Thanks for responding, pegasus! Even if no one responds, it's useful for me to type it out! It can help me figure things out.

I just feel kind of excited by this session. I feel like hey, if we do more work like this, I can figure out how not to mess up future relationships, or at least how to do my part and do all I can to make "a healthy relationship" happen. The other person has to play a part too, of course. There were also some of the things that T suggested that I felt I had tried in my marriage (maybe instinctively), and they had failed, and that also made me feel better. Like, hey, I tried that, I tried the right thing! It made me feel like less of a failure, somehow. But there were also things I had not done well, like withdrawing repeatedly from his anger, and this is something that maybe, just maybe, I can learn to overcome with T's help. (Seriously, though, if I come across another guy who acts like that, I am most likely not going to make any attempt at all to work on that. I am just going to run for the hills.)

Sometimes I wonder why they don't give a required course on communication and having relationships in school? They would teach you how to have a healthy relationship, how to talk to the other person, what not to do, what to do, etc. Because most of this stuff is not obvious to me at all, and certainly not obvious to my H either. Why doesn't anyone teach us this stuff in an organized way? It would be so valuable... We could all start relationships with the same expectations.