I don't know what to do

[BAS_061125]

Me and my finance have been together for 5 years. We share two beautiful children of our own and I have a child from a previous relationship. I'm lacking an emotional connection with my fiance. He's grown up in a really difficult situation, this makes him block out his emotions because that's what he learned to do to cope. I'm a highly emotional, empathetic person. I like to talk about how I feel and this seems to be overwhelming to him which ends in a fight and him walking away/blocking me out. The thing that kills me the most is that he could easily walk away from this relationship if he wanted to and I'd be an absolute wreck. There's so many times I feel lonely, like I can't express myself because I don't want it to end in a fight. I love this man so much and when we are good we are really good. But I need more from him, I need him to be more than surface level with me. 

I also resent him for allowing me to be alone in my feelings, allowing me to sit there crying while he just walks off to bed because he's had enough of the conversation. I get people deal with things differently but he won't even address the situation at a later date he just brushes it off. It makes me feel unimportant and that my feelings aren't valid. 
it's ruining me, I've booked in to see my gp tomorrow to hopefully get a mental health plan but I feel like he needs to fix himself before this relationship can ever be fixed. 

[therising]

Hi BAS_061125

To be a feeler in a relationship with a non feeler or someone who doesn't like to feel too much can definitely be one heck of a challenge, in so many ways. My heart goes out to you as you try to make sense of and manage the way forward.

Personally, I'm a gal who loves 'feelers' or 'sensitives', those who are sensitive to what they feel. They're my people. Took me decades to actually work out I'm not 'broken', I just tend to feel a lot. Feeling a lot comes down to our ability, not our fault. So, 'How to master such an ability?' becomes the question. 'How to live with an ability someone else doesn't share?' can be another good question.

Having been married for 22 years to a guy who doesn't like to feel anything too challenging, took me a long time to wake up to the need to allocate appointments strategically. What I mean by this is if I appoint my husband the role of 'He who likes to think outside the square in order to manage certain challenges', he'll dis-appoint himself from that role over and over again and I will feel that disappointment or those disappointments. If I appoint him the role of 'He who helps me manage making better sense of my emotions, while also feeling my emotions with me (as a bit of an empath)' I will feel him disappointing himself from that role. To offer an example of that second one, I can laugh about it now in hindsight but before I reached my revelation (he feels in highly questionable ways) I used to find the following deeply depressing and upsetting. He'd ask me how I am and if I was feeling down I'd say 'I'm feeling down' or 'I can feel myself starting to become depressed'. His response would typically be 'I hate hearing that, it really upsets me because I love you so much. It really does upset me' and then he'd walk off, all upset. He'd watch some tv and feel better. Technically, this is called 'Leaving someone alone to feel depressed'. I came to figure I needed to find different people in my life who would fill the roles my husband would not fill. I found my outside the square thinkers, my problem solvers, my seers (who can see for me, when I can't see the way forward), my empaths, my wonderers who love to wonder and so on. The challenge involves assessing just how many roles our partner is willing to fill. If there are plenty of other ones, we could say 'Not a problem, I can accept there are some roles my partner's not prepared to fill (for one reason or another) or not able to fill'. But if our partner can't or won't fill most of the roles we need them to accept, it can become a problem.