Therapist feedback and want your opinion on her feedback

[togo1004]

my last thread got deleted, but some of the folks here know that I’m currently in therapy for having a rocky relationship with my fiancé.

i recorded a conversation that I had with my fiancé which turned into an argument and had it sent to my therapist and this was her feedback.

to preface this, the fight started when he was taking a shower and I heard him talking to himself as he normally does. I couldn’t hear the words but it sounded pretty negative. So I walked in and said “what are you on about?” He replied “I’m just practicing my speech. I’ll be doing a small podcast and debating on topics from money to relationships and I was just being a devils advocate for myself so that I can cover if there are any holes in my argument”

then I said “you sound negative” then he replied “I’m not being negative, debates can become passionate but nobody is insulting each other. Then I replied “but you sound negative”. Then he said “it’s not negative why are you keep sayin it’s negative when it’s not negative”. I told him that the way he was talking in the shower made me feel pressured. He then said “why would you feel pressured when I’m not talking about you? I’m just practicing my talking skills”. Then I replied “you sound negative and it’s giving me pressure and..” that’s when he cut me off and said “why do you always have a problem with me? Every few days you have some sort of an issue with me when I’m just minding my own business, I cannot understand at all, is there a problem?” I started crying and started to say “I just wanted to talk about how you made me feel when you do these things and..”. Then he cut me off again by saying “I don’t get it, I’m literally just talking to myself, I’m whispering which means you had to try to listen so hard to listen. If it bothers you so much, why are you listening?” That’s when I broke down and left the house for a walk.

my therapist said we are both wrong here. She said that “I need to learn to let go of these things especially when he mentions that it has nothing to do with me”. And she said he’s also wrong for “not validating my feelings and refusing to understand how it makes me feel when he talks to himself with such a tone and cuts me off”

We didn’t go into further detail than this we will go over Thursday.

what are your thoughts on this MN?

Yes I’m Russian and he’s asian

Do you think this relationship is one suitable for the commitment of marriage? Do you want children?

You need more serious help than you’re currently getting. You are nowhere near in a healthy enough headspace for any relationship.

He's defensive because you are the aggressor here. Who the hell bursts into someone's shower and accuses them of being negative and then records the following conversation. The standout here is you not taking responsibility for any of this. He might be talking about you, he doesn't validate your feelings etc etc. If you were a man MN would destroy you. Your therapist is shit as well if they really told you he was partially to blame. Good therapists don't do that - they focus everything on you and how you react to situations. A functional relationship does not work anything like what you are describing - what a waste of your life to carry on flogging this dead horse. Get out and get another therapist.

If you’re the same poster who is in constant need of ‘validation’ of what seems like every millisecond of every day I would love to ask your bf why he stays with you? I just couldn’t imagine such a nightmare life.

But you don't hear him out, though.

How long have you both been together? This relationship is damaging for him. And you shouldn't be in one. Definitely, not this one.

OP, you need to explore why you have these difficulties and get that sorted first.

Change your therapist.
You need one who would not re-inforce your beliefs where you think 'your partner is wrong' when in actual fact he is not. You needed one who can validate and support you, in honesty.

I’d cut you off if I was talking to myself in the shower and you barged in berating me. Think you need to be single and work on yourself. Let the poor bloke go.

My thoughts is that you should split up with your partner. You are not compatible. You can’t communicate with each other well and you argue with each other. Relationships don’t have to be perfect but yours sounds like a disaster area. You would be very unfair to bring kids into such a bad relationship if you are thinking about having kids.

I do think you have unrealistic and unfair expectations of your partner with regard to him having to reassure you all the time. If I had been him and you had interrupted me when I was in the shower I would have been annoyed. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with someone so complicated.

The fact he has cleverly got you to limit the amount of time you talk about ‘feelings’ to just two evenings a week for an hour at a time is telling. It sounds like he has done this so you can’t talk about ‘feelings’ the rest of the time. It doesn’t sound a healthy or happy situation.

Relationships should be fun, happy, loving and easy. Yours sounds depressing, hard work and unhappy.

Haven't rtft but you definitely have issues. If he was talking to himself how the hell did you feel pressured? Pressured to do what?
He explained what he was doing you should have taken that at face value.
So intrusive listening outside a bathroom door.

This. You are bonkers. You don’t record people whilst they are having a shower in peace and you need to back off when they ask you to - eg I’m just practising a speech, ‘ok then that’s great do you want a coffee?’ is your reply not to tell him he is negative.

I don’t need to know all of this. Start tracking your menstrual cycle and see if there’s a pattern.

This sounds odd and utterly miserable. Why are you together?

You don’t contribute to anything financially in the home due to your accumulated debt - if all /most of your earnings are going towards debt payments when will you be debt free?

