Another Therapy Story

Another Therapy Story

I've sat with three therapists over the years. One was very good and helped me tremendously. This story is modeled after him. The second was mediocre, and the third seemed all to easily distracted. Looking back, the best was a man who helped many of the law enforcement and fire fighters in the town that I lived in. He was no-nonsense, straight to the point, and remarkably clear and effective.

This is a story about infidelity and a failed marriage. More significantly, it is a deep dive into the broken mind of a woman who could never escape the trauma of her childhood. There is no sex in this story. There is no burn and there is no reconciliation. There is just a conversation.

If the reader thinks this is a contrived fiction, think again.

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I was sitting with a therapist I'd started seeing. We'd had the obligatory introductory session and today we started getting into the details. I won't say that I was past the pain or the anger, but questions were forming in my mind that I needed to understand in order to move on.

"Why do people cheat?"

He chuckled. I guess he couldn't help it because there was nothing funny about it. "We only have an hour."

I guess that made me smile just a bit. I was in a bad place, emotionally, and I needed answers to hard questions.

"I suppose at its simplest level it comes down to choices and priorities, but that's not what you're looking for. Everyone has the opportunity to cheat, and women get more opportunities than men. I've heard every excuse you can imagine and most of them are lies. People lie to themselves to make their actions acceptable or forgivable or unimportant when they don't want to admit that it takes depth of character to keep your vows. People who cheat make a decision to set aside the call to personal commitment, that unspoken choice to have or not have honor in the way we live our lives."

He paused for a moment to see if he was getting through.

"I'm not talking about a drunken mistake. I'm talking about a deliberate, sober choice to be dishonest. They say that character is defined by what we do when we believe we won't get caught. Cheaters never expect to get caught." He was now shaking his head as he spoke. "They replace the real commitment that is at the heart of the relationship with the mere facade of that commitment, the appearance without the fact."

He paused again to see if I was following him and then continued. "So I suppose the real question is why do they choose to lessen the commitment and replace it with the façade?"

I was following him. "Yeah. I guess that's it."

"The simple answer is they are missing something they need and choose to look for it elsewhere, but the real question is 'What are they missing?' That's where it gets complicated."

He paused to think for a moment. "John, tell me a little more about her."

"She never forgot a birthday or an anniversary. She remembered conversations from years ago that I had completely forgotten. She hardly ever lost her temper with me, but she never had many friends. Friends would come and go, and they never seemed to last very long. What I never understood was that she seemed to remember every slight that she ever experienced. I sometimes thought about what she'd tell me, and things never quite added up."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she would be offended by people who never struck me as being particularly offensive. She'd tell me what they said, and somehow, I could never imagine them saying those things in an offensive way. But then again like I said, she would remember details about other people that for me would fade into the mist and just become part of the general impression I had about them."

"That can be interpreted in two ways. Remembering birthdays has the appearance of caring, but it can be nothing more than maintenance. It can also be a sign of heightened expectations that other people could never meet."

"Maintenance?"

"Yeah. At the heart of any relationship there is a question: 'Do they want me to be happy so I will make them happy, or do they want me to be happy because they want me to be happy?' You know what I mean?"

Maybe I did. "When I caught her, she seemed scared and confused, but I never detected any guilt. For a moment, I could almost swear she was searching for the right reaction. She tried to deny what she was doing, but I had her dead to rights, and eventually she admitted to the affair when I confronted her but never apologized."

"Did she show any sympathy for what you were experiencing?"

I had to think for a moment. "She seemed upset that she was caught. She had to know that I was hurting, and it was her fault, but something was strangely missing."

"You see what I mean about a façade? She had constructed the fiction of a core reality for your life together, but it wasn't real. She was thinking on her feet and wasn't prepared for your discovery. She was torn between trying to reinforce the fiction and finding a new fiction to explain what you saw."

"Do you think our marriage was always that way?"

He thought about it for a time. "What can you tell me about her parents?"

Her parents! There was a story. "I liked her father, but I felt sorry for him. He was a broken man."

"What broke him?"

"I think he was broken from the time he was young."

"What do you mean broken?"

"I don't think he had a healthy self-image. He was painfully shy. He served in the Air Force as part of the ground crew, but once home he never tried to move beyond the clerking job in a small manufacturing company that he first found when he got home. They didn't respect him. He was withdrawn and he drank a lot."

"Was he always a drinker?"

"I think so. At least, he was throughout my wife's childhood. Hell, I'd drink, too, if I'd been married to his wife!"

"Why is that?"

"She was a serial adulteress, or maybe it was just a few long-running affairs. I never got it straight and never really wanted to ask. She used to take her daughters on camping vacations with her boyfriends. I've never been able to wrap my head around that."

