Friday, May 7, 2010

Wounds

Last night I had a very healing and hilarious experience, chatting online with a group of straight wives via Bonnie Kaye's support group.  I was struck by how so many of us use humor as a coping mechanism.  Last night's chat got a little bawdy, but for me, it was filled with belly-laughs which are so very healing.

I also learned about Misti Hall's blog, Straight Spouse Coaching and was very taken by her most recent post on the wounded feminine spirit.  Misti articulated something I've intuited very deeply for years and I'd like to riff on it a little bit this morning.

Years before I truly outed my gay ex, I ran across a book by Linda Schierse Leonard called "The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship."  This was one of those books much like Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" which was very emotional for me to read.  (In fact, I think it's time to pull out "Gifted Child" again and revisit it!)  So here it was, somewhere in the 1980s, and I finally owned that I was walking around with a gaping "father wound."  My father loved me, but he had difficulty with emotional intimacy and my mother had basically kidnapped me when I was young, taking me away from a very dangerous situation (physically and emotionally), but depriving me of any contact with my dad.  I contacted him when I was in my late teens and we then attempted to rebuild our relationship, something that was ongoing until his death in 1997.

I wonder how many of us straight wives have father wounds.  I wonder if that puts us at higher risk of getting into an unhealthy relationship with a closeted gay man.  I know for me, I didn't know what "normal" male behavior was, because I am an only child, raised by my mother and my grandmother.  I had no male role models or connections growing up except my distant daddy.

Early in my recovery process, I was an avid participant of COSA (Codependents of Sexual Addicts), basically an AlAnon program but with a different addiction going on.  And, while I no longer attend meetings, I do still cling to the philosophy of the 12 steps.  I noticed that the overwhelming majority of us in the COSA group had some sort of sexual abuse or violence in our past.  Many of us -- myself included -- are rape survivors.  That's another kind of wounding, which also creates post-traumatic stress issues.

Like moths drawn to the fire, are we drawn to these dangerous men?  I think that on some level we are.  Until we are able to really dig deep into our own woundedness, own it and begin to heal, we'll be attracted to the relationships that feel like "home."  And don't get me wrong -- a great relationship CAN and SHOULD feel like a homecoming.  But not like Dysfunctional Family Robinson kind of home -- the abnormal "normal" so many of us grew up with.

Misti talks about how during the straight/gay marriage, the straight woman begins to lose her sense of femininity.  I also lost my sense of self -- what my counselor called my "voice."  We sense on some level that our husband isn't truly attracted to us physically.  Even as a newlywed, this fed into my already huge poor self-image and my thoughts that I was too fat, too ugly, etc.  Eventually, I became anorexic.  (Hard to believe if you see me now!)  I asked my ex once why he didn't intervene with the anorexia and he said "I didn't know what to do."  Puh-leeze.  But that's another story.  If we had an argument, he'd say that I couldn't expect me to "perform" or be interested in physical intimacy after "how I had demeaned him" and "made him feel shut down."  Finally, in my late 40s, I added to the litany of my faults that I was too old.  

Interesting, isn't it, that part of this toxic tango is that we are more willing to blame ourselves and build the house of cards that is denial even higher than to admit the honest truth: he's gay.






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