Again I never said to stone wall. Nor necessarily never EVER open up about the extremely deep stuff. There is a difference about telling her about how much you hate your dad, and telling them about some sort of horrible child hood trauma like you were raped or something.
There is a difference between telling her a certain behavior she does makes you deeply uncomfortable, and telling her you have some sort of deeply seated body disphoria that you barely cope with.
Agree trauma-dumping or using a lover as a therapist is bad. You can't fix her; she can't fix you; and neither of you should expect otherwise. Agreed with your comments, too, about being self-aware enough to recognize you're not in a good place for a relationship. And that if you nevertheless want one, make getting your shit together a priority (first). If you're not in a place that you can even start working toward a better state of mind, or are in the baby steps of addressing big things, do yourself (and everyone else) a favor and opt out until you're in a better, solid, authentically strong space. If you're down that bad, it oozes out your pores and you'll either face a lot of rejection or hook up with people who are toxic disasters in their own right. And you'll wind up even worse off, barring a lucky epiphany.
Be realistic and humble about your fitness/aptitude at a given moment in time to be good in a relationship and able to discern who's a good egg vs whom to avoid.
Doing this in a point in a relationship were you're still at the point of petty retard arguments were you fling shit at each other, then she inevitable brings up the actual deep stuff.
I can honestly say I have never done this. I don't believe in low blows or exploiting someone's deepest secrets or failures or fears, not even to a person who's done you dirty seven ways to Sunday.
But here's the personal evolution on that I've had (not even masking for the PL here; it's not particularly unique or revealing of facts, just mistakes and lessons learned): I have always and still do hold off on that kind of thing because I believe it is the right thing to do/right way to treat people, and because it's just, as my grandmas would say,
ugly. However, when younger and not so self-aware as I thought I was, I also held back because I over-invested: I didn't want to completely torch something, even when it should have been lit on fire and thrown into a dumpster. I hedged and compromised and pulled punches in part because I was invested in love as well as (tbh; I was not aware at the time) prideful about making the impossible and wrong succeed. I can also be absolutely devastating in verbal argument but had a retarded and unwarranted protective nature. Big mistake (in the rationale), for obvious reasons.
Having reckoned with and rid myself of self-immolative and
mistaken idiotic savior tendencies, I would still not do it now, both (again) because I still think it's wrong, and because now I'd just end things definitively before it sunk to that bare-knuckle brawl level of petty or disfunction. I see much more clearly now when something is rotten or rotting and have the self-respect to close the door on a bad thing. And if someone did that to me, I would be *poof* before they finished their sentence. And I'd be thrilled I did so, without a look back. No entanglement merits debasing yourself, whether by stooping low or taking that kind of trash disrespect.
the eternal emotion predator and vampiric entity that's the womyn
Why must you do this?
The idea is that it's a game
You don't hef to be mad if you lose sometimes
Keep playing playa
It's not really a "game," in either the game theory or the player/pua-ish sense, and anyone seriously thinking it is is just going be acting like a dick (male or female) and wasting everyone's time as well as causing harm to self and others.
However, lightening up and rolling with the punches is an
excellent piece of advice. Win some, lose some. If you have a healthy sense of self, it doesn't cut you to the core when it's an L.