[nocolgate]

Hope people don't mind. I just wrote this today and felt like I needed to share it. It's a little stream of conscious so I hope it makes sense. Please feel free to respond or ask questions. This could trigger people as it mentions some child abuse.

I started a healing path in September. My life felt empty every day. My walk to work felt like a death march. Everything felt like a solid grey mass. Just a bland, hard, unfeeling nothing. But I was also angry, really, really angry. I punched a hole in the wall of my apartment a year before. I purposely shoved people out of the way on the street if I thought I wasn’t being given the space I deserved. I was mad at everyone, people on the street, people in stores and restaurants, my wife, myself, but especially my mother.

I was thinking about my childhood all the time. I don’t ever recall happy memories from my childhood. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t happy moments but the things that I remember over and over are my mom grabbing my brother by the back of his hair and slamming his forehead into the wall over and over in the middle of the night. Her condemnation of all sex, sexuality, and the male gender as a whole.

I remember every month waiting in the parking lot of the post office in the back seat while my mom went in to check every twenty minutes if the mail had arrived so that we could get the child support from my dad. And often it didn’t arrive on time and we went back over and over again until it showed up. Hours of my week sitting wondering why my mom wouldn’t get a job. That $800 a month was all my mother lived on for years.

My stepdad supplemented our income with a part time job at a health food store. I think about moving. I think about losing my friends over and over. I think about walking around the outer perimeter of the playground, looking straight down at the ground for weeks or months. I hated recess, I didn’t know how to talk to anyone or socialize and no one tried to talk to me. I just sat in corners and took the desk furthest away from everyone else, I was so lonely and wanted to belong so badly but I was so intensely afraid of not being accepted.

And people did hurt me. People saw I was alone and they beat me up. Over and over and over and over and over. I don’t even know how many times anymore. It became routine. I asked for help and no one helped. It traveled from school to school. I was a target. Most people stayed away from me and treated me like I was disgusting by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade.

The hardest move was the summer before 8th grade. I came home from visiting my dad and my mom told me we were moving to far away in two weeks. I’d never heard from my mom that we were going to move again or about the state we were moving to at any point before that. That one broke me. I just decided at that point that I wouldn’t care, I wouldn’t try anymore. I wouldn’t do well in school, I wouldn’t make friends. I was just a body moving around, waiting until I could get away.

I hate my mom for what she did to me. I really hate her. Seeing her is so hard. Talking to her is so hard. Yet she demands it, regularly. So even as an adult I still feel like I am in her cage. Everything is on her terms. I lived in another state from her for 8 years and she never visited me once. I was broke, hungry (literally going days without eating), hurting, and she never tried to help. In fact, she continued to take from me and hurt me.

I recently decided I would be less available to her and there was an instant shift in my feelings. I stopped thinking as much or as seriously about my childhood. I still resent it a lot but it doesn’t hurt me as much. Before this I had issues with my wife over the years. I talked to her periodically (it feels like about once a year). A few months into dating her I really wanted to break up with her. Being with her was really really hard. She was depressed all the time. She was stubborn. I didn’t like the relationship. I complained to my friends about it constantly. I tried to break up with her and she just wouldn’t leave my apartment. She just was so sad looking and kept saying over and over “you don’t want to be with me?”.

I finally agreed that we could try to continue the relationship if she got therapy because I couldn’t handle her depression on my own. She did not openly agree. She just continued to look down and be silent, she didn’t leave. She didn’t respond. I didn’t know how to handle it. We went to bed and woke up and went to brunch the next day. I hated how that had happened. I resented her for two years. I was in a very one sided relationship I didn’t know how to get out of but I desperately wanted out of it. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt her for some reason.

After a while I just accepted it but had moments over the years (about once a year) where I would sit her down and tell her things that were really bothering me in our relationship (her messiness, her lack of consideration of my schedule, how we just feel like roommates that sleep together, not partners, how I wanted better things and I wanted support and help achieving things in life) but every time I talked to her she appeared not to get it on a very fundamental level. She would lower her head and look at the floor and cry but she would not tell me what she thought or how she felt.

Sometimes things would get better for a few days, but never more than a few days. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so trapped. I love my now wife - her personality, her voice, her smell, her work, her ambition but I just always felt like she just walked right over my needs time and time again without a single thought. Or if there was a thought, it wasn’t ever shared with me.

And now here I am. I don’t like my life. I don’t like my career, I don’t like working with the people I work with, I don’t like most of my friends, I don’t like my wife anymore, I don’t like my home, I don’t like being alive. So I thought my job was the biggest problem in my life. I was sitting at my desk all day hating my life. It was making me work slower, it was harder to deal with my clients.

So I got a therapist with the angle that they would help me out of my career slump. Through this we discovered there are much bigger problems. I’ve always been depressed and anxious and now… this hopelessness. So I went to a psychiatrist. They prescribed me drugs and gave me some useful conflict resolution tools.

It took me a while and it was hard but I finally sat my wife down and talked to her about our problems and I told her in no uncertain terms that this was a big problem for me and that as is, I did not see the relationship as sustainable. There were a few days where she really cleaned up a lot of her stuff and we donated things, made the house look a little nicer. But then it kind of went back to normal again. She was cleaning a little more but it was a small thing once every few days. She still threw her trash on the floor and left the vast majority of the housework, pet care, and financial burden to me. She even asked me to start paying more of our bills.

When I tell her about work problems she says sorry and rubs my back but just doesn’t seem connected or “there” for me. She doesn’t make herself more available or try to see how we could arrange our lives so that I might be happier even though I am constantly doing that for her. I want to help her in her life. But I also want her to help me. I don’t think that is too much to ask for.

All these feelings have left me completely unattracted to her. I still do try to initiate sex with her but she never really responds to it. I feel easily defeated or rejected. I want a sex life. Right now I want it to be with almost anyone else but her. If I could snap my fingers right now and make a change, I would just move out today and start a new life without her. I want that very badly actually. But I don’t know if that’s the right choice. Hurting her is hard and she is easily hurt.

[bpcyclist]

Really sorry for everything you have suffered through. That sounds super tough> i related to a lot of what you wrote personally, but I won't bore you with my stuff.

Was wondering a few things. Have you guys ever tried couples therapy? Is the work you are doing with the pdoc and therapist helping you make any progress do you think?

[nocolgate]

hi bpcyclist, thank for the reply! We have not tried couples therapy but have agreed to try soon. I have a therapist who has agreed to do it so hopefully that will be a helpful process. The work with the pdoc and therapist seems to be making progress but it is INTENSE working so hard on my life right now. I am trying to address my childhood, my job, my relationship, my confidence, my sense of self, my long term depression and anxiety/social anxiety. So even though I feel progress happening, I sometimes feel worse than ever. I'm unsure exactly what the medicine is doing or if what I am on what is best for me. I do feel more free to take action in my life since starting medication which is very liberating but I'm also just sad and stuck in negative thought cycles all the time, I really almost never have positive thoughts or memories (this is not new but it has not improved on the meds).

[Uncharted]

I'm so sorry to hear about your troubles and that you're unhappy with your life (I am too). What it looks like to me is (and maybe I'm wrong) that the relationship with your wife is, in a way, similar to the one with your mom, which is the case a lot of the time with our partners/bfs/gfs/etc. It's good you agreed to try therapy together and I hope it goes well for you both. But even if it doesn't, you should know you're strong enough to do whatever you want in your life and you deserve to be happy, with or without your wife and/or your current job. It's never too late to change things up in whatever area of your life.