind of fuzzy to me and seems like maybe it leads to you not actually getting the space you need.

If your boundary was text message only, the fact that you called him on the phone because he upset you with the "wow" message is something I think here is called intermittent reinforcement and can create a lot of problems with having your boundaries respected.  However, since you say you were going low-contact and not no-contact, perhaps you calling him on the phone was fine.  Again, though, this doesn't seem to be helping you take the space you requested.

I can see how frustrating all these exchanges are for you.  The final lack of reply from him could reflect that he is upset or trying some sort of silent treatment, or it could just be him respecting your original request for space.

I think these things have to be really well spelled out, what 'low contact' or 'no contact' will mean, for how long, what the expectations are.  For once, long distance relationship may help because this can be communicated in writing where it can be concrete and referred to in the event that boundaries are disregarded or unclear.

[unicorn2014]

It's just my impression, reading this and trying to take in and understand what happened, is that whatever sort of rules and boundaries you are trying to set up are extremely unclear.  Maybe this is just because you are abridging the story here to try and keep the post shorter.

Thank you for your respectful reply adventurer. This is painful and embarrassing for me and while my more experienced members may be old hat at this sort of thing (time out or therapeutic separation) this is all new to me. While I may have a lot of support in the real world around other issues, I have no support around having a personality disordered partner.

I was in the middle of modifying my post when it timed out so I had to repost the modification in a separate thread.

I have never taken a time out from my partner in the 3.9 year course of our relationship so I'm figuring this out as I go. He had suggested morning and evening check ins while I was taking space over new year's and the weekend and I think this is a good thing to carry forward as I'm waiting for him to show me he filed.

You told your partner you needed to take some space but he was allowed to check in with you in the morning and evening.  Was this 'check in' clearly defined to him?  Was it to be text message only?  How many text messages?  Was he to expect a response or not?  For what time period were you requesting this space from him?  This feels kind of fuzzy to me and seems like maybe it leads to you not actually getting the space you need.

I was allowing him to call me in the morning and evening. That wasn't the problem. The problem was when he mocked me "wow" and when I tried to read it to him, he hung up on me.

If your boundary was text message only, the fact that you called him on the phone because he upset you with the "wow" message is something I think here is called intermittent reinforcement and can create a lot of problems with having your boundaries respected.  However, since you say you were going low-contact and not no-contact, perhaps you calling him on the phone was fine.  Again, though, this doesn't seem to be helping you take the space you requested.

I was going low contact, not no contact, I was fine with morning and evening checkins by phone.

I can see how frustrating all these exchanges are for you.  The final lack of reply from him could reflect that he is upset or trying some sort of silent treatment, or it could just be him respecting your original request for space.

He's trying some sort of ST, as you will see in my expanded version of this thread titled I am not able to validate him yet, revised copy.

I think these things have to be really well spelled out, what 'low contact' or 'no contact' will mean, for how long, what the expectations are.  For once, long distance relationship may help because this can be communicated in writing where it can be concrete and referred to in the event that boundaries are disregarded or unclear.

For me low contact meant morning and evening checkins by phone. He apparently he is giving me the silent treatment now, so I don't know what to do. I've not had the blessing of this board for previous silent treatments so I'm out in left field now.

[Daniell85]

He is pestering and jerking you around. He says things until he gets a rise out of you and you respond to him. The interaction he then uses to discharge his unhappiness onto you.

What may be helpful here is to be very clear to your own self what low contact means for you. I'm kind of doubtful that informing him of that is going to be of benefit.

What I personally have found most successful is simply to go about my day and have boundaries for my own self about what my interaction will be.

My boyfriend does not pester me. He does a big push pull thing. So I am limiting how much I move in his direction, so he comes back towards me.

This I hate you, don't leave me intensity going on with your partner... extinction burst, he is fighting you on your stated boundaries.

Is it possible for you ( and you know your own self best) to simply ignore his antics, not respond to the baiting, not inform by your words he is crossing lines... .and instead by your own lack of response to the silliness inform him that you are not tolerant to all of this continued nonsense?

[unicorn2014]

Daniell85, I will try and thank you for sharing your own experience and reminding me of the lessons I need to review.

I texted him and told him what I was experiencing from him was the silent treatment and that was fine if that's what he wanted to do however I might need to make other choices.

I told him a morning and evening check in would be fine, and then he told me I needed to normalize the relationship while he was getting a divorce. He also asked me about texting during taking a time out. I didn't have any kind of hard and fast rule. All I'm doing is taking a step back from the day to day interaction while I wait for him to file for divorce. I'm not going anywhere or doing anything different, I'm simply tired of the arguing.

I will review the lessons on boundaries, and extinction bursts.


What i told him today is that four days of taking a time out is not going to heal the damage that has been occurring since Memorial Day 2014 when he told me he was going to withdraw his divorce and file for bankruptcy. I didn't have BPD family back then or I would have known that that is when I needed to take a time out.