I saw my therapist, Madeline, yesterday. We’d missed our last session because Auden had gotten sick. I had some catching up to do.
My therapist has a way of uncovering the source of things. My issues, as I’m sure as are most folks’, are layered. Therapy sessions serve as forensic digs. They’ve strung the yellow caution tape around the scene, and painstakingly we sift through the layers hoping to uncover some evidence or explanation. One might surface a small discarded bit of no use, or one might find buried deep a relic overloaded with meaning. Usually, however, it’s neither one nor the other. You find one thing that you think provides insight only to look beneath to find yet another meaningful puzzle piece. It’s a wreckage buried on top of a disaster, covering a catastrophe through multiple civilizations: disturbed turtles all the way down.
First, I told her that Sandy I had been discussing of finding a second place, one for me, where I could get some peace and separation. I believe this idea was originally mine and dates back to a post that I’d written when I was taking a week in Ashland to write this blog. At some recently, it re-surfaced, and Sandy after a session with his individual therapist encouraged me to pursue it. Ostensibly, this is for my sanity. Should I have a place of my own, I wouldn’t need to be there during the evening chaos. Of course, Sandy would have the leisure to accomplish what needs to be done at his own pace without feeling my scrutiny.
With this idea in mind, Sandy encouraged me to begin looking for a place. I dug into Craigslist, contacted and arranged a few viewings, and found myself completely despondent at the idea of finding some other home to set up shop. To be absent enough that the chaos of our house wouldn’t bother me would be to be mostly absent altogether, which is not something I want. I want to be an integral part of the boys’ lives and raising them. I came back to Sandy and suggested an in-law unit in our backyard instead. To that end, we met with a builder we know, who declared our yard suitable and the project feasible. We need only find a tiny house kit of the appropriate dimensions to move forward.
Next, we focused on rehashing the couples’ session that Sandy and I had had on Tuesday. I told her that we finally told Jeff about our lack of sex life. She humphed a little, implying a sigh of relief. I then described Jeff’s comments about lack of empathy (see the Messy post,) and she speculated about Jeff’s “robotic” observation that when Sandy and I met, I effectively closed the book on my emotional side: an obvious metaphor for my discontinuation of writing when we started dating.
I also passed along part of the heated portion of our therapy session, where I tried to explain to Sandy that some of my resentment has stemmed from feeling as if all of this is “my problem.” For example, a messy room that I feel like needs to be straightened (when he doesn’t “see the mess”) bothers me, not him, so it is my problem. I wanted to illustrate how I feel like my values when I bring them to the family are adopted if it doesn’t inconvenience him. If, however, my values impact his way of life, then they are dismissed. The examples I used were meant to be trivial and uncomplicated: about chemical free sunscreen and his snoring. The examples infuriated him because unbeknownst to me, he’d gone out of his way to find a chemical free sunscreen for Eliot this summer. And he was affronted by the snoring comment because he’d been using a snore-free pillow that he hates for months now. He then claimed that obviously all of the efforts he (and the boys) have been making the last few weeks have gone unappreciated, so why should he even bother.
As implied by the desire for a separate space, I have a problem with the chaos that is our house, and that I necessarily become a drill sergeant keeping everyone on track and ensuring everything that needs to be done is assigned, on target, completed, or written down for a future project. Sandy accuses me of having excessive standards for order, cleanliness and repair, as well as an inordinate speed by which I think things should be done. To me it’s not just that I have anxiety over mess but that I want for the boys to take responsibility for their own tasks, chores and belongings. We had discussed this about a month ago and in addition to increasing the frequency that the cleaners came to the house, he asked me to make lists, and he would help prod the children to accomplish tasks.
Back to couple’s therapy, in his frustration over my examples of sunscreen and snorting, he suggested that we chuck all they had been doing. I got defensive, because I felt it was unfair to say that I hadn’t appreciated the efforts. I had vocalized my appreciation, and I have specifically not been criticizing or prodding if something does not get done on the timeline that I would prefer. I did mention that I thought the last two weeks things had slipped a bit back to their normal pattern of me drilling everyone, but I wasn’t making a fuss since Sandy just started a new job. He felt reproached that I hadn’t mentioned the slipping. I, apparently, am supposed to do that without sounding like I’m nagging or pissed, while at the same time I’m supposed to let things slide and be less obsessive about stuff.
[As a meta comment, I strain to understand Sandy’s strict binary nature. To his mind, he had changed the last couple of weeks so it must all be better now, right? To find out that I am not completed sated and happy means that all of his work has been for naught. I struggle to see the world that way. To me emotions don’t just go away. Feeling compromised and overwhelmed for over a decade doesn’t dissipate when there are a few weeks of change. But he wears a starkly different set of lenses than I.]
