Couples therapy
My husband of 10+ years is diagnosed with ADHD and autism, he also has childhood cptsd (history of physical childhood abuse) and I suspect BPD. He sees a counselor (I'm not sure how much training she has in trauma / BPD).
He believes that I have impossibly high standards (like put the dishes away after he finished a meal, think about food shopping, check his emails for some calendar updates), blames me for not expressing the basic adult standards to him clearly enough, I don't praise him enough for taking a shower and waking up in the morning. And then he believes that I want him to fail - so he sees me as his father (who abused him). This pushed me to do pretty much everything in our shared life: cooking, cleaning, house repairs, insurances, car maintenance, gardening, planning holidays, childcare, organizing birthdays, driving our son to places and figuring out his activities, building adult friendships.
I find his splits really draining and I need acknowledgement of his actions hurting me and repair. Whenever I say that some actions hurt me - he goes into DARVO. And then there's the gaslighting element of "just tell me what you want from me - and I'll be happy to do it". So I explained what the repair dialogue looks like: (1) mirroring (mostly for his sake, to be able to understand my point of view), (2) acknowledgement of his actions hurting me, (3) asking something like "what can I do to help" or similar - i.e. invitation to solve the problem. But it never happens: he can do 1, but not the other steps. Then somehow he believes that he does exactly what I asked for. And again, I'm blamed for being someone who's never pleased.
We go to couples therapy, where the therapist practices imago dialogue, it follows a specific structure. First, one person shares, the other mirrors, summarises, acknowledges. It looks like this: I share what hurts me, he says how it makes sense that all of that hurts me (in a very unpersonal language "when the food is left on the hob overnight, you feel your efforts to cook are disrespected"). Then when the first person finished expressing something and the listener summarised / acknowledged, the other person is invited to share. At this point he can say something like "I'm sorry for how it is, I don't want to be that way, what can we do?" (This is something that I would normally say). But when he's invited to share, he goes DARVO. At that point I'm the receiver and I'm mirroring / acknowledging.
I have brought this up a couple of times, mentioning to the therapist that this does not work for me - it actually retraumatises me, because I am going through the same invalidating cycle in a setting that is supposed to be safe.
The following session she said that (1) both of us need to stop blaming one another, because it is really difficult not to be defensive when a partner tells you you're the reason they're in pain. By blame she means "wanting the other person to change so that I can be okay". (2) Your pain is your own to deal with.
Yes, I can deal with the pain of those conversations. And I can be okay on my own. But I cannot build a relationship with someone who doesn't see me, my pain, and doesn't make steps to change. I can be okay, but this relationship cannot be okay if there's no change.
I'm not sure, this might have been a phrase aimed mostly at him. But I left feeling the therapist was saying I'm wrong for wanting a repair and wanting things to change. Am I crazy?!