TexasMama

Therapy 3 - the Answers

OK. Back to those answers.  I'll take them in turn. But since it's been a while, the Question was "Why are you here (in couples counseling)?"

Answer1: For the most part, we are fine.  We don't fight or yell, we enjoy one another's company.  We have no major cultural issues that are at odds with the other.  We have similar religious and political views.  We have the best son that ever was.   He is a bit of a mama's boy and that may be a contributing factor.  So you see, we're ahead of a lot of couples.  But that's not enough for S- and he does have a point. 

Answer 2:  Yes, it's true.  I have serious problems with relationships.  It's not just sexual ones,  I have very few close friends, either.  I just seem unable to give much to any relationship.  Perhaps it is because I am a fundamentally selfish person.  But I am willing to do just about anything for people I care about, I just don't often think to do them.  My husband does the bulk of the housework, (at least what is not done by the part-time nanny, which really is most of it, but still...) most of the cooking, most of the shopping.  To be fair, he also cares a lot more about how things are cleaned or cooked and what gets bought.  He makes pretty much all the money, and is very good about helping with our son.  When you get right down to it, I'm really not offering much to the relationship, other than being kind of cute and the mother of his son. 

Then there the sex issue.  I honestly could just do without it.  I enjoy it when we get around to it, but it's not a driving factor.  I find it difficult to keep my mind on the subject at hand during sex, everything else creeps in and invades my mind.  It's just hard for me to get into it.  It's been the same in every long relationship I've had, the first few months I'm interested, after that, not so much.  I think there are some really complex reasons for my lack of interest that have to do with my upbringing (very sheltered, my introduction to sex (very young) and my very weak will.  I should probably do a whole post on that at some point but I'm not sure I really want to get into it that much.  I will say that while I love my parents and hope I can be as good a parent as they are, I totally disagree with there complete lack of discussion about sex, drugs, and other such teen issues.  That is the one area in which I hope to be dramatically different from my parents.

The result though, is that at some point before William was even an idea, we started having intimacy issues.  Our discussions about it centered around 2 big issues.  He didn't feel like I was still interested in him and I felt the only time either of us expressed any affection was leading to or during sex.  There was no in between, it was all or nothing.  That made me afraid to express affection at times I did not want to have sex, which made S- feel more rejected.  It's all snowballed of course, because the more S- felt rejected the less he showed affection.  He left it up to me but I'm not all that interested.  So now, if I do start something, he feels I'm just trying to make him happy, if I don't, he feels neglected. 

Somehow, he often manages to start something when there isn't time to do much.  If I say something, he feels rejected, but the one time I tried not saying anything G- woke up before much had happened and he resented that too.  When we talked later, he agreed that that was worse than me saying something, but he still gets upset when I do.  If we could find a middle ground of just affection but not sex, it would help that problem immensely.  But for some reason we can't.  I know part of it is that S- feels like he gets action so rarely, the slightest advance turns him on completely.  And I think he also feels like he needs to take advantage of the slightest show of interest.  But that, of course, makes it even harder for me to want to show interest.

Answer 3: has to do with S- and how he aggravates the problems in Answer 2 and add his own little neuroses.  As I mentioned before, he rarely shows affection when it isn't going to result in sex.  He also has his own long history of relationships with people that were not able to hold up their end of the deal, his parents, previous girlfriends, etc.  I'm not really sure he knows what a healthy relationship should be.  So in part I think he is projecting on me, some of the attributes he's seen in other relationship, in other words, being hyper sensitive.

