I want an explanation

Oh how I do try to release what was painful in my marriage.  But here comes the “but” that you knew would follow that statement: there is something I have yet to release.  An explanation I feel I am owed.

Almost a year into our couples’ counseling, my husband Roger began seeing another therapist one on one.  Throughout our marriage, this was one of my greatest wishes – that he would share some of his struggles with a skilled listener and get some helpful feedback.  In particular, I was hoping that some of the accusations he made repeatedly toward me, and some of what seemed to me like obsessive thoughts bordering on paranoia, could be aired, examined and maybe reframed.  Owned, by Roger.

I myself have received individual therapy twice, to resolve some old trauma that I knew was interfering with my functioning.  The first time was when my children were very little and I was experiencing gut-wrenching fear that someone would sexually abuse them.  I held an unfounded belief that because I had experienced ongoing sexual abuse as a child, I lacked tools to protect myself and my children would therefore have no self-protection tools.  And so I would have to protect them, every single moment of their lives, to interrupt the cycle.  I hovered constantly.

The second time was when I felt I was broken and needed to be fixed because I feel no love for my mother.  I look around me and see the beautiful love and devotion others including my own children, feel for their mothers and it really does feel like something is wrong with me.  My mother was a decent enough parent toward me, but I’ve witnessed her awful cruelty toward others, including two people I love deeply.  My mother was physically and emotionally abusive toward my sister all through her childhood and continues to find ways to wound her.  My mother cheated on my father.  She was in a big hurry to marry her affair partner and there were only a few legal grounds for a “quickie” divorce, one being cruelty.  Ever the gentleman, my father signed off on the divorce papers stating he’d been cruel to her.  It’s not so much that I can not forgive my mother.  It’s that she always blames the people she hurts, and successfully manipulated me for years so that she would continue to have a “loyal” daughter while she walked all over everyone else.  I had three years of therapy, which did not change my feelings for my mother, but helped me understand my own response to her toxic presence.

I’m a big believer in therapy.  I thought it might save my marriage, although I did suspect it was too late.  I had renewed faith when Roger started seeing his own therapist.  We were making significant progress in our couples counseling, but there were some issues that remained unresolved.  One had to do with a friendship I’d had with a co-worker almost thirty years ago, just two years into my marriage.

At the time, I was working as a darkroom technician, at a small company that produced photo and transparency murals for malls, restaurants and such.  It was very much a male-dominated work environment so I was rarely fortunate enough to have female co-workers. This was the 80s, when sexual harassment of young women in the workplace was just part of the environment, like the water cooler or the photocopier.  I remained professional but kept my distance from most of the men.

There was one guy, Dale, who came to work for the company very briefly, only about 6 months.  I kept him at a distance too in the beginning, which he thought was very funny.  Eventually, I began feeling safe around him and we would talk about the Toronto Blue Jays and music.  Roger and I had just bought our first home together and I shared my excitement about that with Dale.  I talked about my nieces and nephews and shared my dreams of being a mother soon.

When Dale left the company only a few months later, we would get together once every two or three months and have dinner.  We talked on the phone, with about the same frequency.  The last time we had dinner together, I was five months pregnant with my first child.  I saw him again when my child was 1 1/2, at a party at Dale’s parents’ house.  That was almost 24 years ago.  I have not seen him since.  Upon reflection, I do think he harbored some hopes that something more would develop between us and my kid was a reality check.  He pulled away.  I missed his friendship.  But I made so many new friends, mostly other mothers.  I no longer had very much in common with Dale.

Roger never mentioned any concerns about Dale while the friendship still existed.  He mentioned him once about a year after the last time I saw him and expressed insecurities.  I blew him off.  He mentioned him again about 15 years later, out of the blue, while we were having an argument.  Then he mentioned him every single time there was a conflict of any kind.  I offered a fuller discussion about Dale, during which I shared my hindsight that perhaps Dale hoped our platonic connection would become romantic.  I really hoped that level of honesty with Roger would help him see I had nothing to hide, and also hoped it would appeal to his ego, making him feel he had “won”.  What a mistake.

From that point on, Roger was obsessed with Dale.  I began walking away from him every time he mentioned Dale’s name.  I said I would discuss Dale in the presence of a trained professional only.

Of course Dale’s name came up in couples counseling and I welcomed the opportunity to state my truth.  Roger, it seemed, was anticipating hearing some kind of confession and when it didn’t come, he seemed to feel he was being made a fool in front of our counselor, for being so obsessed.  He spoke about a party the two of us had been to at Dale’s, while Dale and I were still working together.  He has memories of that party that have no basis in reality – at least in my reality.  Neither of us was drunk.  But Roger and I remember many of the events of our lives differently.  It’s a real conundrum for me, and I know it was for our counselor too.

For some reason, I had complete confidence that when Roger shared these stories in his individual therapy sessions, his counselor would ask some reasonable questions, like why the woman who had remained at his side for thirty years, bore his children and basically orbited around him, could not be trusted to speak the truth.  I was certain she would ask him to explore his own thought processes, and question why old history even needed a place in the here and now.

Roger reported that she’d said that I’d probably had good reasons for falling for Dale.  Something to the effect that these things happen and it’s not anyone’s fault.  From there, our couples’ sessions became increasingly painful.  Our marriage was in a worse place than when we’d started therapy.  Our decision to separate came soon after, in an honest conversation we had without our counselor, both realizing we were in too much pain to try to heal the marriage.  Our counselor then helped us separate.

I recounted this tale to my friend Trish, telling her I felt I was owed an explanation.  That either this therapist, or someone in the field should explain to me how the lies an obsessed man tells himself got validated by his therapist.  Trish says therapy can be misinterpreted.  She told me that one day her phone rang and it was the husband of her good friend, calling from a pay phone a block away.  He said his therapist told him he can have what he wants in his life, that he should go after what he wants.  And he wanted Trish.  Yikes.

OK.  She’s got a point.  Maybe I had too much faith in therapy.  There were so, so many reasons unrelated to this one issue, that Roger and I needed to end the marriage.  My primary tendency is to trust that we found our way to where we needed to be.  From that place, I can sort of see that it’s my ego that is outraged because it didn’t get what it wanted.  But every so often, I just feel that I’m entitled to that explanation.

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