"If ever there was a good reason to drink..." He didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't need to. "What happened to him?"

"He died a few years after we got married. He died an empty shell of a man."

He thought for a moment. "Sounds like her father was a lonely man. Is her mother still alive?"

"No. She died about two years ago. Neither one of them lived a healthy life."

"Do you think your wife ever cheated on you before her mother died?"

"Not that I know of, but I only discovered her this time by accident. I know now she was remarkably deceptive. I never had any idea. In fact, before that if you'd told me she would cheat, I would have laughed in your face. It never seemed possible."

When I finally cleared my head, I asked the question that had been haunting me all this time. "So how can a person just push one relationship into the corner as then start another and expect to keep them both?"

I guess I'd come to the point we'd both been building up to because he leaned forward and looked into my eyes. "Because she didn't push you into that corner. You were always in that corner and you just never knew."

"You mean our marriage meant so little to her?"

"On the contrary, I suspect it meant a great deal, but she wanted you there..." He held out his hand off to his side. "... steady and committed, but not too close."

It wasn't making sense to me.

"Think about how her mother treated her husband. She ground him down until he was just a shadow of who he'd been, and then she kept him close but not too close. Did your wife ever speak about her mother giving her hugs and making her feel loved?"

"Now that you mention it, no. She talked about her parents fighting at night and she would sit on the floor of her bedroom closet while she did her homework."

It was like a light went on! "She was withdrawing from the chaos around her and finding a safe place."

I was nodding. I thought I saw where this was headed. I probably didn't.

"A child that grows up without feeling loved and safe adopts a strategy for self-protection. They never learn to trust, and you can't let someone into your heart if you don't trust."

I was starting to see most of my adult life as a lie, and I felt adrift.

"Don't let yourself think that it was all you. In fact, it wasn't you at all. I suspect she loved you in her way, but she was still that scared little girl who had to protect herself. She would never let anyone get too close. She could only feel safe if she was in control, and you can't control a real relationship. You can nurture it, but you can't control it."

"Why didn't I see this sooner?"

"Tell me, was there ever a time in the marriage when things were particularly rocky and she was especially difficult to reach?"

That really opened the flood gates to my memories. "Yeah. It was a little less than a year after her mother died. It seemed we were fighting a lot, but if you asked me why I couldn't tell you. It seemed like every little thing would set her off."

"My guess is she was panicking. Her mother was gone. The bubble she'd built around her was collapsing as her need for you increased and that scared her. When did it get better?"

"It got worse before it got better. She left me for about three months and lived with a friend from work. Those were the worst three months of my life. She eventually came home and tried to patch whatever it was that caused the divide between us. To this day, I still don't know what set her off or why she left."

"I'm guessing she left because she was scared. That bubble was collapsing, and you were drawing closer. She was suddenly in a real relationship that she couldn't control and couldn't deal with, so she created a blowup and left."

As crazy as it sounded, that made more sense to me than all the wondering in my mind and all the question I'd asked her. "So if she left because her mother died, why did she return?"

"Ah, that's the interesting question, isn't it? You understand I'm just guessing here, but I'm thinking she decided on a way to maintain a balance between needing you and pushing you away."

"The other man?"

"Maybe. That may have come later. I can't tell."

"So if her mother was the reason for all her pain, did she also cheat on me earlier in the marriage?"

"I'd almost bet that she never cheated on you while her mother was alive. Remember, she was compelled by the lessons she learned as a child, but she also didn't want to be her mother. The other man wasn't because of her search for love. He was her solution to the anxiety and conflict she needed. Her mother was both the source of her pain and her inspiration while she lived. She needed you to protect her from her mother's influence. You provided a sort of independence from her mother that she needed, but I suspect she never really unlearned what her mother taught her. After her mother died, she became adrift. Like it or not, and I guarantee you she did not, it was her mother that filled her inner space. Once her mother was gone, your wife felt empty. She was having new experiences, and they scared her. She couldn't let you in because she had to protect herself, so she found someone else to add to her collection and fuel her anxiety. In a sense, she was using him to maintain that wall around herself that protected her from any harm that you might cause while at the same time relying on you to keep her safe."

My head was spinning until images of her running that red light as she raced home played out in my mind. I'd caught her. "So she was racing home to do damage control?"

"Probably. She'd built a life around controlling her relationships and suddenly it was all crashing down around her. She knew you'd never accept her infidelity, but she needed you to be happy so that you would keep her safe. I suspect she was in a panic."

"That's nuts!"

"That's not the technical term we use, but essentially..." He was smiling and he understood.

"So you don't think she loved the other guy?"

