Hi. Thanks in advance for reading. I wanted to vent/ask advice about this particular issue that was raised in counselling with my partner.
About 4 years ago he was diagnosed with acute leukaemia. He was very fortunate in that, although severe, it was a treatable kind and he is now in complete remission, after spending about a month in hospital and then over the course of 8 months being treated as an outpatient.
In counselling he brought up the fact that he thinks our relationship started to decline then because I apparently said 'I can't do this anymore' to him when I first started visiting him in hospital. I have to admit that I don't remember saying this at all. But it's entirely possible, given how stressful the situation was. If it's the case, I am certainly not proud of it. There are many things I wish I had done better whilst I was a caregiver, and obviously I wish that I had not hurt him in this way.
I think all this has come up again because when we were fighting, I said I was worried about having to be a full-time carer for him as he got older (he is significantly older than me). Again, I realise now that this was a hurtful thing to say. I have a lot of trouble balancing being open and communicative with being diplomatic and not saying everything I'm thinking.
I'm struggling with the guilt of these things whilst the other part of my mind provides counterpoints - I do not believe that I ever would have left him whilst he was sick; I did look after him through his leukaemia; he has always made an issue about me from seeking therapy for my mental health, so that especially during such trying times I felt I didn't have people to talk to since I can find it hard to confide in my friends; as an older person, is it not reasonable that he should also be thinking about his life as he gets older and how that could affect me?
He calls me selfish and narcissistic and I am entirely willing to believe that I have these tendencies. I am trying very hard to fix them. I just don't know where the boundary is for me to have an appropriate level of concern about my life, versus actually being selfish and not thinking enough about his feelings. I have been selfish in the past with him and my family, and I feel like I don't relate to that person anymore. But when he says things like this, I can't help but question if I am indeed a bad, a narcissist or a sociopathic person.
