Couple Therapist

Did you never consider seeing a couple therapist before suggesting a divorce?

I did think about it a few times but I just knew that he would never go.

He wouldn’t even talk to me about the problems within our relationship, how could I expect him to talk to a therapist? Apart from anything else, he was positive that he was right and I was wrong because I was mentally unhinged.

He never actually said it out loud but that was the implication. He thought my mother was like that and, clearly, it was genetic.

The woman who would suddenly scream like a banshee for the smallest misdemeanour on the part of the children… except that it wasn’t actually like that. He would never take into account what might have been going on for months, the surreptitious pushing at boundaries and line crossing that teenagers do in order to start to become independent.

He just saw the final conflagration of weeks of stand-off and thought that I was behaving badly, rather than registering what the child had been up to repeatedly to bring about such fireworks of frustrated rage at the one step too far.

And he either wouldn’t listen or couldn’t hear my explanation. It felt as if I was talking to a brick wall, trying to remain calm and focused in the face of his infuriatingly stubborn refusal to accept that our child might not be an angel all the time… and that I was continually over-reacting.

Maybe I should have insisted on the counselling? But perhaps I was secretly afraid that what he intimated was true. That I was a terrible mother who had a screw loose. That’s what years of that type of relationship does. You start to doubt yourself and believe the drip drip drip of insinuated uselessness.

Whether it is deliberate or not, it is equally as destructive.

And I was terrified to face the truth that maybe I really was one loaf short of a breadshop.

With thanks to Mr Nighttime, who sent me this.