Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
-- Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant" [1]
Well, maybe I'm a bit tired because I'm not going to blog in great detail about today's events, let alone catch up on things that have happened since Friday.
I will say that I didn't get a chance to read my critical mass statement. This week was my wife's turn to lead off the discussion. She talked about how we had discussed things a bit on Friday night, but not much else. She said she didn't know what to do from here.
Our therapists suggested two things for us to try, both of which are described in Weiner-Davis' Divorce Busting. The first, found on p. 150 et seq., is time-limited conflict resolution dialogues. The other, found on p. 157 et seq., is to add a step in the sequence of events, in essence asking the spouse what is going on inside when a negative situation is perceived.
We also talked about how the lack of interaction between us worsens the distance. My wife said that I didn't seem to enjoy doing much, so she sought to get her needs met through her friendships. My therapist asked my wife if she felt lonely in the relationship, my wife agreed. I think I needed to hear that from her. From the perspective of loneliness, I better understood why she was asking for more time for us.
That was the bulk of our session. My wife started to talk about her lack of sexual desire towards the end of the session, but her therapist put a stop to that, asking that be raised in the joint session next week.
This evening, we agreed to have discussions at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday and Saturday.
[1] -- Hat tip to blogger Tom Allen, whose comment from a posting back at the beginning of this year inspired this posting.
