Dreaming vs. Living in a Relationship

I feel sometimes as though the past few years I have been dreaming a life rather than living it.

I feel as though I have been asleep, somehow cut off from that side of myself that is effective because I have been captured in an affective state that, while not unnatural to me, is supposed to be an infrequent altered-state and not a prolonged one.

I try not to feel defeated when I realize that my admiration of Stephanie's emotional intelligence and my attempts to emulate her have done so much damage between us. Admittedly, I am more emotionally expressive than I used to be, but now I am also much less comfortable being so around her.

I have just realized that in trying to be more like her, more emotive, expressive, emotionally available, and reactive, I became more critical. Me, Miss PollyAnna, the woman who never had anything to say that wasn't nice. She gave me instructions over the years as to how I could better communicate myself to her, but it has backfired. My attempts to communicate with her in the manner she has requested (which is the manner in which she normally communicates) has not only resulted in me being less rationally communicative (something that is outside my comfort-zone), it has also resulted in me being more critical. In my eagerness to improve communication with her, I emulated her to such an extent that I was mimicking back to her the critical nature of her requests and comments on my own communication.

Her requests that I attempt to understand her and enable her to understand me by learning to speak her 'language' has been uncomfortable at best, quite often unpleasant, and in retrospect, an unmitigated disaster. It has had a very detrimental effect on every level of our relationship. I am an adept communicator. I write well, I am well-spoken, I rarely struggle to find words to express what I mean--and I am rarely misunderstood.

Except by her. And so, per her request, when dealing with her I threw-over a communication style in which I was highly effective in order to try to communicate with her in her own affective style. When I found myself chafed by her style, I would ask her the same things she asked me "why can't you just say/see it like this?", which, apparently either incensed her, or made her feel inadequate.

Which in turn made me uncommunicative.

Which in turn created distance and more forceful attempts to communicate to bridge that distance.

Which in turn created more distance as we failed, again and again, to understand each other, or feel understood.

She hears me being critical and when she paraphrases what she is hearing, her word choice offends me because the emotional 'colour' is way off. Her mental/emotional filter seems to twist the meanings to my words, giving them an offensive slant. Where I think cause-and-effect, she hears made-and-blame. And when I try to tell her that what she is hearing is not what I mean, a drama unfolds. I am not listening to her, she says, and yet I was the active speaker. I always think the worst of her, she says, because I try to correct her impressions, and yet, her impressions make the worst of what I am trying to say. When I give up and decide to let her have her misconception rather than fight about it, I am cutting her out of the communication loop. If I keep trying, then we fight, and the situation deteriorates into self-recrimination and defensiveness.

I feel that she insists in hearing everything I say as negative, critical or bad has made me question the basis of my reality; forced me to recall words that were not said, unstate facts that were mere musings, and apologize for meaning things that were not meant.

She hears me as negative, critical, and bad, and so, in our relationship, that is what I have become.

I do not know how to repair the situation between us. I am at a loss. The damage is done. There is no fault, there is no blame, there is no argument for responsibility. There is only sadness. In order to repair my own self-regard, I try to feel compassion for both of us, for our suffering, for our failures, for our flaws. To learn from this experience, and hopefully find a way to break the cycle, I am attempting honest self-examination and recognition of cause and effect, but I am learning that I must keep these things to myself because she doesn't speak my language, she only picks out certain words and translates them into her own, and what is lost, modified, or mutated in the translation simply creates damage and anger and pain where none was intended.

And so today I find myself struggling to wake up from the dream, to reclaim my authentic voice and express myself effectively to her. There are days when I am certain that I will never be able to. Today is one of those days.