Be specific with your partner about what kinds of behavioral and lifestyle changes will be helpful to you, while also taking responsibility for your part. Saying that you want to feel better is meaningless. How would it look and sound and be if things were better?
Also, you need to practice pleasure. The more stress goes up, the more tense you get, the less pleasure you experience. Remember what feels good, and diversify rather than constrict your involvements. As life goes on, we tend to get more narrowly focused and we stop having recess. Recess is when playfulness happens, and a by-product of playfulness is intimacy, the glue of relationships.
Finally, don't normalize excessive type A reactions. Work cooperatively to lower your levels of stress and tension. Try to become a more effective controller of your physiology: master relaxation responses, learn to monitor and change the effect you have on others. The fuel for TYABP, and therefore for so much of the painful interaction in relationships that revolve around TYABP, is hurriedness. If you allow yourself to slow down, you'll see that often it doesn't matter if you let stuff slide. In short, don't turn everything into an interpersonal struggle. But remember, no one can create and maintain a perfectly nurturing life. For most of us, remaining stress-hardy is difficult work. We must constantly adjust our reactions to the people and places that constitute our territory and insure that we don't settle for the toxic and unhealthy.
