[Gareth]

Hello all,

I guess no-one will really be able to help with this but it helps me to write things down to get my thoughts straight.

Having been suffering from anxiety and depression following a mini-breakdown in March of this year, it seems that I have not been noticing the profound effect that me being miserable has been having on my wife. My breakdown seems to be related to a period in my childhood that has left with abandonment issues. During this time my parents split in a very acrimonious way, my mother fell into deep depression and I lived alone with her for years while she was in this state, and she tried to kill herself when I was 15, and I found her unconscious and had to get the ambulance.

My wife told me a few weeks ago that she has become very unhappy, as my unhappiness has really "dragged her down". I became ill only a few months after we got married, and obviously this was never the start out in marriage that she was hoping for, and not something any new married couple should have to go through. She has been worrying for her future, worried that I will never get better, and that she has to resign herself to a life of me being miserable. She says that she has "lost" me, that I am not the person I was and she is losing faith that I will ever come back.

Our relationship has always been quite difficult. When we originally met, my wife also went through some resolution of her own childhood trauma, and she was very difficult to be with for a while. I stuck with her through some very bad times. She has been in therapy for 5 years now, and is much more well in herself and has got through many of the issues that caused her problems.

She has not afforded me the luxury of the unconditional support that I have given to her over the years. She gave me 5 months of solid love and support, and then pretty much broke down and started talking in terms of not being able to cope anymore with the relationship. I am extremely angry about this, but in some ways understand what she is saying. Before I got ill we were at the point of starting to discuss having a family etc. All that has now disintegrated. She has lost everything just like I have. The difference is that she is in a personal position of strength, more able to make strong positive moves to solve her situation - most notably it seems by manouvreing her way out of the relationship. I believe that she is already thinking of how to find her new life, and how to do it in the least messy way possible. What follows is the beginnings of her doing this.

Things have taken a more sinister and horrible turn. Last weekend she went to Paris with a friend and I went to Spain with friends. I found out by accident last night that she and her friend met two Australian men out there and spent most of the weekend with them. My wife received an email from him last night, which she then texted her friend about and said "Result! Had a really sweet email from M." The only problem is, she texted this message to me by mistake (a Freudian slip, perhaps). I asked her what was going on and she showed me the email and it was very friendly and quite flirtatious but no mention of them sleeping together, just chatty and quite familiar.

My wife says that she did not sleep with him and that she was never looking for a "physical" thing and would not have slept with him, it was just that she really enjoyed the attention that he gave her, and that it showed just how much she has lost, how unhappy she has been with me, and how there was still another kind of life out there where people are strong and not miserable all the time and have fun. She says she wanted something "for herself", something not about the terrible misery of her home life, that would make her smile. This man made her smile and feel good about herself, if only for a few hours, and it was powerful enough for her to want more contact with him, and to be very excited to hear from him.

Regardless of whether she slept with him, she clearly wanted some kind of ongoing contact with him as she gave him her email address, and was very excited to hear from him. She says that he and his friend and travelling through Europe and that they live in Australia, so there would be no ongoing friendship between them anyway. But later on she admitted that he and his friend are coming to London next month as part of their travels. She said she had not thought about meeting up with him then, but I suppose that is exactly what she would have done if I had not found out about this. She was able to keep the significance of this liaison, and the ongoing contact, from me, so it follows that she is completely able to keep a further meeting with him secret as well.

This morning she has replied to his email saying that she will not be around when he visits London, very much shrugging him off, and she has showed me this email. But I have absolutely no idea whether she has sent him another email saying that she does in fact want to meet him. This is the whole problem, how on earth am I meant to trust her now?

All of this has happened at precisely the moment when I have identified in therapy that I have abandonment issues, trust issues, that I feel that no-one has ever really looked after me, and that I have a terrible deep fear of being alone, and that I fear losing the things that I trust. What a helpful time to discover that I am losing my wife, the one person I was really close to and whom I trusted, who has been hiding things from me and was going to continue to do so, who seems unable to really take care of me, and is probably going to abandon me (and perhaps has already done so emotionally).

In his book, Benjamin Fry says something like "The partner that our subconscious mind chooses to resolve our trauma is not necessarily the person whom we can have a Mills & Boon romance with."

