# Feeling alone again



## Seekingpeace001 (Nov 2, 2014)

My wife and I have been married almost 6 years and we have been in marriage counseling for 5 of those. I love my wife dearly but we have very different beliefs about love. I sometimes feel like we did not take enough time to get to know one another before I proposed and I take full responsibility for the challenges we are facing now. My wife and I were raised very differently and I feel like that plays a huge role in our communication. I express and receive love through sacrifice, service, collaboration and communication. My wife seems to most relate love to physical contact and light-hearted dates. What I need seems so overwhelming to my wife that she completely shuts down around me and I understand she is trying to express what she considers love to me but it feels more like affection or veiled neediness. To make matters worse I have an optimistic worldview that we cannot seem to share. This may not seem like a big issue but I equate optimism to faith and her pessimism and negativity feels like a constant challenge to my beliefs. My wife often make negative, cutting or hurtful remarks to me in the guise of playful banter which I think may be part of a cycle of mental abuse that started in her childhood. I know this comes from being hurt herself and I have to constantly remind myself that she loves me and doesn't mean to hurt me. In lieu of not being negative she will just not say anything to anyone for hours unless it is to correct someone's behavior. It also worries me that she thinks our children don't understand cynicism or sarcasm and somehow won't beimpacted by this cycle. We are working on making things work but I feel like I ant take it any more. She feels like she is failing and I am ashamed to ask for anything from her considering how difficult it is for her to just be nice let alone loving. I can see that when I ask her for something to make me feel loved she genuinely has no idea what that means no matter how many therapy session we have had discussing it. She recently told me that she did not intend to fall in love with me but that she is now. I have been in love with her since the second month we were together and I am willing to do anything to make her happy and to make her feel loved. She has made it clear that has a limited capacity to express her emotions and she is unable to see herself giving much of anything for me other than sharing a meal or light conversation. Reassurance, healing, spiritual nourishment, intellectual engagement, supported growth, encouragement...it's not happening any time soon. I've given everything I can and I feel like my heart is literally breaking waiting to be loved by my wife in a way that I can feel. I've gone outside of our marriage once emotional support but never physically but I need so desperately to not feel like a fool waiting to be loved by someone who's only know hurt. I suffer from anxiety and depression which exacerbates all of our issues big and small. Unfortunately when I'm struggling with it is when I need her that I remember that the relationship essentially relies on my emotional capacity and resilience. Hopefully I just need someone to talk me through this...
Edit: advice from anyone whose spouse is a survivor of childhood trauma would be much appreciated


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## 2ntnuf (Jul 14, 2012)

Home | The 5 Love Languages®

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/pdf/HNHN-ch1.pdf


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## Uptown (Mar 27, 2010)

Seekingpeace001 said:


> Advice from anyone whose spouse is a survivor of childhood trauma would be much appreciated


SP, welcome to the TAM forum. I was married to a woman who had been sexually abused by her own dad during her childhood. I spent a small fortune taking her to weekly sessions with six different psychologists (and 3 MCs) for 15 years -- all to no avail. My experience is that, when a person is traumatized in early childhood, her emotional development is frozen at the level she achieved before the trauma occurs. 

What apparently happens is that, in order to survive this trauma, the child keeps a death grip on the ego defenses available to young children. These include, e.g., projection, black-white thinking, denial, cold withdrawal, and blameshifting. She relies on those primitive defenses so heavily that she does not move on to acquire the more mature ways of dealing with emotions. 

If this happened to your W and her issues are serious, I believe you will find MC to be a total waste of time and money. Although MCs often are excellent in teaching communication skills, they generally are not trained in identifying -- much less treating -- strong traits of a personality disorder that has been entrenched since childhood. What is needed, instead, is years of treatment by a psychologist who has the experience and specialized training needed to teach clients how to acquire the emotional skills they were unable to learn in childhood.

Sadly, even if your city has such a psychologist available, it is very unlikely your W will seek him out or -- even if she does -- will remain in therapy long enough to make a difference. The reason is that her way of thinking is "ego-syntonic," i.e., such a natural part of the way she's been thinking for decades that her issues are invisible to her. She therefore is likely to have great difficulty in seeing she has a problem and -- even if she does sense something is wrong -- is likely to have no desire to fix it.


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