He also has a serious issue with how my parents treat him/us as compared to how they treat our BIL/my sister.  He believe they do more for them, are more interested in their lives, care more about their children, and like the BIL more than him.  In a certain way, he is right.  They do treat us differently, but that is because we have made it clear that is what we want.  S- would never allow them to loan us money or pay our rent, he would never want that, but he still resents when they do it for them.  He would not want my mother practically raising our child, but he resents that she spends more time with their children.  He gets upset that they sometimes pay for my sister's hotel on vacation, but he knows they could not come if they had to pay for it themselves.  Plus the BIL came into our lives when he was 16 years old.  S- was 32.  BIL is practically a son to them, S- came to the family a fully opinionated adult.  It is a whole different kind of relationship, bit S- resents what he sees as favoritism towards the BIL.

The problem in all this, though, is that I too have a serious inferiority complex when it comes to my relationship with my parents.  My sister is much more like them and has always needed/wanted their support and input more than I have.  Intellectually, I understand this but when my mother forgets she was supposed to keep G- I can't help but let those little questions creep in.  Maybe she doesn't love my baby as much, Maybe...  What I need from Erick is reassurance, not more doubt.  It's a big emotional issue for me and they are MY family and it is much harder for me to deal with.  He might feel a bit slighted by them, but my whole world would basically unhinge if what he were saying was true.  I've pointed this out to him many times but he seems unable to support me on the issue.

Finally there is the problem of the lack of respect I feel from him.  We are both architects and have been trying to design a house for ourselves basically since we got married 6.5 years ago.  I have finally had to accept that if I want to ever have a house, I will have to let him design it.  We don't work all that well together and he simply will not accept something that I have designed because he does not believe it could be as good as what he would do.  He cites his greater experience, blah, blah, blah, but the fact of the matter is that he simply does not respect me as a professional.  Every time we discuss the house, we end up fighting, not over the house, but over our treatment of the other.  But our current house is springing apart at the seams and simply does not suit our needs anymore.  That alone puts a huge stress on the marriage so we really need to get the new plans complete, but trying to complete them strains the marriage even more.  I'm trying to step away from the whole thing because at this point I just want a house.   But I have more free time than he does so, it frustrated me that I can't help get it done.  NOW.

So there are plenty of issues to work out, but I'm not really sure a therapist is going to help that much, other than perhaps making a particular time that we have to set aside to discuss all this.  She is gone for the next 3 weeks so we'll see how we do in that time.  Hopefully we can make some progress on our own before we see her again.

Therapy 2 or The Longest Post in History

Well, I’m setting aside my exploration of the possible answers for a while because I have too much other stuff running around in my head right now.  We went for out first session of therapy today and I have to say I am now a little scared, for two reasons.  One, S- sees things in a much worse light that I thought.  And I’m not really seeing that he sees a lot of hope in things improving.  Two, we have inadvertently landed on a very anti-AP therapist.    Right now I need to deal with the AP part because the S- part would be better addresses in my thoughts about reasons we are going.  Plus I need to get my thoughts out in order to “fight back.”

Problem 1 with having an anti-AP therapist is that DH has never been on board 100% on the whole thing.  To be honest, I wish I had never mentioned the term Attachment Parenting to him, because that is not really what we are doing, at least not in the dogmatic way of most people who identify themselves with attachment parenting.  We don’t co-sleep and never really did, I weaned my son in a very parent-led manner, it was gentle but it was decidedly not his choice, I work outside the home nearly 25 hours a week, purely by choice,  I use time outs (though we call it chair time and I sit near him) , and I use the threat and follow-through of separation to get him to go to sleep at night.  However, I firmly believe in the absolute importance of the relationship of mother and child, and that a close, attached relationship early in life is THE BEST foundation for the child’s future life.* 

But S- has latched onto the idea of attachment parenting as the sole root cause of G-‘s sleep problems.  He fails to realize how far from attachment parenting we really are and insists that I have some kind of “agenda” in my parenting and that I’m following some system regardless for wether it works for our child.  But we are not following some of the base tennents of AP specifically because I found they did not work for our child.  Co-sleeping is a prime example.  He is also convince I spend hours comparing notes with other attachment parents and that all the tiem I spend on-line, “chatting with my girlfriends” as he says, is some way in furherence of this AP agenda.  He has a fair gripe that I spend to much time on line, but in fact, almost none of it is spent in AP communities as I have long since been ostrisised for my un-AP practices.  I actually spend more time in infertility circles than AP ones, and most of my time is spent with a first time moms group that is very mixed to the point of including some folks following Ezzo.**