Is this what has happened with me and my wife? Were we put together to resolve each other's trauma, and now that that is happening, we have no relationship left? I do believe that we share the same beliefs, the same desires for the kind of life that we want, the same sense of humour, very similar pasts and a supportive, affectionate and loving relationship. But on top of this was always a mistrust between us, a misfiring of communication - more difficulties than many relationships would withstand I suppose. Is it the case that my wife only stayed in our relationship because she was weak emotionally, and now that she is strong she sees a better life out there? I cannot be with her in seeing that as all I want is for us to stay together. But then I am weak emotionally right now.

What is happening with her certainly harks back to my past, and if it were not for my past then I would perhaps be able to cope very much better with all this and provide some strength for myself. But as it is I am weak, desperate for her to love me, desperate for her not to lie to me, desperate for her not to take the relationship we have spent 7 years building up away from me. I am as desperate as the 14 year old boy that I was, who found his mother after she tried to kill herself, and was desperate for all the pain and horror in his family to go away, who was desperate to be loved and taken care of, who was desperate not to be abandoned, who was desperate not to lose his family. Its happening again and I am no more well equipped to deal with it now as I was then.

These are far and away the hardest times of my life, and the fact that they are happening alongside the middle of my breakdown means that I have no idea how to cope or to find strength for myself. For the first time I very seriously consider anti-depressants but they are not going to take these problems away, are they? I suppose only time will do that - but I did not heal after the problems of my childhood, who is to say that I will heal after this?

Gareth

[Jay]

Hi Graham

I have just read your message and I truely feel for what you are going through. Being as I tend to crave what you do I am probably not best placed to comment...but that's not going to stop me!

The thing i noticed, because its what I have done in the past, is the amount of emphasis that you place on your wife and her failure to meet your expectations, that she does not behave as you have or would and that she's not being, well fair. The thing is this thats what expectations do, they set you up to be disappointed. Your expectations are just that, yours, they are not your wifes and she is being equally let down by her expectations of you. Unfortunately we all generate expectations about everything without even being concious of it so its quite difficult to control even if we are aware of it.

The other point, if you're still reading, is that regardless of what your wife does or doesn't do, you are still going to have to deal with you and nobody elses behaviour should be allowed to stop you making progress nor should it be another 'thing' to hide behind (you may have noticed I am not as eloquent as you).

And my only other point was that, having read Benjamins book I do think this is the kind of situation re projecting that he was observing and perhaps thats why you are with the one you are with.

If you are anything like me, you were probably a lot 'stronger' in yourself when you were supporting your wife as thats where you could focus, and in a sense work through her similar issues instead of yours. As soon as her need for you lessoned you relaxed and that brought you back to your own issues.

I really wish you well and hope you find a way through.

Jay x

[Gareth]

Jay,

Thanks for the reply. A lot of that makes sense to me. It is certainly true that I am 'strong' when dealing with other people's pain, and 'weak' when dealing with my own. It seems that my pain came out of nowhere 6 months ago when I 'broke down', but the truth is that it was a timebomb waiting to go off.

This point is one of the most awful things about this situation. I broke down earlier this year precisely because I was in a safe enough place in my relationship to do so. I had space and time to be looked after for a while.

Unfortunately the very harsh lesson I have learnt, which I think could possibly do me a lot of damage in the long run, is that my trust that my wife would in fact look after me unconditionally and support me through my pain, was actually misfounded, and having broken down in safety, I have actually removed that safety that I craved, and could end up the one thing I don't want to be - alone and abandoned.

Your reply was interesting to me so I was just wondering if you would clarify a couple of points. You say; "regardless of what your wife does or doesn't do, you are still going to have to deal with you and nobody elses behaviour should be allowed to stop you making progress nor should it be another 'thing' to hide behind."

Do you think it is possible that I have hidden behind my wife's pain in the past as I way of stopping me from confronting my own? Do you think that the situation with my wife has developed to the point now where being with her is stopping me from making progress in the real issues that I need to deal with?

And you mention "projecting" - perhaps you could explain how you feel this applies in this situation?

Sorry, to interrogate! - your post just interested me.

thanks,
Gareth

[Jay]

Hi Again

in answer to your questions, from my perspective you have't hidden behind your wifes pain, I just think you strongly empathised with it to the point where it made you feel better about your own - almost as if dealing with her pain would deal with yours too, perhaps this is why you were drawn to her.

