Why Men and Women Give Up Couples Therapy

My wife is divorcing me after 12 years. I don’t want a divorce. It’s clear she is unhappy about something, but she cannot articulate it and does not have “bandwidth” to talk about it. Even in therapy she can’t quite spit it out. Small bits and pieces are revealed, but its far easier (for her) to just leave the marriage than face the unresolved traumas of childhood and young adulthood.

I am not crying. I am not curled up like a ball on the floor. I am not a victim. I have to go to work. I am becoming a single Dad at with a 3 yo and 7 yo and a 26 yo from a former marriage. I stay busy and moping is not an option.

I agreed to move out of the house to give her the room and space and time she could not say she needed but was clear she needed…

With these two beautiful sons I feel deeply obligated to at least try and understand what is happening. I am a good listener. I am a good provider. I have been faithful. I love and respect and appreciate my wife. I did not tell her that every day…and maybe I did not think it every day…but I do now. My sense of belonging to this family is very important to me. I want to make it work. I have told her this every day for 8 months of separation.

When I found out she was having an affair with some loser bloke in Australia 18 months ago I agreed to couples therapy. She continued to FB message him. I don’t do Social Media because its clearly just one big collective lie. And when we lie to ourselves we corrupt the instinctual mechanism that gives our lives meaning. (Rule #8 Jordan Peterson) Social Media is the furthest thing from giving our lives meaning.

We spent 4 months once a week talking to our therapist by Zoom and all it accompished was opening up the can of worms all women have inside themselves. And my wife had a BIG can of worms. Imagine that.

All women on the planet have been told all their lives to NOT look at or talk about what happened…They have been told to keep secrets…their own, their mother’s and grandmothers, their step fathers, their brothers, their creepy uncles…All of these are traumas they either inherited from their mothers while inside the womb or bumped into on their own journeys….deep wounds they got in college after having too much to drink…unresolved trauma and unprocessed trauma that goes back generations. Do you want to talk about this?…because between the way you attached as a toddler to your caregivers and the the traumas surrounding childhood and growing up…THIS determines how you are in intimate relationships. These events and relationships determine your marriage.

If you grew up not trusting, do you think you are going to trust in your marriage? Not likely and only with alot of therapy.

Trust, safety, security cannot happen between couples in relationship without conversation. Everyday. You need to talk about what is going on and check in with each other. If your husband drifts off to the massage parlor and the wife wants to bang the poolboy…chances are you are pretty far down the rabbit hole of being estranged and resentful. Pretty difficult to build trust from those positions.

After 4 months of therapy my wife gave up. It was not happening FAST enough for her. She wanted results. She wanted Conscious Relationship or the poolboy NOW…I could not tell which…but it required Transparency, Honesty, Fidelity, Trust, Vulnerability. Do YOU really want to work on those things? They do not just appear out of thin air. I was willing to keep working, but she said enough.

At 42 she is 8 years from 50 (a kind of old number) and FOMO becomes unbearable. So unbearable she can’t decide to divorce or stay together as parents while wanting to have a boyfriend she can bang on the side…Really? Good luck with that. Maybe some folks can do this, but it might be easier to be honest about WHY it makes your skin crawl to have sex with your husband. I mean if he is REALLY not going to touch you (or you him) that is a BIG problem. It might be something in therapy you could talk about. Why not try?

My parents stayed together for 70 years and they were not happy all the time. No marriage is happy all the time, but good marriages understand this and make sure the tools to quickly repair hurts/resentments/misunderstandings are available and used regularly. Love doesn’t keep marriages together. The promise that you will accept the other person’s shortcomings (and they yours) is what keeps marriages together.

I don’t have a clue what my wife thinks or feels today. All I know is I am paying her attorney fees as she divorces me from a marriage she does not understand or care about anymore. At least, that is what I assume…

Related posts:

Nowadays whenever we read about digital transactions, investment or banking, we also see a term blockchain. What does it mean? How does it work? In simple terms, Blockchain is a record-keeping…

Happy holidays and happy new year! I hope you are spending time with your loved ones and celebrate your accomplishments for 2018! It’s that time of year again — it’s time to make new goals like…