My wife

Farm medic

Registrant
my wife and I have been married for just over three years and have been together 16 ½ years. I never knew that love could get richer and deeper over time until I met her. She is a brilliant healer. She is a CSA survivor. Our relationship has been adventurous as we are people who do what needs doing at risk and cost to ourselves. We responded to our individual traumas as we did. A broken healer and a crooked builder. When I signed onto the BSA CSA lawsuit, I didn’t realize that I would be reliving the experience multiple times a day in my mind for the next few years. A a couple of years I was pretty out of control with the stress of my trauma and the work I was doing. Therapy has been transformative internally but not so much between my wife and I. Early winter I told her about posting a thread on here about inappropriate thoughts about children and that it was a topic that I was wrestling with. She knew of my past not long after we met. She didn’t know details of my mental state. This upset her a great deal. She could no longer help me process this stuff because I triggered her trauma so hard.
I’ve always had a hard time comforting people, even on the ambulance. When confronted by a grieving person, I tend to freeze and get defensive. Between she and I, this lends to me unleashing anger.
Her childhood home was one of silence and her mother perpetually overwhelmed and on the couch with little contact with the outside world. Little was said. I grew up with loud people. My relatives got together and drank and told stories and argued about everything at full volume. We are noisy people. I am a noisy person. I bang clang my way thru life. I hurl myself at life. Often stupidly. She seeks reserve and solitude.
With my disclosure to her causing her such distress, she has been seeking a T in Ohio that would understand our situation and takes her insurance and it has gotten nowhere.
Our every interaction has become stilted and awkward. The long silence leads me to keep talking and unloading more unhelpful yammering into an already stressful situation. I feel like an alien, observing my life, laughing at my meager attempts to be helpful and utterly missing the mark.
Are there any words of wisdom that might help us?
 

betrayed boy

Greeter
Staff member
stop talking about the abuse it triggers her and does neither of you any good, start slow with safe subjects your T is the one you should talk to about what's going on since you joined the suit against the BSA try talking to the lawyers who are doing the case im sure there's others just like you perhaps they have a hot line or someone to talk to when the pressure builds up too much idk but its worth a try.
 

mmfan

Registrant
It sounds like communication between you has shut down. I suggest a week or two of quiet and gentle space for her to digest the new information. Allow her to have her own emotions without "fixing" her and use the time to research couples therapists. Offer a couple choices, for you two to interview together and choose one who can help you two start to reopen constructive communication without shutting down or blowing up. It sounds like you tend to have an anger response to her sadness and grief (a good step that you recognize this) and this is something that can be worked on to create psychological safety between you. And a couples therapist can hopefully help allow your perspective to be heard in a way that is less threatening to her.
 
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