Digging deeper on my side of the street

Husband and I were beginning to make love one night last week, and I was wrestling with being trapped in my head.

Earlier in the evening as I was washing dishes somehow my mind went to thinking about how husband could have been spending his time with prostitutes while I was going about my daily life doing mundane things like washing dishes and not realizing what unimaginable physical intimacies he was sharing with other women. After that, all evening long my thoughts strayed down this path of invasive pictures forming in head.

I was going back and forth about whether or not to say anything to Husband, but I decided that this was my opportunity to get practice at getting myself back to the present while I was on a downward spiral. So I continued wrestling while trying to engage in making love with Husband at the same time.

The struggle in my head intensified as I was giving Husband a massage, because this was how the whole prostitution thing took off (massage parlors) and was a part of most of his sessions with prostitutes. Things were getting worse and worse, with every touch leading down some dark path of images. My heart was racing, and I realized that I was feeling a lot of anxiety and fear. As we continued kissing and caressing part of me was thinking very hard about what it was that I was afraid of.

I reached down and found that he'd lost his erection. He's middle aged, so that's not completely unusual, although I always have that little voice in the back of my mind that makes me consider the possibility that he is bored with me. Suddenly, he pulled away.

"I'm sorry. I don't know why, but I'm really in my head right now," he said.

A rush of relief flowed through me as I laughed and told him all about how I was so in my head, too. I confessed that I'd been struggling with a PTSD spiral of invasive images all evening, and that I'd been trying to figure out how to pull myself into the present without bringing him into it. We talked about it, and he said, "When in doubt, it's probably always best to talk about things. You're not responsible for my feelings or my reaction."

He has grown tremendously, so much that he's really able to support me when I'm feeling vulnerable and anxious. It was an amazing experience to be "seen" by him when I thought I was doing such a great job of concealing my struggle to get fully into the moment.

So I took all this to therapy last weekend (I would have forgotten, but Husband firmly encouraged me to write it down, so I wrote "Fear of - I don't know what. Fear of things that have happened in the past. Not afraid that it will happen again. But just have fear.")

Well...SURPRISE (to me, at least)! I thought I was trying to do the evolved thing and get myself back into the present. But what I didn't see was that I was using my old ways of handling things myself, trying to control Husband's experience (I didn't want him to feel bad about things that seem like they should be resolved for me by now,) and withholding myself to avoid being out of control (talking about what's going on while not knowing how Husband might respond.) In hindsight I could see that I was already feeling so out of control and in the grips of fear and anxiety in my spiral of thoughts and images, that the way I was trying to regain some sense of stability was to clamp down and get back "in control" by taking care of my feelings all by myself.

So I've told Husband that I'm going to try to talk about my feelings, and face my fear of things being messy and out of my control. I want intimacy, not a secret island of safety where I know I won't be hurt because I'm completely in control and alone.

I don't exactly know how to do this, because "handling it myself" is like water to a fish for me. It's really hard for me to distinguish when I'm doing this because it's deeply integrated into who I am in the world. But I know that the other side of discomfort and pain can be freedom if I stay with those things long enough to get present to the fact that all things change, and to my willingness to have faith that I have everything I need, and that my higher power answers before I ask.

Transition out of therapy

Since the beginning of June, and at the suggestion of his therapist, Husband has concluded both his individual and group therapy. Husband consulted me about this decision, and said that his therapist had offered to see us together if I was uncomfortable with this transition. But I decided that if both of them felt he was ready, and as long as Husband was planning to continue attending regular SAA and OA meetings, from my perspective I could see so much growth and progress that it seemed like a natural time to take this step.

Then, last weekend, Husband and I realized we also both felt ready to end our regular couples therapy. Our therapist agreed that if we felt ready, in her opinion we were ready.

We left both therapists with an open-door policy, meaning we can return at any time for a "tune-up" or to resume regular sessions.