I also think you absolutely felt safe enough to 'break' down and this is where your expectations let you down. It would be great if we could rely on others as we would allow others to rely on us but this is an unfair expectation. Part of the reason we are there for others is that is a quality we crave in them.

I do not so much think your current situation is in itself stopping you from going forward, but it could. To explain I think that the situation with your wife and her reaction to you is drawing your attention back away from the underlying issues that got you to this point in the first place. If the trigger for the 'break down' was being left alone and abandoned then you are in a sense recreating this and still not dealing with it, of course you are not doing this conciously.

Ideally you could find a way to put what is happening with your wife to one side and look at your own issues, if you can resolve these then perhaps this will help you resolve your current situation. Of course if we lived in an ideal world this forum wouldn't exist as we wouldn't have any issues to deal with.

In terms of projecting, and this really is a very basic view, but if you look at just the points you mentioned in your first message; your mother sank into depression and you coped with that for several years on your own (you don't say how you coped by the way which might have some bearing for you), you then tell of how your wife was in therapy for some years and you supported her through that. Here it looks like you have to some extent mirrored supporting your mother with supporting your partner. Now it would be logical that you would have needed your mothers support and when she was unwell you would have wanted her to return to or become your loving supportive mother where you didn't need to be the strong one anymore...if I'm on the right track I think you will make more sense of the pattern than me.

I hope this makes sense to you

Jay x

[Gareth]

Jay,

Everything you say does indeed make sense. I did strongly empathise with my wife and I did want to "fix" her pain for her. I can definitely see how I on some level expected that exercise to "fix" me as well. I can remember feeling strong, independent, proud of myself, when she was breaking down - remembering to congratulate myself that I wasn't breaking down, that I was "in control" and that I wasn't the sort of person to "lose perspective" they way that she did.

How wrong we can be about ourselves, eh?

And yes, much of my pain about perceiving that I am not getting the support that I need from my wife is actually about the pain I experienced as a child who did not get the support he needed from his mother or father. I am acutely aware of this and it makes it all the more painful that these patterns repeat. How much of what happened to me as a child and what is happening now was always within my control? Probably a lot more than I have ever realised.

My therapist thinks that I only coped with living with my mother during her years or depression by suppressing my own feelings. You'll know what I'm talking about when I mention trauma - from Benjamin's book. She thinks that right at the point of that trauma being lived through, I am living through a very similar thing in my real life right now with my wife. Much of what I feel about the situation will inevitably be about projection. It is impossible right now to see what feelings are about what situation, to distinguish past from present, and until I can, I suppose I am just stuck with the feelings, and Benjamin Fry would just tell me to "let them come..."

What is interesting about what you say is that perhaps many of my projected feelings are about my relationship with my mother AFTER she got better... in that when she was well and didn't need me to prop her up anymore, I expected her to come back to me, to love me in the way she should have done when she was ill. This never happened, not really. Was I expecting the same thing of my wife and I have perceived that it hasn't happened?

At the moment I have unrealistic demands of my wife. I have expected her to be around all the time, always willing to listen to me complain about my pain at the expense of our real relationship. She misses me, misses the person I was, and all I could think was that she should be giving me more time to get better. It has been hard for me to remember that her life has been torn apart as well.

The question is I suppose, and the question that until I get past I won't develop - how bad are things with my wife? Has the trust now been obliterated? Is there a way forward for our relationship or has my misery and her inability to deal with her feelings honestly and openly with, completely destroyed our marriage?

I'd be interested to hear your story if you feel like sharing it, or if not, I'll just say many thanks for the replies, they've helped me a lot.

Gareth

[Jay]

Hi

glad it was of some help

as for my story, that could take a while...actually the highlights are in my posting 'what am I missing', comments most welcome.

When I have a bit more time I will perhaps write the full version, but as I said it could take a while!!

Jay

[Jay]

Hi Gareth

sorry I just realised I called you Graham before, no clue why - I was paying attention honest!!

Jay

[Gareth]

Jay,

No problem, it happens all the time, and its a lot better than Garth!

At school my best friend was called Graeme - everyone called him Gareth and called me Graeme!

all the best,
Graham (whoops!)