Becoming More, Part 2, YOUR HEART

Last week I talked about taking back the keys to the arena of your heart, mind, body, and spirit where you gave him open access in sharing yourself in your primary relationship. I pointed out that this arena was where he violated your trust and used your generous intimacy against you and the best interests of your whole family.

Then I invited you to use a scale to measure your experience of intimacy with him in the four same areas of his life. Important questions followed for you that would help you identify how “access” was an expression of mutuality in your relationship, or one of the ways your relationship protected him while making you more vulnerable. If you haven’t done that work yet, go back to last week and get caught up!

This week I’m going to talk more about the dynamics of your heart, and his heart. I believe you already have the knowledge, wisdom, and personal strength within yourself in order to find your way to a better life. But you may need a hand uncovering those things and letting them inform and guide you. So hope I can help you get started. Let’s begin to gather and work with the emotional information you have about your relationship with this man.

Step One: How Does Your Heart Work?

Review the list of descriptors and choose the five that best match the emotional energy you bring to the world:

Passionate

Prudent

Warm

Cold

Open

Guarded

Generous

Withholding

Loving

Accepting

Discerning

Happy

Depressive

Patient

Angry

Forgiving

Cruel

Kind

Courteous

Rude

welcoming

Selfish

Personal

Impersonal

Light-hearted

apathetic

Balanced

Unpredictable

Sensitive

Controlled

exhausting

Gentle

Defensive

Careful

Aggressive

Positive

Negative

Available

Unavailable

Malleable

Dominating

Hurt

Caring

Forbearing

Fearful

Creative

Intense

Confident

Timid

Reserved

Expressive

Empathetic

Joyful

Other:

Now, with each of those five descriptors, respond to these two questions:

How does your life partner show his respect, love, affirmation, and value for those five characteristics of the emotional energy you bring to the world? 

How does your life partner show his respect, love, affirmation, and value for those five characteristics of the emotional energy you bring to his life, in particular?

It’s important that our life partner see us not just in our relationship with him, but as a person participating in all of life and interacting with the world around us. I value my life partner because of how I see him treat his friends and family, how he does his work, how he treats creation, and what he cares about in the social questions of the day. Does your partner see you in the wider social context, and does he value your interaction? Is it part of his emotional response to you that makes your relationship rich?

In many cases with compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered men, they are not comfortable with or able to acknowledge and affirm any visibility you have outside of your relationship with him. It’s a strange combination of his jealous, cruel, insecure, controlling and isolating instincts about you. Doing the above exercise can help you identify whether he’s emotionally limited in his love to the sphere that includes him, and where he is the dominant person.

Now let’s explore whether you emotionally receive what you need and deserve from him on a daily basis and without nagging or demanding it.

In my life with a CASRD-man (the short form for the descriptor in above paragraph—rhymes with “hazard) he kept me on a strict survival diet. He threw enough emotional bones my way that I could keep going, but there was never a comfort, a security, a promise, on which I could draw in between “meals”. He kept me hungry and I simply got used to be hungry. That took a toll on me. I was sad a lot of time. I was lonely. But I could never see that clearly because just when it would escalate into crisis, he fed me some gruel, and I thought I was okay after all.

It is only now in my real relationship with a healthy and normal human being that I have learned anything about emotional richness in a primary relationship. I have never been hungry. We do not always understand each other. We sometimes have to ask for specific attention. Those are exceptions in a daily banquet of emotional intimacy that has allowed me to be so much more generous of heart with the world around me. When you aren’t always emotionally hungry, it is easier to be emotionally generous. 

A frustrating aspect of my experience was knowing that my ex had emotional affairs with others (not just with his emotionally incestuous mother). In other words, the emotional energy that rightfully belonged to me in our marriage was spent elsewhere. There was nothing I could do about this—God knows I tried. I was emotionally available to him. He was minimally emotionally available to me.

When I give you a snapshot from my life, it’s because I know what a difference it would have made had I ever read my experience being described by another woman. Since the lies these men tell about us seem to have greater currency in misogynist culture, it’s still hard to find our experiences told honestly and accurately.  

For a woman in relationship with a CASRD man, taking back the arena of heart means that you see clearly the deficiencies in what he offers you emotionally. It means you carry no shame about expecting more than that from a primary relationship. It also means no longer pouring your emotional energy into what is a non-positive and non-mutual black hole of infinite consumption. You need your emotional reserves for yourself, because you now realize you are on survival or even a starvation diet. What you have been giving him emotionally so he can go share it with emotional affair partners must be used to feed yourself and make you strong enough to make good decisions for your own life. It also is more correctly directed to any minor children in the home. Don’t emotionally parent him. Parent your children emotionally.

Take back the key to your heart. Do not feed him what is not returned to you in positive mutuality. Change your emotional behavior and language. You may still love him and care for him. But as a primary relationship partner—he needs to do the stepping up, not you. 

Here are some “scripts” to use in response to him or members of his treatment group, family, faith community, friends who urge you to invest more of your emotional energy in him and his recovery:

My main priorities now are putting myself back together and getting the help I need as well as supporting my children through their own traumas, along with daily parenting. That seems to be a more than full-time job.

My emotional reserves are devoted to my children’s needs in this family crisis, and to ensuring that they have one functioning parent. So I am also trying to look after myself.

I learned quickly that my needs would not be addressed if I did not address them. So I am. I am also looking after my children through the discovery of their father’s secret life.

This experience has underlined how little emotional investment you have made in me or our family compared to what I have invested in you and our family. I am making adjustments so that my emotional energy is invested in me and my children as first priorities for healing and recovery. 

The treatment industry assumes you will continue to pour your heart into a relationship that was not mutually positive in emotional support and investment in the first place. Giving even more of your heart does nothing but deplete the resources you and your children should be receiving. Do not insulate him from the impact of his secret life on his emotional supply. Take back the key. He no longer can assume access. There are others who take priority: you and your children. If you see and experience changes in him, you can choose to be more emotionally generous with him as long as you and your children do not “go hungry.”

What to talk more? Your story is safe here.

With you

Diane

P.S. This was Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend, so my blog post was delayed by food and family. Yes, you can have a Thanksgiving that is great without being married to the CASRD man.

Here’s my version of my eldest son’s scalloped potato recipe:

Thinly slice potatoes  (just about one bag—I use my food processor to slice and put in bowl with milk to keep from discolouring while I put it all together)

Thinly sliced onion, separate the rings

2 cups grated old cheddar

1 litre cream (I use whipping cream)

Fresh thyme

Salt & Pepper

Four dots of butter

Layer as many times as your greased casseroles will allow:

Potato, then some onions, cheese, cream not quite covering, dots of butter, thyme, salt and pepper

Repeat

Cook at 350 for 1.5 hours.

They are insane.

If you think the cream is just too thick, add a little milk to each layer.