I'm still getting stuck in that area of wondering what I did wrong, or maybe if I did this or said that, the break up wouldn't have happened. This type of thinking usually happens in the morning, or, even more often, in the middle of the night, when I wake up with that realization that things will never be the same.
Then, around the middle of the morning, my full grasp of reality takes hold. I am at this point aware that there was nothing that I could have done differently; the result would be the same. This is because, I realize, I was married to someone who was not capable of thinking in a emotionally mature manner. In other words, I was expecting behavior from him that was not part of who he was. I expected him to see our marriage as a series of ups and downs, the usual various problems that couples work through together. He could only experience things through his own sense of inner pain which had been instilled in him through a bad childhood.
What I am trying to say is that, although through our own marriage he had experienced both the pain of arguments as well as the sense of accomplishment that comes from working through issues together, he could, at times, be overcome with an overwhelming fear of abandonment which sprang from issues in his childhood, over which I had absolutely no control. And so, during these times, getting him to see these problems as molehills rather than mountains became an impossible task. My expecting him to be someone without this emotional baggage would be like trying to buy a hamburger at a video store – just not something that he had available, and my expecting it was not going to make it appear.
When I look at what happened in these terms, it makes more sense to me, and makes me more aware that there was nothing that I could have done. Maybe this little epiphany will be the key to my getting unstuck and be able to move forward at last.
No comments:
Post a Comment