AlwaysMyDuty

It was great and the conversation that my wife and I had after it was awesome. It was so good to actually say some things that we intuitively knew already.

Yes, we have a very non-traditional marriage and it works for us. I'm sure people in our church might not approve, but what we have for the people we are with how we grew up having worked on our family or origin issues which mainly brought closure to several things as well as some insight to others has also brought us to the point of realizing that we have our own God-given uniqueness and our marriage works best within that framework.

It can't be copied, put in a book or prescribed for to have a marriage like ours one would have to be very similar type people. So, instead of my staying angry at my mother for now wanting a daughter and trying her best to raise me like a girl which actually made me a very nurturing person in my work, in my marriage in which I'm more like the wife, and in my parenting in which I'm much more the mom and capable of getting past my wife's mom instilled fears of men during our dating when she was already in a very tight female/female relationship because as my therapist said, I approached her in our romance in a non traditional way that a typical man would have done. I must have done something right. Yes, this reality about myself does feel a bit strange at times if I think about it too much and there have been times when I've run from this by being ultra athletic or trying to act like I was so naturally macho, but all that failed.

My wife on the other hand came from a home where her mom was more like a husband of her passive, nurturing dad and more like a very rough dad to her two girls. We know what we do and don't want in our marriage in light of the extremes and abuse we saw in ours, but the basic orientation of her naturally playing more the traditional male role and my orientation of more easily playing the traditional female role can't be changed, but it can be modified to be as healthy as possible which I think is where we are now.

Here's my report on today's therapy session.

That was one powerful therapy session and he let me have extra time because I had a lot extra to unload. I came home and discussed this with my wife. I put in my movie that I forgave my mother for absorbing me into herself like an emotional spouse both as a single mom and then in her second marriage, plus trying her best not to raise me as an all American boy like her ex wanted to. Thus, my confused identity comes from the confused way she raised me plus her using me like an emotional partner/spouse. So, and my wife and I concluded this is why we are both comfortable with our rather non traditional marriage in which we really have some basic role reversals which the home she came from fits with how to tell the truth I was raise part like a gril and part like a boy. My conclusion is my mom was in bondage to something that happened in her life and I forgive her for that. My final conclusion is that I am finally comfortable with how I turned out as my therapist, SIL, and some of my friends have said, I really function more like the wife and the mom in this household which is ok with me and I'm no longer angry at God and mom making me that way. My wife on the other hand does not fit the stereotype feminine submissive wife either which my mother certainly was not. So, as we talked today and she wanted to make sure that I'm ok with all this, our non-traditional role reversal family works for us, we like it and we like how our marriage works plus we recognize that neither of us could have been married to a stereotypical person of the opposite sex because neither of us fits completely those stereotypes. There are things that I do which reflect the lack of intimacy with my dad plus the confused identity with my mother. My wife recognizes that and as long as I stay with the boundaries that I've set with myself, she is fine with it because she understands it. The same thing is true with her as well and I give her some extra space their. Nothing immoral or illegal but a little something that helps each of us with our issues.

thank you !
hope you have had a wonderful day .
i sure did , took dad to dr this morning and his uti is cleared !
brighten up my day and took pa to bob evans , wow he realy ate like there s no tmr . lol .
xoxo

Last week my therapist wanted me to look over my past 'therapy movies' that I've made in my laptop using pics and clips which I've written scripts for either between the the pics or clips and sometimes on the pics. He said that I'll notice that I'm moving much away from my anger toward my mother's intrusive making me into her emotional partner both when she was a single parent and continuing after she got married again which I never really started to get much freedom from until I graduated from both college and graduate school. It goes without saying that her using me, for her emotional needs while not helping my emotional needs much less my step-dad's and I assume my dad's as well, impacted and damaged my social life a lot. He said that he can tell that I'm moving more now to working on my own identity separate from mom as I make my own choices about life and who I want to be when I grow up. Looking over my past titles, I can see this progress. He said one aspect of mom's covert enmeshment with me as an emotional 'spouse substitute" remained for me to face and he was not sure I'd really faced it much less even started to work on it. I immediately knew what he was talking about but now I had not gone there in my journey and to some degree did not want to either.

The pics and clips serve as artistic means for me to express my emotions, get in touch with my emotions and deal with my emotions as well as be able to talk about such things in session. My wife has noted that I have less anger than I did at one time. She has more freedom from her mother issues as well. She knows about my 'therapy movies' because I've told her about them but respects my privacy of not sharing them with her although I have told her a few pieces of one such script and she agrees that she really does not need to hear these nor see how i'm using art to communicate this. Now understand that never in my life before have I used visual media in this way. These little 'therapy movies' has led me to take video clips and pics from our family media and create DVDs for family members. My dad was amazed at what my older son and I have produced with our combined talents.

