I have this thing where I get caught up in certain thinking patterns/remembering or obsessing over trauma or traumatic people/all the fun negative things and when I do that I bottle it up and withdraw so then my partner gets upset bc he thinks I don’t want to be around him and it’s a whole cycle that usually ends in a heated discussion to varying degrees.

I’d started this cycle again and have been withdrawn and depressed for a week and hes been saying he feels like I don’t want to be around him, it started to get too much, I took a moment and then followed him, asked to talk for a minute and was able to tell him that I’ve been feeling sad and thinking about sad things and that I don’t know how to talk to him about it and I don’t want to make him uncomfortable talking about trauma he doesn’t know how to react to, I managed to tell him that when I feel like this I bottle it up and withdraw and that I’m not withdrawing bc I don’t like him and that even if I’m sad and withdrawn I still love him.

It doesn’t sound like much but I was actually able to step back and calm myself so I didn’t have a meltdown and/or start a fight, and I was able to actually say how I feel which is usually really hard for me to express verbally