So S- brings up the idea of AP in our session today and we spent a lot of time focusing on the differences in our views on parenting and how this is impacting our marriage.  By the end of the session, the therapist was convince that G- runs our house and it is completely because of him that we are having marital problems.  She had S- nearly convinced that this was our main problem, until we left and were discussing it.  And eventually I got him back to what I see as the real problem: the intimacy issues.  He agrees, of course, and since we had some of these problems before G-, it can’t be all because of him.  But I am afraid that the therapist will be able to divert attention away from the real issues and convince S- that my parenting choises are the problem.  Or at the very least, create more friction between us due to parenting issues, when I really believe that while those issues may be exacerbating the problem, the root is something else entirely.

Problem 2 with having an anti-AP therapist is that I think it will likely color her counseling.  I think she may not be able to accept that it is possible to do some version of AP and still have a healthy marriage.  And this is where my real disagreement with her begins.  She drew a little diagram of what she says is the healthy parent child relationship.  The parents are parallel on top and the child is below.  She said we need to put our own individual needs first and then our needs as a couple and then the needs of the child.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize I just fundamentally disagree with that analysis.  I absolutely agree that it is very important to have a strong marriage, that we need to make the health of our marriage more of a priority.  I also agree that it is important for each of us to take care of our own needs.  However, I simply do not accept that the needs of the child should come last.  In my mind, all people in all relationships should be of equal importance. 

For any relationship to be healthy, I believe the needs of all the individuals in the relationship need to be considered equally.  Just because one of those individuals is a child should not automatically render his needs less important.  In fact I believe there is a period of time, from birth to about, say, 2 years, that the needs of the child absolutely should come first, by simple virtue of the fact that the child cannot see to his own needs.  I also think the fact that a child under two has no comprehension of the needs of others has to play into the treatment of young children.  They simply do not understand that the world does not exist for them, and a parent ignoring the needs of a child or putting their own needs first is teaching the child that his needs are not important and will not be met.  Somewhere around 2 years old, they begin to gain the capability to recognize that others have needs as well.

If we accept that all people need to take care of their own needs first, we have to consider the fact that an infant or young child cannot really take care his own needs as he has no way of enforcing what he needs.  That means it is up to the parents to make sure the child’s needs receive equal consideration.  This, in my mind is one of the sacrifices of parenting.  I chose to have a child and he is now my responsibility.  I do not get to continue living my life as if he did not exist.  Nor do I want to.  His childhood is a very short time in both my life and the life of our marriage and we should be able to make that temporary sacrifice without it destroying our relationship.

Where I see common ground with our therapist is that I do believe it is possible for the parents to continue to put the needs of the child first when it is time to be transitioning to a place that everyone’s needs are equal.  I think we have reached that point, and she is absolutely right that we need to begin to help G- respect that his parents have needs that are equally important to his.  I do not believe that this will require a fundamental change in parenting style.  He has come a long way in the past few months, learning to play by himself for longer periods and sleeping much longer periods.  I see no reason that we cannot continue to make improvement with out ignoring him when he calls. 

She asked what I would say if she told me that the more gradual transition I was suggesting would result in more distance in the marriage.  I answered that I saw no reason we couldn’t work on the two things simultaneously.  And I still don’t.  As I said before, I think it is possible that some aspects of our disagreement over parenting are probably contributing to marital stress, but the actual fact of the way we are parenting, is not the problem.  After all, G- is in bed on most nights by 8pm and we do not go to bed until 10 or 11.  That should be plenty of time for us to connect as a couple but we aren’t.  Being able to put William in his room and have him put himself to sleep would not really affect that.  In fact, if it meant listening to him cry for me, it would totally ruin any chance of us enjoying one another and it would make me very resentful.  It might help if he slept a little bit later but I can’t see that forcing him into it with a week of sleep training would help the marriage that much more than taking a month or two to work on it with him gently.

