My Therapist says I don't let my emotions out.
The premise of this morning's session was that after so many years of thinking that I was in touch with my emotions (I still think I am), while I might be feeling my emotions, I have been informed that they are not being expressed in my facial expressions or my body language.
I am stoic. I am like a poker player. There is no "tell" as to how I am feeling, and my body language blocks this too.
I always thought that was a good thing, especially since I feel so much loneliness, pain, and sadness each day. Who would want to let something like that out into the world for other people to see? Why let my emotions out? ...AS IF someone would see my sadness and they would feel ANYTHING for me?! AS IF someone would take a moment and share a kind gesture or a bit of non-selfish warmth towards me?
If I cannot get this from the woman I love -- from the most important person in my life -- then why in the world would I dare risk the pain of feeling these crap feelings if there is nobody there to express them to, or to share them with??
I am alone.
I know emotions need to be experienced or they won't go away.
I know, I am only speaking emotionally. It is so important for me to feel my emotions -- all of them, even the painful ones. Without feeling them, they don't just go away; they wait there... lurking... in line waiting for me to be ready to give them the love and attention they deserve. THEN, when I feel them, they feel comfortable leaving me and they are free to be released back into the world.
Loneliness in Marriage
But I don't want to feel these emotions. None of them. I don't want to feel sad, despondent, lonely... like a failure that I made really stupid decisions in my life, and now I am stuck in a relationship that I don't want to leave, but which leaves me unfulfilled, lonely, and alone. "I can fix this!" I say to myself over and over.
The Uphill War for Love
Each time I try, after fighting what feels like a literal war "to get the woman," well, she slips away from me. I might have many weeks of woo'ing, pursuing, showing attention to, and loving with a direct purpose of strengthening the connection between us -- and by extension, the intimicy shared between us as a husband and wife are SUPPOSED to WANT to experience together --, but if that ever happens, the next day it is erased and I must start over again. It is so tiring!
You would think it is the MAN who slips away, out of the bed in the middle of the night; you would think it is the guy who loses interest as soon as he scores his touchdown. Maybe here, I'm not the man, and my female "husband" has no interest in showing any attention to me, and so I remain the masculinely male "wife" in the relationship who wishes that her husband would even glance ONCE at her. I don't wear any fancy negligées, and I do not clip "How to be a better lover" articles from the newspaper -- she wouldn't be interested, and she would find my attempts for closeness to be a burden.
"I am one of the kids" to her, as she says frequently. I am only a burden to her. All I want from her is the limited amount of emotional energy she does not have to share with me; she does not WANT to share with me. I'm still the selfish bastard that hurt her in 2016 with my criticisms and my critiques when we were newly married, but it only gets worse from there [even though I became a more compassionate, thoughtful, and loving husband in 2009, 3 years after trying to make our marriage what I thought we were supposed to be; where we happily played our roles as husband and wife, father and son, provider of the home and provider of the family. Yeah, it got worse.]
Her Trauma is ME.
It's too painful to even share what happened since 2009. I am ashamed, I am humiliated, I am ripped apart with sadness, grief, and agony. Even now, I cannot believe my wife went through what she did, all under my nose, all under my "watchful eye." She experienced trauma for so many years and I did not see it because I was loving, I was caring, but to her, she was stuck in an -- dare I say, from the outside world, imaginary, but to her experience, REAL -- abusive cycle of pain.
OK, so I'm going there. This is really painful for me. [Damn you, privacy. In respect of my wife's privacy interests so that I do not embarrass her "secrets," I did "go there," but then the next day, I edited out the specifics of what I wrote about below. Sorry; I believe in honesty, but in this life, I seem to live with a muzzle around my lips always been told not to tell the truth about what is happening around me.]
I have always believed strongly in roles. Women roles, male roles, Rabbi roles, student roles, who is the child, who is the adult, who is the master, who is the servant (bad examples, not relevant to this), and so on.
