Hi Psychgirl, I see you are a newer member here at PC so welcome.

Oh, lets see, well the good news is that you can identify the fact that you are over reacting and struggling in the relationship area. Recognition of faults is the first step to correcting and improving. And I think that it is great that you WANT to improve yourself and that you are even aware of where this comes from, also big steps.

And you are right, it isn't fair that you take so much out on your boyfriend and it does interupt with having a better healthier relationship. And that can be hard to change over night too, because some of that is learned behavior from the way you were brought up.

So print out your post here because you Have identified your problem areas. And what you have to do is learn to attack each problem area at a time. And what that means is that when you are in a situation that causes you to react poorly your going to have to learn how to stop yourself before you react. This takes practice and often in the beginning you may react before you can stop it. So what you have to do is right after you act poorly, even in front of your boyfriend, you have to say out loud, wait, I am sorry that was wrong, and quiet yourself down and say, this is what I mean to say, when you do this it upsets me because .... and as your doing that slow down and think it out. You can also have a talk with him and tell him that you are aware that you often respond poorly and you need to slow down and stop and work on it and ask him to be patient.

I have things I have to work on too, because I can over react as well. Ofcourse I suffer from PTSD so when I get triggered I CAN over react. I don't mean to over react but for some reason there ARE things that my husband does that DO trigger me. And yes, some of the things he does are unfair to me. But in order to fix it I have to address it differntly. And I have it so that he works with me on that. And what I like about that is that it also teaches him to learn about what he does that is unfair to me.

What we are working on is slowing things down into more of a conscious, quiet discussion rather then me getting all upset. It DOES take practice and it doesn't always go right at first, I honestly have to work at it. But he is learning as well.

Now, I have years of combatting abusive behaviors towards me. So it isn't easy but I am working at it and it is improving.

So think about that because you CAN work on it as a team, but you have to be patient and know it is going to take you time to build up better habits verses just getting upset etc.

Open Eyes