So why, you might ask, do I want to continue to see this therapist?  Well, she comes highly recommended from sources I trust, S- likes her and this therapy thing is really his deal, and in the end, I believe having to defend my parenting choices to her will both strengthen my own resolve and help explain to S- why I feel the way I do.  Also, I agree with much of what she said about what the endpoint needs to be, I just don’t agree with her recommendations of how to get there.  But I think there is a lot to be gained from hearing the other side because I know in my heart it is possible to have exactly the same healthy relationship between parents even while practicing some form of attachment parenting.  If it weren’t possible, AP parents would be getting divorced all over the place and they are not.  At least not any more than anyone else.  SO hearing where she thinks we need to be, and getting there, still being true to my own parenting beliefs, will go a long way in reinforcing for me, for S- and maybe even for the therapist, that AP ideas are OK and can still allow for a good marriage.

*Interestingly, I heard a lecture today by an emergency medicine physician on the relationship of poverty to health. His specific area of study is health trends in populations and the relationship of wealth and health.  Among other truly fascinating things, he said that the single greatest factor in determining a child’s future health is the secure, early attachment of the child to his mother.  He also commented in passing that people in Nepal, though desperately poor by our standards are generally healthier and happier, and they never let their children cry.  I have much more to say about this lecture but it will be a whole post unto itself.

**Who I have to agree with Jo (I think?) is pure evil.

Therapy

I find it highly ironic that I started this blog with a reference to my non-existent therapist and now I suddenly find myself with TWO therapists.  The blog was supposed to help me work my issues out, not make them so much worse I actually need to see someone.  Ah well, perhaps it's simply opened my eyes.  Or more likely, the blog has nothing to do with anything and I've needed therapy for a long time.  The more the better.

So, at my husbands behest, we are off to the marriage counselor tomorrow.  I have mixed feelings about this.  My sister's marriage is such a mess right now that in comparison, I think we are just doing dandy.  But I can also see the benefit of heading off the problems before they become too big to handle.  I go back and forth on why we need therapy in the first place.  I envision the woman asking, "So, why are you here?"  And I have several answers.

"I'm not sure.  Ask him.  I think we're fine just going through normal new parent/ post miscarriage stuff."  But as you'll see from my other possible answers, that's kind of deluding myself.  I do feel that way sometimes though.  I mean, in comparison, we are fine.  S- however, does not agree.

"Well, it's about 70% my issues.  75% of that being that I am completely sexually and relationship(ly?) dysfunctional, and 30% that I have major inferiority complex/self esteem issues. Then about 20% things S- probably unintentionally but still legitimately, does to aggravate my issues, and 5% issues he has from his upbringing, etc."  This is probably largely true, and I know S- would pretty much agree with it.  He's said a few times that he thinks we'll have a few sessions together and then she'll want to just see me, so I can work all this stuff out.  He's quite likely right, but I can't really see how it will help.  Then again, I've not tried therapy before so what do I know.  More on my doubts about it later.

My last answer isn't exactly formed except that I think there has to be an option the S- is just as much to blame as I am.  And when I begin exploring the things he does to aggravate my issues, I start believing that even more.  The problem is they are still MY issues.  So does that really make it his fault.

Well, I started to go through the potential answers one by one, but I'm out of time.  Must get to the gym for a three mile run.  Assuming the lung stays in place.  I'll tackle them this evening I hope, as I really want to get through this thought process before tomorrow.

***********

Yikes!  I told my family I am sexually disfunctional, and I mentioned my sister's marriage.  Oh do I ever hope no one saw it.  Aye, yie, yie.