Next, I described how in couple’s therapy I told both Jeff and Sandy that therapy was a safe place for me to share issues or vulnerabilities that frustrate Sandy. My memory of this most of the session is jumbled, and this portion even more so. What I recall is being teary – and I don’t remember what made me cry – and claiming this safety, and I recollect that Sandy accused me of being an entirely different person in therapy than when I was home with him. (He claimed that he felt like he was consistent between therapy and outside of therapy.) His angry (he would say he wasn’t angry only frustrated) accusation continued, “why can’t I share this with him outside of therapy?!” I have to hope that he couldn’t see himself saying that. Or perhaps he had never been a child around extreme anger. I was crying and trying to share something, while his face screwed up, his hands clenched, and his eyes narrowed. Those behaviors will never elicit emotional vulnerability from me.
Just imagine this scene:
Woman: (speaking softly) Can you please sit down? I’d like to talk to you about something.
Man: (tensing, clenching hands, popping knuckles, frown pressing his face into a an attempt at an invulnerable face) Ok. What?!
Maybe there are men who considering this scene would say, ‘yeah, so what?’ But I cannot imagine a woman ever thinking that this is a safe place to share something especially if that something involves the husband in any way.
To Jeff and Sandy, I said that at some point I learned that it was not safe to be emotionally vulnerable at home. Sandy again was piqued by my comment, but Jeff popped in a suggestion that I may have learned that a long time before meeting Sandy.
Madeline heard all of this, brought us back to the beginning of the session and our discussion over finding another place for me to escape the chaos, and she said an educated version of ‘hogwash.’ Yes, order is important to me, and feeling unscrutinized (if that is the problem) is important to Sandy, but to her mind, the problem exists beneath that: neither of us feeling at ease in our home. I feel unsafe and he feels threatened or judged. (I must say that I’m speculating and projecting Sandy’s discomfort. This is not something he has stated explicitly.) That, she advised, is the issue that we need to address.
She probed and asked about what about Sandy’s anger/frustration is so threatening to me. Why isn’t it safe? I volleyed back a few, “I dunnos” before admitting that it is the physical gestures along with the occasional hitting of the wall or the kicking of something. The physicality of the anger. I shared that my recollection of my father when I was growing up was that he was an unhappy angry man. [This is not who he is now, and it’s certainly not captured in the photo albums.] I have no specific memories of him being physically abusive beyond the use of a paddle, but our paddles held a strong negative association. Each of the three of us (my brothers and I) had our own paddle with our names burned into them. These hung in the breeze way for everyone to see upon entering or exiting the house. After each paddling we earned a notch in the side of the paddle. I suspect that I had few if any notches. I know with certainty that Tony’s paddle was lined up and down with them. Madeline pointed out that the threat of violence can be as frightening as actual violence.
After the session, I rode home with myriad thoughts rumbling around my head. In a few weeks it will be the one year anniversary since Sandy and I had sex. Ironically, we last had sex celebrating our wedding anniversary in an Airbnb in San Francisco. Before getting sick, I could never fathom going that long without sex – especially if you were married. After our anniversary I had called a hiatus on our sex life as I struggled through my depression. Then in December I grew sick, and sex no longer registered as something remotely interesting. Between the pain meds, the anti-depressants, the cannabis, the diarrhea, the farting, and most importantly the pain itself, my libido has suffered a mortal blow.
A little over a month ago, Sandy and I had a terrible row about which neither of us can remember. Later that evening, or possibly the next, I broached him about him seeking sexual pleasure outside of our marriage. I wanted him to know that I don’t know how we would navigate it, but that my not having sex with him was not meant as a way of punishing him or denying him pleasure. That it wasn’t about not thinking he was an attractive man. That really it wasn’t about him at all. This conversation startled him. We both took it to our respective therapists, and both concluded that we should wait a bit longer before exploring it further.
Still, it is something that I think about constantly. I think that if Sandy were having sex he’d be significantly less frustrated. I feel constant guilt over not having sex with him. I know that sex is not the root of our problem, but it may be the primary source of the strain in our lives.
When I think back before I was sick. When I skim through my writings before my illness – both published and unpublished – I know that I was sexually unsatisfied before my libido waned. My fantasies included aggressive couplings. My sex life with Sandy has always been tender and gentle. Our last love making session in SF, I asked him to be rough and to fight physically with me, but he couldn’t bring himself to. I have been hovering over and questioning the irony of why tender lovemaking with Sandy is so unsettling. After yesterday’s therapy session, I speculate if it has to do with not feeling safe with Sandy emotionally. To me, violent sex brings pleasure if you can trust entirely that your partner empathizes completely with you and knows how far to push it. When your partner cannot empathize with you. When your partner is emotionally threatening (even unintentionally) then you cannot have violent sex. Furthermore, I think that at some point, on a visceral level I stopped wanted to have tender sex with a partner who I felt was emotionally unsafe. It was a lie that I couldn’t tell physically anymore.
So, now we begin the process of trying to dance safely together in therapy first and then maybe at home. If indeed we can be vulnerable with each other without judgement or blaming, then maybe we’ll move forward together.