^ This.

Is your therapist BACP or UKCP registered? Sounds like you need a psychotherapist with plenty of training and experience - counselling is not well regulated so it’s possible to have a ‘therapist’ who has very little training.

I wonder if an IFS (internal family system) therapist might be helpful they specialise in helping people to surface issues from the past so that the feelings and beliefs can be processed and integrated, or an integrative therapist, someone who works with anxiety stored in the body. It seems that your need to be heard perhaps stems from your past, and this part of you that hasn’t felt heard is activated by your partner when he reasonably expects privacy. If you can work through your own issues about being heard then perhaps you will stop making him responsible for your feelings?

Of course maybe he is not emotional enough for you - I know I’ve wanted my DP to be more emotionally literate at times, these days I brief him if I really need his support, or let him know that I just need to vent rather than be given a solution etc, but realistically you can’t change your DP much, not should you expect to - either find someone who is better able to give you what you want, or somehow learn to take responsibility for your own feelings.

I feel for you, OP, you sound anxious and it can’t be pleasant. But your DP appears to be fairly willing to make an effort and he seems to be going over and above what most other men I have ever come across would do. However, he is not going to be able to fix you, or be able to react exactly how you ‘need’ him to in any situation, and it is not his responsibility to do so.

Do have a think about your therapist (check qualifications) and do speak with your doctor about anxiety. If you want to stay with your DP then do it soon - he may reach the end of his ability to cope with the relationship and you’d be left in your own.

You sound exceptionally hard work and totally unreasonable. If it was the other way around I suspect we would be saying LTB. I cannot imagine why he is still with you. Poor bloke.

Stopped reading when I read he was in the shower. My immediate thought was give the bloke some peace

OP, this relationship sounds exhausting for both of you.

From example you give I think you were being argumentative, invading his personal space, accepting the answers he was giving you and putting you at the centre of something that had nothing to do with you.

From the wider context- you seem to have a larger than typical need to talk about your feelings. It sounds very positive that you have sought a therapist who will give you space to do this. When you say you’ve set aside 2 days to talk about feelings- is that with your therapist or OH? If it’s your OH then I honestly don’t know how anybody could cope with that. It’s very intense.

Can you return to your home country? Being isolated there with no one to talk to but your fiancé won’t be helping this anxiety (I think it’s more than that tbh) and the relationship is going nowhere good. You need to go home and be single and get proper medical help before you have a full blown breakdown, or drive your fiancé over the edge. The fact that everyone is telling you how bad this all is and you start going on about ice cream and whole foods proves this is way beyond normal issues. You’re incapable of seeing beyond your own problems and need real life professional help.

If that's your standard of behaviour I'm surprised he's still with you.

He's in the shower doing his own thing and you're being critical of something that has nothing to do with you and to which your opinion wasn't asked. Really not good.

You went out of your way to pick an argument with him - after putting your ear to the door so you could hear what he was saying privately - and even after he told you it was not about you, you still managed to make it all about you. It was perfectly reasonable for him to be defensive when he was having to defend himself from your totally unreasonable accusations and demands.

You seem to think the world should revolve around you and your feelings. Has it ever occurred to you that other people's feelings are just as important as yours?

Poor man. Sorry but living with you sounds like a nightmare.

He doesn't wash your feet in the shower or something to do with feet does he? This is ringing a distant bell.

I personally think this is a wind up. Like, all of it. I don’t think any of this is real. I do think OP is unwell and unhinged, but I doubt there’s even a fiancé. I just don’t buy these arguments that they’re having, that she’s actually saying out loud that she’s losing her shit with him over dropping a sock, knocking her hand when trying to fix the rice cooker, listening to him in the shower, etc. These examples make her sound batshit and she knows it, and she’s enjoying the attention it brings.

I’ve just read your updates. Yeah, these are your thoughts and your issues. Stop blaming him. Stop looking for him to fix you. Stop picking fights. “I got loud” means you shouted at him. You have all kinds of anxiety by the sounds of it. He can’t fix that with reassurance. This needs to come from within. I would recommend you spend some time apart as you’re depending on him to make you better. Only you can make you better.

“Asian” is a pretty broad spectrum. But if there is a clash between you bring over-emotional and him being under (based purely on stereotypes and guesswork here) then you have to decide if that’s something that can be got past.

But being over-emotional doesn’t excuse your behaviour.

But does your therapist know that this wasn’t a one-off and that he probably has to deal with this every damned day? Because you’re asking a lot of him.

You are exhausting, I can only imagine how your poor fiancé feels.

He has done absolutely nothing wrong, and you truly sound crazy. You need serious help but leave him out of it- he’s being kind to humour you and so is your therapist but to be absolutely clear only one person is in the wrong here and it is NOT him.