In 1981 I married my one and only husband to date. We were both drinking, both alcoholic but our dynamics were similar to those of my parents; he was Mr. Well and I was Ms. Sick. He came off as the responsible one and the relationship in fact was defined and perpetuated by one person being sick, weak, helpless and dependent and the other getting to pass for the manly man, the responsible one, the forebearing one ostensibly, whom everyone else canonized. Ick! Yuck! Thank God I had the good sense to end this travesty and others like it.
What interests me at the moment more than the sad, endless scripts over the years are the underlying dynamics and what they have done to me and other women who find themselves one down wondering how they got there. I conjecture that I am not alone even with all we know now as armchair psychologists. As an unwell woman, a damaged woman I didn’t pick healthy and sane men. I picked rescuers, loners, lonely and embittered men generally with a painful history themselves. We rushed into intimacy as if it came out of a cereal box. We cleaved together and whitewashed everything to look pure and possible, when we were doomed the minute we laid eyes on each other.
I still remember every single one of these excursions into hell and the names of my then loves. Out of the cradle and into the fire pit. I remember bad blow-outs with lovers that sent me to my room with the same feelings I had when things went south with Mom.
But I especially remember and relive, the pain of feeling that it was and is all my fault every time it happens. The men I’ve picked want it to be my fault. Their egos demand it. Bit by bit a woman trapped in such dynamics surrenders her power, her self-respect, her dignity, her optimism and her career if she has one or ever wanted one. I watched my mother go from being bright-eyed and engaged with her community to a blob of protoplasm in a chair waited on by my father. Despite the fact that he was shriveling up with emphysema, he ran the show. He got to come off as the strong one and the saint.
These dynamics, in my experience, are harder to overcoming than drinking ever was. I sometimes believe the purpose to all of this suffering is to help me turn to a spiritual solution– to Someone/Something that it is safe to be close to and to be loved by. I believe that there is a loving power in the universe that wants the job of nurturing us and I’ve experienced that to be the case–when I’ve let myself be open to it. When I was in the nursing home with people dying on either side of me and absolutely nothing going the way I thought it should, I turned to the Unseen. I found a way to transcend my own brokenness. And yes: years of therapy of all kinds.
After reading your previous post in which you shared the painful tale of a mother, victimized by shock treatments and further self-injuring with an addiction to alcohol, I feel I understand where you get the feeling you need to pack up and run…or do you? As you said, arm-chair psychology-I am certainly NOT a psychologist, but I am the child of a woman given to emotional pain so great that it enveloped her entire personality many times as I grew up. My father, an aerospace executive by day and cocaine addict by night, also caused chaos in our home. It left me feeling small and unnoticed and the sense of constant dread haunted me even into adulthood. The feeling of running away didn’t leave me on its own; it’s been a process. I married a rescuer and am happily married still, twenty years later. Oh, it wasn’t always that way. Much of what you describe here fits how we were, two broken souls trying to fix a puzzle; one we never had a complete picture of. We are figuring it out and with each passing year, love has grown, patience has grown, I stopped blaming myself for marrying a rescuer and being a co-dependent. I just began to work and fix all that I could.
While I would never presume your situation is like mine, or even that you feel the need to escape much like I did based on serious and ongoing childhood trauma, I can tell you this…you are not alone. I will be saying a prayer for you tonight.
Thanks very much, Lisa. I’ll keep you in my thoughts–xxxj