As a Jewish husband, I understood that it was best for me to give attention to my wife all day, every day, doting on every need, every desire, every wish. "Great!" I thought, I can do that. Even emotionally, I thought I was emotionally present (always working on this one, because there is always room for improvement), giving her attention every day, every week.
What I was not aware of was that while I was trying to make our relationship fine, she was experiencing trauma. I think she should have confided IN ME about the trauma, but I was the problem. I was the one that according to her was emotionally closed. I was the one who couldn't "see" her or the pain she was in. I was the one who in the early years of our marriage didn't understand yet the importance of keeping criticisms to myself, or better yet, don't even feel criticisms towards your wife. Just let things slide -- life doesn't need to be the way we were told things would be. She didn't need to be the wife I thought I was marrying, and I didn't need to be... well, I have no idea what she wanted me to be to her. She is still not happy and she won't tell me why.
Maybe I'm just an idiot. Maybe I'm just emotionally closed. Maybe I'm just so self-involved as she thinks I am, where everything I do -- whether it is spending time with the kids, buying her flowers, or saying hello to her just to see how she is doing -- she interprets each of these things as "he [the selfish bastard] is doing this for himself."
But while I can't defend myself to her because every denial seems to just affirm her suspicions that I am not listening to her, and while I can't defend myself to our marriage counselor because every time I do, I am "being defensive" and I am not hearing her true pain, and I must put my own thoughts aside of how I remember things to be, and I must see things from her perspective, as if every skewed memory is true, every warped understanding of context, or why I did a particular thing I did is false (even though I was the one who remembers what I was thinking when I did something because I was the one who did it).. But no... MY REALITY must be put aside, and I must entertain her reality with all of her assumptions and warped way of seeing things that happened, placing into me thoughts I did not have, intentions I did not think... and instead of my reality, I must enter into HER WORLD, HER REALITY so that I can see her as she really is... to see her and the pain she is really experiencing.
Reading that, you probably thought I didn't do that, right? WRONG. This therapy session where the therapist suggested that I place "my reality" aside so that I can see "her reality" was more than six months ago, and I immediately understood exactly what she was speaking about, and I was immediately able to jump into her world and see things the way she was seeing things and experiencing them. It made me feel like crap that "I" (the husband of her internal story that she has been creating for herself) did all those aweful things, and that "I" thought all of those aweful things, and that "I" had all those terrible intentions each time I did something -- whether it was a hug, an inquiry into "hey, you look sad -- how are you doing," or "let's spend some time together," -- all of these things were some evil "me" who hurt her, criticized her, harmed her, hurt her, didn't see the pain that she was feeling.
[YOU KNOW, I totally erased, edited, and danced around what I wrote here the first time. I was VERY SPECIFIC about something that "real me" did in real life, but that when she saw it through the lens of "evil me," as she did in the stories she told herself, she turned me into a sinister, horrible person -- a person I would never have wanted to live with either. But to protect her absolute secretive need for privacy from everyone outside the 4 walls of our home, I made the edit after realizing that she wouldn't want her friends to know what she really experienced.]
I almost feel like a convicted criminal for something I know she feels like I did (or neglected to do), but it hurts my heart to have been seen as someone who thinks that way, who acts that way. Where is my pain for my intentions being so so badly misunderstood and judged so viciously? I'm editing this post now, so I don't want to mess up the stream of thought I had when I wrote it the first time.
Bottom line, I truly did see that she was sad all of these years. I could read on her face every time she was upset, and I understood that she was sad, but when I asked her what was bothering her, she denied that she was sad or unhappy. She made me think that I was imagining what I was clearly seeing on her face so often, so frequently. There were so many times in our marriage I wanted her to consider taking medicine for what appeared to me to be depression -- and there were times she was so depressed that I couldn't even get a "hello" out of her. But she told me everything was fine, and so I learned to just listen to her and not push deeper than she wanted me to go.
I learned to trust that when she says she is fine, that she probably is fine. And, if she is upset, I learned from our first bout of marriage counseling not to take things so personally. Just because she is upset doesn't mean that it was about me. So yeah, we've had many years of a rocky relationship, but I trusted her when I noticed she was not happy, and so I inquired about her feelings, and she said things over and over that things were fine.
