Despite the healing I had experienced, having J move back in was absolutely terrifying for me.
My most valuable tool in achieving serenity had been listening to my gut-- if I felt unsafe, I would act on it. I'd speak up, detach, and seek safety. This worked perfectly when having an actual relationship with J wasn't part of the equation! But once he was back, our therapist began encouraging me to be vulnerable. Let him in. Give him an opportunity to nurture and earn trust. Expect that he will fail. Keep trying.
All of those things, while they made sense for building intimacy, pushed me into that zone where my gut screamed DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! Moving past that instinct in order to give J a 'chance' meant I was living in an anxious, triggered state almost constantly. I had no idea how to regain serenity without detaching.
A typical {daily} example:
J would do something simple- like walk through the door after work.
Immediately, I would be tense. I didn't want him to come kiss me. I didn't know if he was still sober that day. I didn't know what to expect at all, and yet I had no idea how to explain the fact that his walking through the door every evening was traumatizing.
J saw this as rejection. He wanted to be greeted with adoration, and my fear felt like a personal insult. Of course, when he reacted by taking offense, I couldn't help but feel that his lack of humility and understanding was further evidence that I was not safe.
We could very quickly spiral from there.
The more I expressed my fear, the more J felt unwanted, and the more he only focused on his own wants, the more I felt that my fear was justified. We called it the cycle, and we went through it hundreds of thousands of times as we tried to reconcile.
Of course, in hindsight, I think my vulnerability should only have been equal to what he could prove he was capable of handling with empathy and love, {which was very little} but at the time, I truly believed that the cycle was what healing looked like*.
It wasn't long before our biggest source of conflict returned to sex. J felt it was his love language, the only way he ever felt completely accepted and one with me.
We would come home from a week long vacation, where by the end, I'd finally relaxed and established a connection enough to be intimate. "This is what it should always feel like!" he'd proclaim, "This is real intimacy! How do we keep this going?" and I would despair, because how does anyone make a marriage feel like a honeymoon 24/7? He was asking the impossible.
Once again, I felt like he was expecting me to fill all these emotional holes he had with sex-- only now he was calling it attachment.
I became very depressed, started gaining weight, and refused to work on 'desensitizing myself to the fears I have surrounding healthy intimacy'. I didn't know what was wrong with me. No matter what J or the therapist said, no matter how logical or healthy any of it sounded, I simply could not make myself do anything more than what I was already doing.
But there were glimpses-- little flashes of what healing and unity could be like-- that gave me hope. They were often interspersed with events that seemed to point to the contrary as well, but I wanted to choose the hope.
There was the weekend we went out of town with his family, which was incredibly difficult for me when I was feeling so self-conscious and uncomfortable in my skin. J was protective and understanding, even when I'd bow out of something and take time to be alone.
There were all the times he would push aside his desire to be physical with me, and try to serve me and meet me where I was currently at emotionally instead. He knew I liked projects, so that was the year we built a massive chicken coop, painted the kitchen cabinets, redecorated our daughter's room and spent date nights shopping for power tools.
He would get frustrated by how slow our progress was and lash out at me, but then sit humbly in therapy and take notes as our counselor told him that he had to double down on empathy and find a way to be honest about his feelings without jumping into victim/persecutor mode.
There was an afternoon where he ran up the stairs with panic in his eyes and asked me to come delete a file off of the computer that he'd forgotten he had.
And there was the way he endured months upon months of periodic rejection as I slid out of his embrace, turned away from a kiss, and stayed on my side of the bed.
"Why am I the one doing all the changing?" He would ask, "Don't you feel that I speak your love language? Don't you see all the ways I'm trying to make you feel safe? Is it really so terrible to go out of your comfort zone a little in order to make me feel loved? Can't we work on this together, even slowly? Anything would be better than this!"
That summer, I went home to spend a month with my parents again. They were in the middle of working out their own relationship issues, and as my mom tearfully voiced some of her hurts and concerns, she sounded eerily similar to J. She talked of felling unloved; she said that the form of attention she was asking for was so small in the grand scheme of things, and she'd gone so far out on a limb in order to love and serve my dad, that why couldn't he have compassion and do the same for her? Wasn't she worth it to him?
Her pain was so sincere, and yet so alarming to me {because I completely identified with my dad!} that it caused me to re-evaluate the way I was rigidly maintaining my boundaries and detachment from J. Maybe my fear really was just residual trauma. Maybe I needed to decide "in for a penny, in for a pound" and commit full force to doing whatever it took to establish a truly intimate marriage. Maybe I needed to do more to meet him partway.
It was hard. So incredibly hard.
When I returned home, my emotions were even more erratic. I'd grit my teeth and be vulnerable, then second-guess myself and be so consumed with anxiety that it gave me whiplash. And it was all so confusing-- was I ignoring gut feelings the way I swore I never would again? Was I purely hormonal because of a new birth control we decided to try? Was my depression medication off? Was this the natural growing pains of re-establishing a relationship after experiencing betrayal? There were just too many variables to take into consideration, and by giving up the 'listen to your gut' strategy, I'd completely lost my moorings.
As the holidays approached, J relapsed. It had been after another sleepy morning where he'd made an advance and I'd turned him down. He came down the stairs an hour later and informed me of his break in sobriety with an almost-vengeful tone in his voice.
He was angry. He felt that I'd pushed him into it by not working on 'my' half of our recovery enough. I'd sabotaged him, and he was bitter.
I was shocked and disoriented by his attitude. What happened to taking responsibility? What happened to coming to me with compassion and regret as he built safety? Simultaneously, I knew he was hurting. He'd been sober for a year, and this setback was a blow to his ego. I didn't want to increase his shame, so I thanked him for his honesty, then did my best to remain calm and supportive over the next few days.
We had planned to be filming our Christmas Video that weekend, but he was too angry and depressed, so we put it off. However, as the next weekend approached, he was still wallowing. The way he could concurrently pity himself and blame me for how terribly he felt enraged me. Throwing up my hands, I emailed his brother and asked him to talk to him, since I couldn't put up with it anymore; then packed up the kids, the camera, and all our props and filmed the video myself.
It took a week, but J slowly came out of his foul mood. He talked with his brother and our therapist, then signed up for an intense 90 day version of the 12 Step Program.
I wanted to acknowledge the small victories. At least he'd been honest. At least he'd gotten back on track. I wanted this to be a bump in the road, so I let it go. I forgave and we moved on.
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*To clarify, the cycle can be a healthy part of healing-- if J had been reacting with patience and compassion, it would have been incredibly comforting to me. I think it would have established a great deal of trust and safety between us, and I think I would have begun to feel confident in his recovery. But that isn't how he reacted-- because he wasn't in recovery-- and I just kept putting myself out there, long after he'd stopped giving me valid reason to do so.
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