Marriage Counseling

Marriage Counseling
My wife and I will start marriage counseling in early January. We have such a strange relationship. We love each other, enjoy being with each other and laugh a lot. But we both avoid conflict which leads to resentment. And we both suck at communicating. I am terrified of being in counseling individually to deal with my CSA while also addressing issues in our marriage. It feels overwhelming. I know I need to improve how I relate with my wife. But I also need to improve how I relate to myself, my God, and my friends. Sometimes it seems too much. Next week my counselor wants to lay out a framework to help me know if I can do both. He wants to take a 'wait and see' approach to whether I suspend my individual counseling while I do marriage or whether I can do both in parallel.

I worry about suspending individual counseling. I heard someone joke that counseling is like paying someone to kick you in the balls. I worry that if I stop it for awhile while I do marriage counseling that I won't want to come back. My wife has said repeatedly that she doesn't want me to do marriage counseling if it feels overwhelming for me. But she is been in limbo for a year while I try to get my act together. I feel like I owe it to her to try. I wish none of this stuff happened to me. I wish I didn't bring so much brokenness into my marriage. I wish there was an easier way.
 
You don't mention it, but I wonder whether you're seeing a different counselor for marriage counseling. I know some therapists will do both, but I also know that can create problems since the existing relationship between client and therapist can be interpreted by a spouse as putting themselves one down. That isn't a great place to begin this process.

Since you posted this on the Family and Friends forum, I'm assuming you want to hear from partners of survivors, so I'll hold my comments for later. I respect your willingness to look at how the trauma has impacted your marriage and to work with your wife to find a healthier way of relating with one another. You CAN be allies for one another and this process may give you the tools you need to be able to do that. All the best to you both.
 
You’ve got this my friend, how much does your wife already know about what you are dealing with? Does she know deeper than the detached non associated stories? With your counsellors support you might consider putting some of your worries and experiences down in a letter for her to read. Your love and need to protect her and not change the dynamic of your relationship comes across in this post, as does your need to be true to your past and your inner child. Giving you both an understanding of the nature of the challenges you are facing and how you want to be able to express your feeling for her and strengthen your bond and relationship further.

I learnt that once I told my wife about my past, and it’s impacts on me today and the shame and gilt I felt for enjoying it and going back for more not understanding then the reasons this was not my thought. What I saw was she started to understand me more, for example why I was only ever OK, alright or fine, as I had no concept of the emotions I was feeling at anyone time. Why I was never able to see the positive about myself and how everything I had achieved didn’t feel real, or wasn’t the real me. These are things she has seen and as me being dismissive or detached, but once she understood she was able to helps me to address these issues daily, I am never fine I am sad, lonely, angry. She makes me identify the real emotion. Secondly, she questions me when I disassociate, “Where are you now, what are you thinking about? Through her understanding and helping me to process and put away my past traumas,we have grown closer.
 
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hi greg,, heres a way to try doing both do one each week 1st week do couples the next do your own and so on see how it goes if your good with it problem solved.
 
Couples t can be super helpful but it can also be overwhelming. The try it and see approach seems reasonable. If too overwhelming and destabilizing, you have options. Another approach that can be less overwhelming in my experience, is for each partner to talk about the relationship separately in their own individual sessions. I can vent to my own t without filtering myself, and she can gently help me develop scripts and new approaches to try between sessions. Then i report to her next week on how it went. I can tell he is doing the same with his own t -sometimes after a session he will suddenly ask a question he's never asked before, or react in a new way to an old argument.

The separate sessions help me, personally, to feel a sense of control over the flood of information/emotions and kind of modulate the pacing better. It also helps me to stay in my own head and reinforce that i can only control myself and my own behavior, and that i am in the driver's seat of myself, which is reassuring.
 
Some time ago I posted that my marriage was in a really bad place and I didn’t know what to do: stay or leave seemed to be the only options for me because I was always so angry with my wife. I told her I thought we should try marriage counseling. But after our first session, it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had no business putting my wife through marriage counseling until I dealt with my own problems from CSA.

That realization turned out to be very comforting to me because I knew it was the responsible and respectful thing to do for both of us. In the following months, I gained enough insight to see that many of my negative feelings about her came from the little boy inside me who always wanted his mother to “fix” what she had done to him. In other words, I had unconsciously linked my anger at my mom with my feelings towards my wife. This realization was liberating to my sense of what is possible for our relationship and was also a big relief from all the guilt I was having about being angry at her in the first place. My problems aren’t over by a long shot, but I think this was a big step forward in terms of our marriage.
 