But I knew in my heart that everything was NOT FINE. I thought she was lying to me, but I never could put my finger on it where she wasn't being honest with me, because I could always find places I could improve, things I could have done to make her feel more loved, etc. But every time we were in the same room, it felt like it was only me in the room and I couldn't understand WHY. Now I know -- I was the only one in the room; there was nobody "standing in the closet" with me. She was somewhere else, emotionally "checked-out," experiencing who knows what kind of pain, and I was left alone, confused, wondering why my wife was not emotionally "with me."
The pain I do NOT want to touch.
IF you want to know what kind of pain I myself don't want to touch? It is the pain of fiery sadness, anger, rage, and literally shame and grief because 1) not only was I the stupid, oblivious husband that knew nothing of the agony of what my wife was going through for so many years (again, I wanted to know; I asked over and over again and she kept it from me), but 2) she turned me into the abuser -- a selfish person who did not see her, who did not see the pain she was experiencing. We spent so many months focusing only on her pain in therapy, and rightly so -- she is the one that experienced this. But do you want to know my pain?!
Do you have ANY idea how that felt for me to be turned into such a horrible selfish person? I feel like a criminal, accused and convicted for something I literally did (I did the things she remembers I did; I said the things she remembers that I said), but how she twisted so much into evil was kept from me. I don't know if I am more sad for her or angry at myself, or angry at HER for letting this happen for so many years!! All that love wasted, all the energy wasted, all that time literally turned into shit and turned from something so beautiful and wonderful into something so demonic, evil, and horrible.
Two Worlds... Both REAL.
I struggle so hard with the two realities -- was I really the abuser she made me into? Or was I really a loving husband but all this trauma was created in her head and was a story she told herself? And, when I know all of the efforts I did over the years -- all the love, all the work, all the sharing, but her reality was that anything that came from me was shit that was worthless and meaningless to her -- how do I reconcile those two realities? And how today do I stand tall with a smile when I know that she still feels like punishing me for the misdeeds I have done both in the real world and in the stories she told herself? How do I look her in the eye knowing this is how she spent so many years seeing me, when I too felt real pain in our relationship, but I acknowledged my own flaws and faults, and I worked (and continue to work) to improve myself and to make myself a better person?
So this is my loneliness. This is my pain. In one reality, I am a loving husband who tries as hard as I can to be emotionally present for my family, to work hard to be supportive of our life together, to be a good father to our children and a kind and gentle person to our family. In the other reality, I am that selfish bastard to her that for so many years did not see the struggle and the agony my wife went through, and it was right in front of my face happening under my nose.
Am I a dumb fool?? How could I NOT have seen this? I knew she was in pain all these years, but she never let me see it. Do I defend myself that I tried to see it but that she hid it from me? Or do I accept her reality that I am an abuser that needs to make endless amends and endless "I'm sorry's" for something I didn't do in the first place? ...but I did do it, right? To her, I did it.
So this wasn't my therapy session. This was a piece of my pain, and now I have no emotional energy to continue.
Again, I hate you world for forcing me to hide myself and my true thoughts and feelings. I hate you world for muzzling me yet again because my wife would be embarrassed if I shared the truth about what happened. [As if lying to the world for so many years that I wasn't being beaten and abused by my parents and neglected and not fed and forced to live in filth most of my childhood wasn't enough. Now in my adulthood I am forced to lie again for the "woman in my life," this time the one who would be ashamed if the world knew what she experienced when she was shown judgement and criticism at first in our marriage, but then love and kindness as I grew and developed with so much effort into a better person.] And I hate you world for putting me in this situation where so many things I have done have been twisted and warped into something ugly and in so many circumstances evil and shameful. What did I do to deserve this, G-D? Why was giving up my life to live a life of frumkeit rewarded with a wife who sees me as evil and with so much pain and loneliness I don't know what to do with myself? Why is this a reward for doing the right thing and making the right decisions in life?!
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