For some reason, I decide that an appropriate reaction to her expressing herself and looking for support is to try to solve her problems, talk about my experiences, or defend myself if she is feeling upset with me for some reason. Ultimately, I am not doing a good job respecting her side of things and supporting her through her struggles as she did for me. My previous behaviour would go something like this: once I am done defending myself or trying to solve problems and realize that it is only making her more upset, I start to hate myself. I call myself names, I have hit myself, I get so upset to the point where now the focus is on getting me to calm down and feel better. I usurp the interaction. I never consistently adjusted this behaviour, and now I am doing something far worse. I have become physically abusive. This started over a year ago and was infrequent. Now it is happening with most interactions that are difficult/conflicting. I am ashamed to admit this. Even one instance is unacceptable, and here I am repeating the behaviour.
What is wrong with me?! I am in therapy, but I only just admitted this behaviour to them last week. I certainly don’t do enough journalling or CBT practice. Does that mean I don’t care about changing this behaviour? I hate myself so much right now – how can I say I love someone and then turn around and hit them? I don’t want to hurt her anymore. I don’t want to hate myself anymore.
I desperately want to repair and move forward with her. I know it will take time. I know she is really hurt and angry with me – she makes that plainly clear and she has every reason to feel that way. In spite of that, she says she still loves me and cares deeply for me and wants to make this work. Only just the other day did we finally have one productive conversation after what has felt like an eternity where she felt supported and heard and that the focus was on her feelings. It felt great to do that, but it still took some arguing until we got to that point.
Am I a bad person? How can I move forward with her? What do I do about my abusive nature?
Thank you for reading if you made it this far
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon/smile.gif)
-C