My powerful partnership fantasy allowed me avoid grief and trauma...until it didn't

As I go through the last physical step (leaving my home in NYC) of removing my 30 year marriage from the historical record (it will not be remembered by anyone, in the end), the epiphanies are rolling fast and furious.

 

These are all the result of doubling down on therapy yet again.  Self-reflection.  Noticing.  Reading.  Study. 

 

Moving is a top stressor, and when you have depression and anxiety disorders, it's best to accept the rules of thumb and try to protect yourself.  Therapy back up to 3X a week.  Check. 

 

The power of these new understandings of my last thirty years startles me.  The things I've come to recognize now have, for one thing, completely erased the narrative I fancifully held during the period.  To be specific:  because of my own family contracts, I needed to believe that I was in an exceptional, creative, affirmative marriage.  I militantly and blindly believed this to be the case, even during long periods when my ex left to have affairs or ghosted me—and of course during all the minor conflicts too.

 

Now I believe that she essentially was "screaming" to get my attention to tell me she was unhappy or disinterested—that she wasn't fulfilled?—and that my needs put me in a condition where I was deaf and blind to her painfully obvious messages.  The result?  The fantasy I adhered to with the tenacity of two-part epoxy blew to smithereens.  A few years later, I cannot remember—I'm not exaggerating—a single moment in the thirty years that wasn't tainted by my then-wife's apathy or disdain or dislike of me.  Every single adventure—and we were active—is marred by a sneer, or fight, or interruption, or "gaslighting" event ("that didn't happen.").  Yawns.  Walking away in the middle of conversations.  Etc. Etc. (Note:  I can't fact check what I've learned through therapy, so this is my truth.  I have no idea what my ex thinks and we don't talk any more now than we did during arguments or affairs or absences in the past.)

 

The energy required to maintain this "contract" in my marriage turned every aspect of my life brittle.  It changed my diet.  It changed my community and the choices I made.  It changed the way I experienced art and culture.  It confused and diminished the choices I made as an athlete, much moreso than aging or other normal factors. It weakened my ethical standards and moral ideologies.  It made me less capable of patience or listening.  It upended my sexuality.  But, most of all, it catalyzed inside me a latent self-hatred that I can no longer control nor, as of yet, treat.

 

In the matter of a few weeks, 30 years turned from a cherished and happy, if untrue, fantasy--to a pile of hurtful, if honest, ashes.  What my ex had been telling me for decades finally hit home, and it knocked me into deep deep PTSD and clinical depression. 

 

It also released all the grieving and trauma (lost parents, mentally ill brother, loss of a home and pets, social drinking and drug use, counter-indicated loneliness during large social events) that my powerful "I am part of a happy successful couple" fantasy hid or diminished.  You can step over a lot of setbacks--and extremely contradictory information--when your family constellation is to value approval from only one source—the woman at the center of your life.

 

My marriage never met a single one of my essential needs.  I didn't realize this at the time either.  Supporting my earlier statements here, this was a powerful, all-consuming fantasy, and at the time not letting the fantasy collapse was life or death for me.  I died when she left the third and final time, still trashtalking me loudly while I slammed doors and clutched the wedding photos of a marriage that only existed in my corrupted, blind mind.  We tried couples counseling once more.  She showed up for the first session with the top three buttons of her shirt undone, and uncharacteristic lipstick.  She had a date with her polyamorous girlfriend fifteen minutes after our session ended.

 

Like I said, I was blinded by my fantasy for a long time.  She said: "I thought you'd be happy for me!"

 

David Foster, Chair
BVR 
M: 917-741-3853
www.bvresources.com