"I don't think she could love anyone, really, at least not in the way you mean it. She needed you. She appreciated you. She was committed to keeping her marriage while at the same time she was not able to live within it. She probably cared about you in her way, but she wouldn't risk her own security by having a mutually dependent relationship with you. The irony is that she depended on you a great deal, and it scared her. She had to keep you at arm's length so she would feel safe - not too close and not too far away much like her mother kept her father."

"So I was just a convenience?"

"Maybe more like an emotional security blanket."

"Do you think she would have eventually changed?"

"I doubt she could change. Even with years of therapy, her personality was set at an early age. She might have been able to reprogram her behavior, but every relationship she would ever have would be superficial, no more than a pleasant façade. Whether she ever had another affair would depend more on her needs at the time than anything you provided."

"You're describing a sociopath."

"No, more like a wounded child that could never grow up. Her parents stunted her growth and killed the woman inside her." He thought for a moment. "Psychologists debate whether people like her are never given what they need to grow or have what they are born with taken away. We are born with a need for the help and support of our parents, but how that grows into an adult desire to love and nurture a life partner is a more complex question. We see it in how our parents work together, or we don't. Is it something that we learn, or something already within us that gets broken by a difficult childhood? Either way, it sounds like your wife was a sad little girl who never learned to trust others. Without trust, love will never be more than a superficial relationship."

I didn't know if I was grateful for the knowledge, or wished I'd never known. It was both liberating and depressing at the same time.

"John, keep in mind that I never had the chance to meet your wife before the accident. I'm just making an educated guess based on what you've told me. It seems to me that your wife loved that you kept her safe and didn't ask for more of her than she could give, but she never let you get too close because as a child she never knew that kind of relationship. It scared her. It's a difficult concept to understand, but we tend to recreate the environment we grew up in even when that environment is painful for us and we tell ourselves that we want something different. We recreate what we know, and we cling to it. Your wife knew the isolation of that little girl sitting on the floor of her closet doing her homework, and as hard as it is to believe she set out to recreate that same unhappiness in her own marriage."

"So it's true what they say about 'If you want to know what a woman will be like in twenty-five years, look at her mother"?

He gave me an honest smile. "If you think about that too much, it will give you nightmares."

The thought of it stabbed at me like a knife in the gut, but it was starting to make sense.

He was bringing it home and I tried to keep up. "She lived safely in her bubble surrounded by the security that you provided with you close enough without being too close. I hate to say it, but she was comfortable and felt safe with you. She was still that frightened little girl sitting on the floor of her closet. Her mother reinforced the fear of intimacy that she was raised in, and you provided the safe place to live with that fear. When her mother died, that bubble began to burst and it scared her. She needed a way to keep you at arm's length and a new boyfriend provided the means. She could hardly grow closer to you while she was betraying you with another man. For all you knew, nothing changed."

"Yeah. I was happy living in the dark. Too bad I had to catch her with him on their date. Fuck, I hate that word!"

"What word?"

"Date! I've been on a fair number of dates in my life, but I was never married when I did, and the girl was never married. That word 'date' sounds so innocent when it's nothing more than cheating."

He took a deep breath and dropped his eyes to the floor. "I think we have a lot of work to do, but we're off to a good start. Before we're finished, you're going to understand that this is not your fault. You're a trusting man with a good heart, and that's not a weakness. That is your strength. You couldn't be expected to see what she would never let you see. In fact, I doubt that she understood what she was doing. She was raised in that chaos and it's all that she knew. My guess is that you made her feel truly safe and secure for the first time in her life and she loved you for it, but it also frightened her, so she still had to protect herself even from you. That's why she kept you at arm's length without you ever knowing it. She was the loving wife to keep you happy, and so long as you were happy, she was safe, but it could never have been more for her. She just didn't know how. Then when her mother died, she had a hole to fill, and she filled it the only way she knew - with a new destructive chaos."

It was almost time for me to leave, and I began to stand. He stood with me and extended his hand. I shook it.

"We'll work through this, John. I promise."

"Just one more thing?"

"Yes?"

"If I meet someone new, would you mind interviewing her for me?" I was finally smiling.

That earned me the first real laugh of the hour. "Sure. I have twenty questions that will lay bare her soul and reveal every secret she's ever had!"

If only that were true. As I walked to the door he called out to me, "John? You're going to trust again. Give it time."

I left wondering if that was a curse or a promise.

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I hate to admit it, but there is a lot more personal truth in this story than I usually write. Life can be a challenge and people can be fractured. We do our best with what we have, we live in the moment, and we hope that life will not betray us. We believe we can see into the hearts of those around us, but do we ever really? Some say that love is the greatest gift, but I think that the ability to trust is right up there with it.