And this week, according to the plan Husband and I had discussed, I resumed my individual therapy with the therapist who was seeing us as a couple. I have uncovered a lot of family of origin issues that I was unaware of (nothing dramatic, but certainly important to my experience of life) and I realized I need to be challenged in this area before I slip into complacency, which is so easy to do when life feels good.

My goals for therapy are to continue to explore where I'm not setting boundaries, and to further develop my own self-definition and relationship with myself. Having never been in individual therapy outside of the crisis of discovering Husband's sex addiction, I have a conversation in my head telling me that it's indulgent. Surely there are millions of people more in need of help than me. But a different part of me recognizes this as an old conversation, so I'm actually going through with this. I don't expect to spend years in therapy, but I think 6 months to a year will give me a solid foundation of learning, growth and practice around being a strong, self-aware, self-defined, self-loving, adult woman assuming full responsibility for my experience, and accepting all the love and support that comes into my life at the same time.

I am grateful, thankful, and appreciate the chance to be a human being in this world, right here, right now. To quote that Jesus Jones song that Husband loves, "There's no other place else I want to be..."

Assignment from my therapist today

I talked with my therapist about some of the stuff I discovered in couples therapy. She gave me two assignments:

1. Write about the feeling I have that my mother sacrificed a lot to be a parent to me and I can never make it up to her

2. Express my anger through writing and sharing with trusted friends and my S-Anon group

I've been feeling angry at Husband for breaking me. I feel irreparably broken. I used to believe that you could count on people. Not everybody, but certainly a few carefully selected, trusted people in your life.

But my experience has taught me that no matter how well I think I've chosen, no matter how much evidence I have that someone is trustworthy, the fact is I can never count on anybody 100% of the time. In that regard, I am alone. I have only myself to count on. (And maybe there are those who feel they can't even count on themselves. That would be really scary - to have absolutely nobody at all.)

The reason I can't count on anyone 100% of the time is because I cannot control what someone else will do, how they will think, feel and respond, 100% of the time. If I could control everything 100% of the time, I could predict with certainty. Any less control than that introduces some amount of uncertainty. I can never know. I can eventually trust, believe, think, hope, have faith. But I can never, ever know. So how do you live with a know liar in a context of never knowing? Don't know yet. One day at a time I guess.

I used to believe that I could know. That time, love, shared experiences and personal integrity could forge an unbreakable bond of trust. While I see now that was a form of naivete, it felt good to believe that it was possible. Now I feel sad and wary, and while the fact that it's not possible to count on others has nothing to do with Husband, I'm now intensely present to this fact because of his betrayal and I'm angry at him for that.

What goes through my head: Why did he have to do that? I didn't do that! When I had problems I talked about it. When I didn't feel heard, I did something about it. What is wrong with him? (I could go on.)

Intellectually, I know the answers or at least the explanations, so in an instant I invalidate this anger because it feels irrational.

But it's there. And I want it out now, so I don't carry it around for years, so it doesn't come out when I least expect it, so it doesn't rot me from the inside all the way out to my happy, sweet, she's-so-nice veneer.

Helpful notes from couples therapy

Here's what I need to remember from couples therapy yesterday:

HOW TO TALK PRODUCTIVELY WITH HUSBAND ABOUT PROBLEMS
When you ____ I feel (mad, glad, sad, ashamed, afraid - pick one) and what I make up about that is _____.

When you get to the core of them, most negative feelings come from one of two places:
1. I'm afraid I won't be safe
2. I'm afraid I won't be seen or heard for who I am

WHERE I SPEAK AND THINK FROM
I see the world and listen through the perspective that no matter what, there is always going to be something better than me. (Don't know how I got this belief - need to investigate with my therapist.)

I filter out what is
a. positive, because it feels like that feedback is covering up people's real thoughts and feelings (there's something better than her)
b. not true from my perspective (even in reaction to other people's feelings - for example, if Husband says he feels like I don't care about him, in the past I've ignored that because I know that I do care about him)

It's unlikely that I can rid myself completely of this ingrained perspective, but now that I'm aware I can make a different choice when I notice myself coming from this position.