Posted by Racer on July 30, 2004, at 15:27:55
In reply to if the bridge leads to slaughter do you still go?, posted by B2chica on July 30, 2004, at 14:18:30
That's actually off point, but her work interests me. She's a high-functioning autistic who designed some more humane slaughterhouse techniques, which is why I mentioned her.
Back to you, though: you're not a cow on the ramp to the slaughterhouse, so you might look for a different way to ask your question -- one that might allow you to answer it more easily. (I just got back from a fairly grueling therapy session myself, and your question happened to trigger a lot of what's going on for me, so please read this with the knowledge that I'm *not* really reacting to you, just reacting to the question that I'm reading in your post. And maybe I"m reading that question into it myself, rather than really seeing your question -- I can't tell. I think what I'm about to say is on point for you, but I could be wrong.)
Anyway, it sounds to me as if you're accepting what others are saying to you about your 'secrecy', rather than trying to find out what's really going on for them. This is a kind of soapbox for me right now, and it's getting some excess fuel from the presidential campaigns, so bear with me: when something happens, you can react or your can respond. (I started to give an example from politics, but I decided that was unwise. I'm not sure I can illustrate what I mean, but I"ll try.) Just as a guess, I'd say that your husband doesn't really want to know what's in your journal, per se, nor what deep dark secret you're keeping from him. I think it's more likely he's feeling insecure because you've withdrawn, and wants both reassurance and an idea of what he can do to help bring you back to him. If you react to the easy target issue -- the journal -- you can't respond to the deeper issue of how to alleviate his fears and allow him to help you.
(I've gone through something very similar with my husband, recently, and we're actually getting through it together now. It is possible, and it feels good -- even just to be on the road, even if we're not yet in sight of our destination.)
To make matters worse, you're not in a great place to communicate with someone who can't or won't meet you halfway, and a lot of people -- especially men -- don't have a lot of skills in communicating. And make no mistake: communication skills can be learned. He may be putting pressure on you about the secrecy and the journal simply because he can't express the base issue, which probably makes him even more demanding about the issues he can express.
You're absolutely right: if you need to protect yourself right now, then that's what you need to do. If the journal helps you because it's absolutely private, then it needs to be absolutely private. And none of those are necessarily permanent states. It may be that, one day, you'll find that it won't matter to you so much if someone else reads that journal, or it may always need to be for your eyes only. Only time will tell.
As for your husband, since I find I'm in total ProblemSolvingMode. Can you break down the issues in your own mind, and address one of them directly with him? Remember, even though you're the one in distress, you really do have to make him the "patient" in this -- otherwise, he's likely to react and everything may escalate. It's not fair. But the idea here isn't to experience fairness, it's to protect yourself and improve your environment. So, if you could sit down with him in a quiet time, and say something like, "Honey, I know you feel as if I'm withdrawing from you, and that's probably accurate (<<validate him first, so that he can feel good while you move on to the next step), but I'm not rejecting you. Right now, I'm having troubles, and I know that they're affecting our marriage, and I don't want to lose you, so can we talk about whether there are some ways that we can get through this together?" The basic idea is diplomacy, negotiation, all those things that are so hard to do in personal situations.
The hardest part for me is always remembering to offer that validation, and maintaining a balance point between acknowledging that my issues are behind my behavior without opening the door to accusations of me ruining everything. Or, at least, feeling as if I might open that door.
My guess, frankly, is that your husband is feeling helpless, because something's going on and he doesn't really know what it is, and that helpless feeling is triggering all those HeMan things: you know, "there is a problem -- I must fix it in order to remain a man". (NOT limited to men, by the way.) And, as we all know if we watched Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best -- or even the Cosby Show -- Husbands are the Protectors of the Family. He probably feels as if he's letting you down, but doesn't know how to say so.
The best thing to come out of marriage counseling for us has been letting down those walls around our insecurities. A lot of his insecurities I had sensed, even though they were never mentioned, but he really didn't have any idea of mine. (LoL! That's actually one of his: he says that I can read his mind, and he can't read mine. That worries him...) Anyway, one of the revelations recently was that he felt as if he had failed me, by not being able to provide adequate psychiatric care for me! Now, I'm beating myself up because I can't make an inadequate system meet my needs, and my husband is beating himself up because he can't force them to be adequate -- um, maybe we should be comforting one another about how inadequate that system is? (The only party in this that isn't engaging in any self-recriminations, of course, is The Inadequate Agency. They're perfectly happy to blame it all on me. Nothing I can do about that, but at least now my husband and I can talk about it together, instead of holding it all inside, behind our individual walls. It's not *quite* as good as getting decent medical care, but it's a dang sight better than it was before.) It took a lot, though, to get us here. I think the most important part of it, though, was my husband's willingness to try to communicate. It was hard for both of us -- very hard for him to learn to talk about things that, for him, were as difficult as anything I was holding back; and so hard for me to be patient while he was learning. It was well worth it, though, because I learned a lot about my own communication deficits. Who knew? I talk a lot, so I thought I communicated. Nope, I just talk a lot. So, by being patient with his learning curve, I got a start on my own. In a lot of ways, it was harder than individual therapy, but it has also shown much more visible results much more quickly.
OK, I'm exhausted, and I don't think I've really communicated anything much to you. I think the bottom line is: I'm sorry you're having this trouble; you don't have to volunteer for slaughter; there is at least one other option than the ones you described -- you can try to talk about the deeper issues of staying together, rather than either telling him what happened in your past or losing the marriage; and you're not alone on this path. It's a tough place to be, and it's hard to get through the forest, but it is possible to take a few steps together, if you both try.
Best luck.
poster:Racer
thread:372402
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040728/msgs/372424.html