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Beautiful work Steve. That was a profound realization that you needed to do your work first. You've really uncovered some very important material. I always hoped my wife... in fact every one of my FOUR wives... to save me. And they never did or COULD. The residue of trauma I've carried my entire life was really mine to attend to. In fact, I'm just now acknowledging how much pain I caused my wives because I'm still in relationship with my fourth wife and we're speaking truth to one another. Hopefully, you can use your discoveries in therapy to build a healthier relationship with your wife. All the best to you both.
 
Beautiful work Steve. That was a profound realization that you needed to do your work first. You've really uncovered some very important material. I always hoped my wife... in fact every one of my FOUR wives... to save me. And they never did or COULD. The residue of trauma I've carried my entire life was really mine to attend to. In fact, I'm just now acknowledging how much pain I caused my wives because I'm still in relationship with my fourth wife and we're speaking truth to one another. Hopefully, you can use your discoveries in therapy to build a healthier relationship with your wife. All the best to you both.

Thank you, Visitor. Of course, my experience is just that - it doesn’t apply to everyone.
 
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What does apply Steve is that we need to do our own work... expecting others to make our lives work is a sign of our disease, not our healing. You model that beautifully. We need such reminders.
 
Yes, I have to echo what Visitor says. My guy has been doing his own work after a few episodes that made it clear to me that the relationship wouldn't work just as is - and why it is working and growing is because he keeps putting in his own work on his own issues and is not asking me to make accommodations for him, or to make his life work. I can't say we will survive the long haul - we are at 6 months in this relationship - but what I can say is no other man in the past has ever stepped up to own his own issues remotely close to what my guy is doing. Bc of a confluence of a number of events, he is supremely motivated to deal with his own shit. And he knows my life does not admit of garbage in it - I have a pretty full life that is not dysfunctional and worked hard to get it there. He has a ways to go on some central issues, but we are also managing this relationship so those issues are not becoming my issues in any serious way. And I know that the support he feels from me about his facing his demons definitely gives him strength to keep on facing himself. This isn't to say at some point we won't feel that a couples therapist could help us manage any residue of emotional shit we each might still have, but my guy is not ready for that - and knows this is the time for doing his own work. The best thing I can do for him is just stay calm and even keeled while he's going through the emotional upheavals of facing some pretty nasty truths.
 
Well after all my stress about marriage counseling my wife and I decided not to do it right now. It just didn't seem like the right time and it felt like we were trying to work too hard to make it work with the counselor we had chosen. The biggest obstacle is that she is only doing virtual visits. We have no acoustic privacy in our house and couldn't find a place to do virtual sessions. I also struggled because the intake form was quite comprehensive and intrusive. The form "causally" asked detailed questions about different types of trauma. There didn't seem to be any appreciation that the questions might be difficult to answer for someone who had experienced trauma. It made me wonder how much experience the counselor had with trauma and if she was the right counselor for us.

My wife and I are comfortable with that decision for now. I continue to try and help our marriage by getting my issues healed. That is not a substitute for the work we need to do as a couple but it will still help.
 
Sounds like a good decision Greg... patience and kindness are keys here. That communication is open between the two of you is a good sign. You have important work to do and I KNOW from what you share on the board that you are doing it. Deep respect.
 
You add to this conversation with your observations Unexpected. I have great respect for how you're navigating this most challenging territory with your guy... This is the kind of dialogue that is priceless for both survivors and their loved ones. I really appreciate this forum.
 
I have nothing to add, except to echo what betrayed boy and mmfan suggested. The fact that you are worried and considering your wife’s feelings says a lot. The only thing I have to add is to be as open and honest with your wife as possible. If you’re not telling her how you feel or what your needs are, then her mind will fill in the blanks and more than likely it will be no where near the reality.
 
I agree wholeheartedly with karin4him. I have discovered that once my survivor opened up and told me significantly more about what he was struggling with, it was no where near what I was imagining, and very relieving. The situation reminded me of when you have a little child and you assume the child is behaving in a certain way because you bring your adult assumptions into the situation. Then when you explore what is going on for the child, it has absolutely nothing to do with what you might have imagined. I can't say there will be always be a positive result in what the spouse finds out and how she can cope, but there is a lot of grounding and lessening of co-dependent behaviors when the full truth is on the table and not shrouded.
 
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