IFS has changed me, but not my marriage.

Sorry this is so long. I’ll be surprised if anyone reads it, but I feel the need to throw this out into the universe.

I’ve been working on myself for a couple of years now, trying to improve my relationships by learning more about myself and my parts. I feel like I’ve made some amazing changes in myself, applied the theory of IFS to my interactions with others, and improved some of my relationships just from being more aware of my parts and patient with others’ parts too.

But my closest relationship is struggling to improve and it seems that no matter how much I change, our problems don’t. I believe that the reason is largely because I am the only one working on it. My husband and I tried marriage counseling for a little over a year, with my husband ultimately deciding that it didn’t work, nothing changed, and it was a waste of time. During that time, I started IFS for myself to help us with the marriage counseling, and continued IFS with my therapist after my husband quit marriage counseling. Although I’ve learned to change my responses to his parts in order to “keep the peace” and not trigger his angry and defensive parts, it has only helped a little. I find that when I approach him from a place of curiosity and compassion, sometimes he still has a bad response to it. And if I try to explain that I’m not upset or trying to start something, he doesn’t believe me. He thinks that I’m just gaslighting him, and then I start questioning myself and wondering if I’m gaslighting him without even realizing it, and then wondering if he’s actually gaslighting me. But when my brain has thought it through and sorted out the interaction, I usually come to the conclusion that I was truly coming from a neutral or good place. I’m trying so hard but it’s just not working. Not to mention that I feel like I’m the ONLY one in the relationship trying, and starting to feel resentful that I’m basically changing myself for this person who wants to put in minimal effort to help our marriage.

Do I just keep trying? This going on 3 years since we started therapy together and then I went solo. We’ve been married for 27 difficult years, so 3 years is a drop in the bucket. But I don’t want to live the rest of my life like this. Should I just continue letting self take care of my parts and let things fall into place as I grow out of this relationship, hoping that my husband will change along the way? How will I know when it’s time to move on without him? I don’t know if I trust that I’ll know, maybe I should have called it a long time ago. My friends and family seem to think so.