Where it Gets Ugly

Roi has taken off the kid-gloves and donned a pair of boxing gloves with embedded spikes. 

We've had one couples session so far, and during that session therapist asked him how much responsibility he felt he owned for the problems we're having. He calculated and came up with somewhere between 70-80%. This was news to me since his party-line has always been we share the damage 50/50. I saw this as denial on his part, but nevertheless I was willing, perhaps too willing, to examine my behaviors, and I did so exhaustively giving myself thorough soul-whippings for all my wrongs. 

Trouble was, as long as I was willing to try to own my part, he was perfectly happy using this against me to make me feel guilty in ways I had no business feeling guilty. Like when he was lying about something and I felt like something was up, he would insist that I question what I was feeling suggesting that I was being paranoid, over-reactive, self-centered, or just plain crazy. And I would oblige, retreating from the truth in order to check in with myself to see where I might be behaving exactly as he was suggesting. My gut would usually win and I would dig for the truth. I'd be angry when I discovered that my original feelings were true, but I was mostly angry that he had manipulated me in order to protect his lies and that's the part that he's just never gotten. It was the insult added to injury, and more importantly, it was a huge sign that he wasn't anywhere close to active recovery.

To him, my anger was out of proportion to the original infraction, but he wasn't factoring that I was angry about how it would go down, how he would throw me under the wheels of the crazy-bus from start to finish, and the cumulative effect of all the crazy business on my psyche. 

He would say, "for all your anger, I might as well do the crime if I'm going to do the time" (and worse, this is what he would tell his friends too without filling them in on the full story). In his mind he has never cheated on me, never come close to the "serious" infractions of other guys he meets in the rooms who've slept with multiple women, or frequented prostitutes. And yet, that's not how his addiction leans with or without me, actually sleeping with lots of women, so holding this up as something noble is just insulting.

So tonight, he admitted to me that when he was angry at me yesterday that he started planning to go to New York. He is more than aware that New York is the site of my deepest pain in relation to him. A source of deep trauma that hasn't been healed. Earlier he had recommended some ways we could approach each other without it diving straight into war. Just tell him how something makes me feel. So I did. I told him that him going to New York is painful to me. Up went the walls, and out came the big guns, and it ended with him forcefully telling me that if this continues it's game over and I haven't even seen how bad things can get.

He also pulled out the 50/50 number again and said HE talked to a DIFFERENT therapist ("one who knows me well" he said) and THAT guy thinks he's not so bad and I've got equal problems. I promise you, this guy doesn't know Roi as well as he thinks, and he doesn't know the whole story. It doesn't matter, everything I've said, everything anyone else has said, his understanding about the trauma, it's all out the window now that he's been validated by this other guy.

Good thing I wasn't letting hope back in. Yet I worry what he's going to do before I get the money together to leave. There's not much more I can withstand.