I believe that you thought you were doing the best thing you could for me in November. J believed that he was doing the best thing for Lisa, by staying away. That doesn't make either of you correct, even if I know that your intentions were, indeed, honorable. Nor does it make it hurt any less for the person on the receiving end.
I did not, by any stretch of the imagination, walk away from our relationship the first time you required extra care and feeding. As to my relative ability to forgive, it is on some level unfair to you because the visceral hurt that I felt was closely tied to being hurt in the exact same way by J's depression- rubbing salt in an open wound, effectively.
This is how my mind works: I can overlook slights, up to a point. If I do not speak up before the point where I am desperately hurt, which I am still learning to do- and being told I'm wrong to do, by Mike, in this thread- then it does not matter if the behavior changes. This is what happened with you, and I am sorry that I did not know how to ask for things, and I am sorry that there are switches in my mind that cannot be reset once they are tripped. This is what happened with J as well, and I have given him the same apology.
The best I can do for myself and anyone I get involved with in the future is to keep practicing asking for what I need before the situation is desperate enough that I resort to taking it by unhealthy means. That's exactly what I tried to do on Friday, and it is reactions like this that kept me from knowing how to do it for 29 years.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-10-12 12:18 am (UTC)I did not, by any stretch of the imagination, walk away from our relationship the first time you required extra care and feeding. As to my relative ability to forgive, it is on some level unfair to you because the visceral hurt that I felt was closely tied to being hurt in the exact same way by J's depression- rubbing salt in an open wound, effectively.
This is how my mind works: I can overlook slights, up to a point. If I do not speak up before the point where I am desperately hurt, which I am still learning to do- and being told I'm wrong to do, by Mike, in this thread- then it does not matter if the behavior changes. This is what happened with you, and I am sorry that I did not know how to ask for things, and I am sorry that there are switches in my mind that cannot be reset once they are tripped. This is what happened with J as well, and I have given him the same apology.
The best I can do for myself and anyone I get involved with in the future is to keep practicing asking for what I need before the situation is desperate enough that I resort to taking it by unhealthy means. That's exactly what I tried to do on Friday, and it is reactions like this that kept me from knowing how to do it for 29 years.