Responsibility vs Boundaries vs Criticism/Defensiveness

A previous question and answer here have made me fundamentally reflect on (perhaps even question) my relationship (or more specifically, marriage) and I would appreciate some help disentangling different concepts.

I have noticed that for a while now, I’ve started not sharing as much of my thoughts/life with my partner as I used to at the beginning of our relationship because he typically doesn’t respond the way I need/would like him to. For example, he often doesn’t share my excitement and his reaction then ‘destroys’ my own excitement. Or he will question my thoughts in a way that I don’t know how to answer, leaving me insecure/incompetent.
I often tend to perceive his behaviour towards me as criticism (this ranges from his responses to what I share with him to how I hold a kitchen knife to what type of yoga I do before bed), and I in turn get defensive.
He will say that he wants to ‘improve my life’ and that his ‘tips’ come from a good place, but to me it feels like I’m his improvement project and he doesn’t really love me as the person that I am. At the same time, I do want to grow as a person, so I don’t want him to stop challenge my thinking and giving me tips for how to do things better – which means I feel like I can’t just tell him to stop it altogether.
At the same time, he will say that he loves me so much and that he’s so proud of me and that I’m his favourite person – yet in so many situations of our everyday life I don’t feel like that’s actually the case, and I feel like I have to constantly prove that I am worthy of his love.
He also makes me feel like the way I’m communicating is inefficient and that I’m not honouring his needs when communicating (e.g., he gets impatient/loses focus quite easily, and I like to think out loud or tell a story and sometimes take a while to get to the point – others seem to like my way of communicating, he doesn’t), and he regularly jokingly makes comments along the lines of how abusive my looks at or words to him are, which is really hurtful for me because it feels like he is turning everything around and makes me the ‘evil’ person.
Obviously, there are also a lot of great things about him and our relationship, but at the moment, the negative things are really sticking out to me.

What I am struggling with is determining whether this is more my own issue or whether it is about him, and my thoughts are going in all directions: Part of me is thinking he is a narcissist (although not sure what consequences it would have for me if he was), part of me thinks this has tendencies of an abusive relationship, part of me is thinking that this is about me not being able to handle criticism and having to learn to not get defensive, part of me is thinking that this is about responsibility and learning how to be 100% responsible for myself and not over- or under responsible, part of me thinks this is about me having to improve my communication, and part of me thinks this is about me having to learn how to set boundaries.

It seems like depending on what this really is about, that has different implications on how much I question the whole relationship and because I don’t know which of these different issues/concepts it is that I’m dealing with here, I’m feeling a bit stuck – can you help me point me in a direction to start getting unstuck?

 

 

Answer:

All humans are self centered. We have to be. We are looking at life through our own brains and the beliefs we’ve picked up along the way. Your partner’s behaviour tells you about him, not you. The things he says, the tips, the words that come out of his mouth are just information. Right now you are interpreting a lot of this information as criticism. Whenever you notice uncomfortable emotions, the first place to start is to clean up your own thinking. You can make your experience in this relationship much better without your partner even knowing.

Notice how you’ve given your partner all the power in how you feel. You are the victim in your story. This thought is colouring how you look at everything: I feel like I have to constantly prove that I am worthy of his love.

This thought will keep you on the defense, always looking for problems. Pick a specific situation that has happened recently. Do a thought download and some models on it. See what’s coming up for you but keep it focused. Notice what your results are. Getting very clear on the facts and your thoughts is a powerful step to take. You don’t need to figure this all out at once. Breathe. Awareness is the first step.