Rick’s advice is the best imo - - “A significant chunk of my sense of well-being and emotional security was tied into the status of the relationship’s integrity, which was itself tied into the status of my spouse’s emotional temperament and her fluctuating perceptions of me and the relationship”
Basically you can’t allow yourself to feel good if your partner is upset, specifically with you. Or you can’t allow yourself to feel good if they are withholding affection. Do you think you fear what your life might be like if you two broke up? Would it get harder? More expensive? Or do the fears surround more emotional things, like a need for fulfillment from one’s partner. Both? This is a very sticky subject & I’ve had it both ways at the same time.
You could probably work through a lot of objections to feeling good the next time this situation arises. Just come up with sensible reasons for feeling good, and sensible reasons for feeling bad. Come up with why feeling good in the situation would be silly. Come up with why feeling bad would be silly. See how it all tallies up. But I found this ‘technique’ where if I make a ‘good’ argument for following where the instincts are taking me, it starts to sound silly and becomes less appealing. And then the sensible route becomes more appealing (to ‘me’ at the core of my being). And you just do this cognitively each time you feel bad until it’s no longer an issue.
Otherwise, I do believe that a couple can work through this if they both recognize this situation as a common pitfall and ineffective tactic that couples engage in. It’s par for the course as both parties are engaged in a psychic battle anyway. She is merely attempting to get what she wants from her partner, and withholding affection is a means to an end. As instinctual beings, we all seek power over one another. So she can withhold love and affection from you to gain a psychic advantage - - she gains psychic power over you where you feel like you have to seek her out for a resolution so that things can go back to normal. (This is garden-variety psychic power, where one’s emotions can be manipulated in order to control/influence them.)
This tactic is so common and it gets to fly under the radar because it’s ‘non-violent’ and everyone is engaged in it to the point that they don’t even realize what they’re doing. But it’s just more vibe violence aimed at self-centric ends. And it’s difficult to ‘call-out’ because it’s easy to ‘call-it-out’ in a way that is psychically aggressive.
If both parties can recognize that they do this to each other from time-to-time, and both agree that it’s not helpful, and both agree that trying something different in those moments is worth it, then it comes down to a matter of engaging new tactics while being instinctually driven in the other direction. It won’t ‘feel good’ in the traditional sense. Either way, it requires both parties at some point to see what’s happening and how their behavior contradicts their desired goals of the relationship, and try something different, in a sincere way, in an attempt to change and cease repeating the same patterns, so that the relationship can be better over-all for both parties and not just one person. Both parties have to be more focused on ‘policing’ themselves rather than each other, which again, is not what happens in typical relationships.
The more you can weather the storm of the psychic battle the more you can patiently interact without getting sucked back into the real-world. Leila recently quoted Richard:
Incidentally, the reason why the nursery-doggerel ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me’ was largely ineffectual in childhood is because truisms such as that do not take into account the affective vibes and psychic currents—transmitted instantaneously via the psychic web connecting all feeling-beings regardless of spatial extension—which are part-and-parcel of the very act of giving offence and/or being offensive and the vital element in the entire giving offence and/or taking offence phenomenon which bedevils life in the ‘real world’.
As I have oft-times said, it is the psychic web where the real power-play takes place. Howsoever, once the practice of not taking offence becomes habituated even the most virulent affective and/or psychic power-play—being thereby recognised for what it is—can thus be weathered with relative ease.
She may not be name-calling, but she is 100% engaged in a psychic power battle and using withdrawal as a tactic. You’re involved in the battle too. Par for the course, and it helps to remember that both you and her have been doing stuff like this for decades now. You could likely learn a lot about the psychic web and psychic power plays from this situation.
