My F'd up relationship

Hey @Mr Banjoman thanks for the encouraging words! Sorry for not replying earlier you are right if it was 90 or 180 days that would be a small price to pay. I would gladly pay it, but unfortunately i cannot say how many bad days there will be in the future. All i can do is say that today it is worth it. And i do that each day. Thanks for reading

 

Ya i don't have much faith anymore, but there is a thread there still. It is tough for me. But maybe we can discuss the finer points some time.

 

Welp we are in conflict right now. Well i should say I am in conflict. My wife got blind sided by my emotions. Right now she is at her group so when she gets home we will probably re engage and work through the shit.

 

My SO and i did make it through the conflict, it was really difficult and drawn out. I plan on posting more details later. I learned some things this weekend.

 

Ok i said I would post something about our conflict and how we resolved it and I finally have time.

Last saturday I was expriencing some very deep grief. I had a long journal post about it and so my capacity to hear her hurt was not very high. That night I pushed her away. I am just not very good at engaging with other humans when I am feeling big things yet. I learned from a young age that it was not acceptable to have big feelings and be part of the group. So i spent a lot of time in my room hurt and angry and had to learn to get through things on my own. That is a disfunctional way to live. However, it is the way I have lived my whole life. And forget about grief. I have never been able to express grief. Even when my wife lost her mom. I was asking, "how am I suppose to feel?" Because I was so out of touch with what I actually felt.

Now my emotions are part of my life, but I still don't know how to communicate them to others. So saturday night ended with me pushing her away. Sunday we were talking about some money things. We got sent a new credit card because data was compromised and so as we were switching everything over to the new number she got triggered and was feeling the grief. She does not trust me with money because I was spending lots of money without her knowing about it and lying about it. Also, recently she was looking through our amazon acct. and found archived apps that I had downloaded in 2013 that were sexual in nature. So she is afaid of seaching too deep because she had that experience. Anyways these kinds of triggers happen pretty regularly in our relationship and I have been working to be safe and honest in all situations. So we talked at length about her grief and she was expressing a need to feel angry. She wants to be free to express her anger and often tells me that she doesn't feel like she is free to express the huge amount of anger she has over all of the things I have done. I felt fine and we were working through things until there was a moment when I got triggered. I got super angry.

This part is hard to write out. I have felt this anger a few times recently. Explosive anger that happens really fast. It always stems from the same feeling, but that feeling is hard for me to articulate so here goes. What happened this time was my SO misquoted something I said. I told her that is not what I said, and she proceeded to tell me why she thought I said it. She did not ask me what I actually said or meant. It was that simple and yet it created so much anger for me. My efforts to communicate all of the sudden felt futile. Like even if I say something she is going to hear what ever she wants to and then defend that instead of listen to what I am actually saying. Oh man I feel myself getting worked up just writing that. I know that this is not true. I know that in reality she wants to hear me and she wants to be heard, but in the moment my reality was what I stated. So I walked away, slammed the door and went outside. It was about bed time so we put the kids down. I grabbed a beer and sat in our front room in the dark just staring out the window feeling hopeless.

This is when things changed. She came in the room sat down and started asking questions. Looking back on it this is huge. We talked for a while and she genuinely did want to hear me. I know that this thing goes deep for me, and she felt better about it knowing that I wasn't blaming her for all of my feelings.

Anyways that was the turning point and we got back to a place of hearing eachother. After that we had sex and it was intimate and intense. This week was pretty good. We did our normal wednesday FANOS checkin and worked we went on a date last night. Life is a rollercoaster. I am still commited to my recovery, my wife and my family.

 

Haha you are right. It does sound weird.

 

Wow these are strong words man. Thank you. It means a lot. I hope that my struggles can be helpful for others.

 

Thank you. It toug road we walk

 

Today I want to talk about triggers.

This week in particular has been full of triggers for my wife. So I want to share my thoughts on what a trigger is. Triggers in my mind are the release of the emotional potential energy that gets stored up when we try and avoid or stuff things. We often need. So the more things that i stuff or the larger the emotion the bigger the trigger feels.

So for me the addict this is experienced as sexual urges. For my wife she often expresses it as anger. This week on wednesday Thursday and friday night, when we talked on the phone on my way home, my wife expressed her disappointment and frustration with my boundaries around technology and also how I have let her down in the past with mothers day. There was a lot of energy when she was expressing them. I made the mistake of engaging with the beliefs that she was expressing that weren't true or that felt like direct attacks on me. This essentially communicated to her that I did not understand her feelings and that I was critical of her beliefs. So we went round and round for several hours each night. It was EXHAUSTING. One thing I will say though, is that we kept engaging and eventually things felt ok at the end of the night, but then something else would start the trigger and we would be derailed and go through the whole thing again. Until today. Today we were talking and I just took a step back and started putting together the pieces of feelings that I had heard from her this week. Over and over again she was asking me if I cared. And she was doing it in ways that were typical of how she handled the pain when I was not able to express empathy. So there was big fear for her, but she was disconnected from where it was actually coming from and filling in the blanks with what was in front of her.

This is a very difficult thing to decipher. we often don't know where big emotions are actually coming from and feel the need to fill in the blanks with things that make sense. This morning we talked about it and got to a place where she could express her grief over not having a mom to celebrate on mothers day and the added layer of fear that I am simply acting out of oblication was a big step in understanding the big feelings she had this week. In the future I will strive for curiousity with her. It is so difficult when you are in it though. Especially as I become more sensitive to my emotions. I often get too focused on them, because it is so essential for me to express my emotions to avoid sexual urges.

This is the hardest thing that I deal with in life right now. And I don't have a solution. On friday what happened was we were on the phone and both realized that the conversation was going into high energy fight mode and we decided to hang up. I then made a call and vented to a guy in one of my groups and then I was more emotionally available for her when I got home. It was still very messy when I got home and we both ended up crying and finally after a few attemps and a few beers we got through it. Meanwhile my kids are being neglected on a friday night. But I made some delicious grilled beef strips on my new BBQ.

 

Thanks for the encouragement! It seems to be a struggle for many of us. I like the earthquake metaphor. Like if you let it out in tremors then it is more manageable/less damaging than storing it up for the big one.

 

Thank you for responding to my journal. You are so gentle in your communication. It is obvious that you have done a lot of work to understand addiction.

I think i may have over simplified here. My wife does tend to use anger to express emotions and has for our entire relationship. It is a specific pattern for her and not just applicable to betrayal triggers. But i do see your point as well. Expressing emotions when feeling pain is not the same as my brains auto response to any emotion. This is a tough one to communicate here. I wasnt trying to say it is the same thing. I guess i was just seeing a similarity. And life is so much more complex than i can accurately express through a few words.

 

All feelings are valid dude. This is an essential belief to having space to heal the relationship. For us and for our SOs. there is no arguing with emotions. In fact the idea that i can disregard any emotion is what perpetuates addiction. Feel free to continue to engage this. It is a really imortant point.