Ok, I've gotten up the steps and we are on the porch of the house so to speak with all of that background, but now to go in the front door.

Free association thinking and writing is giving yourself the freedom to just randomly let ideas and emotions come to the surface as you focus on something. I've been working on this every since Tuesday in my man cave which is my place of ultimate privacy which I so desperately need and enjoy. In the script that I wrote, I had make me and my early childhood experiences with my mother the object of my wife explaining me to someone which meant I was not directly dealing with issues and I was intellectualizing them. So, last night I had the most free time of the entire week. I destroyed the old script for the most part, changed the title, and put me directly on the front burner as I wrote about my journey for years of feeling as well as being my mother's emotional partner along with the internal confusion and the social awkwardness that created. With complete quietness in the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning traumatic experiences with my mother plus the thoughts and the emotions that I'd forgotten or did not want to remember just flowed like a river. I just kept writing the script, writing more and editing. Just when I thought I've completed parts or even the very end, o no, I was not close to done. I became so engrossed in it I even talked out load some of my script as if my mother was right there and could actually understand me which I know is no where close to possible, but it would do no good to share these things with her now. (She apologized years ago for how much pain the way she raised me created in my life, that she knew it would and it was wrong, but she could not help it. I'm still not sure if that was bragging or merely a statement of fact to be taken as "I'm sorry.")

This all became so overwhelmingly personal and emotional that I just waiting for the free association of ideas and feelings to flow as I worked on my script using my various pics and clips. My movie is 34 minutes long. It is by far the most emotional, authentically honest, and yet compassionate in how I end it with telling my mother that I forgive her for I realize that someone must have done to her something that put her in the bondage so that she could not help making me her 'little man' or giving me the impression that she really wanted a little girl and that's why she did not want me to be an all American boy like my dad wanted me to.

I got so worked up about this that I could not sleep for the rest of the night and just might call my therapist's office to tell him I"m coming it with my plate full so if he has any extra time before or after, I dam well need it today, because I'm about to explode!

I just might edit the pics and clips more in order to shorted the movie some, but right now it says plainly and with much feeling with raw honesty and thought the deep inner stuff that is there which has not been easy to share. I've shared a lot about my life on this site and been very supported in doing so and it's probably helped some people understand me better and where I'm coming from on things. However, what I've just written is only a preview or a step inside the door of what my movie like a house contains. I don't need to take you through the entire house, room by painful room for I think you get the overall idea.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? Good question which I'm answering part by part in my journey. My identity cannot help but be influenced/shaped by my past, but I don't have to be controlled by it unless I actually like certain parts of my past's impact. Part of me wants to go whole hog in the direction that I think mamma really wanted me to go, but I can see where that would only be a statement of further anger and an attempt to take it out on others. The only way that my wife would stick with me in that would be for her to go back into a lifestyle that she was living in, unknown to me at the time, when we were dating. I'm not sure she wants to go back to that fully either, plus the impact upon our sons would be devastating.

All in all, I'm going to call the therapy place right now and inform them to tell my therapist to be ready for me to come in like an over energized bear with a hot huge bucket of emotional molten iron to pour out. I will let you know his repsonse.

Maybe, just maybe, I've explained what free association of ideas and emotions is. Plus, I hope that I've not given you TMI, but if I have at least we are all anonymous here. I'm free to be and become me at 53 and I'm tired enough of people liking or not liking this me that I'm going to be freely me with God's love, my wife's love and my therapist's support and the rest well that's between them and God for I don't have the energy to waste on such. Those who understand don't need an explanation.

I"m not sure if you are familiar with free free association thinking and writing. It is encouraged in order to reveal unconscious thoughts and emotions, such as traumatic experiences that have been repressed. Well, last night I spent from 9 pm to 4 am on editing my "'therapy movie" script for meeting with my therapist today and I don't feel like going to sleep. Also, I just wanted to get this done. I'm seriously thinking about calling the office today to tell him that I just might need more than 45 minutes today and if either appointment before or after me cancels, please let me work in that time even if I have to pay for it myself. Frankly, the free association experience was overwhelming, but also good. 1:45 cannot get here soon enough today. Please keep me in your prayers.

I'm glad that you are back to working on genealogy. Likewise, I'm back to digging into my mother's side more as well since dealing more with my own issues as well.

Last week, I had the most eye opening therapy session of all! My therapist said it would help me to look over the titles of my 'movies' that I've made and see my progress from being so wrapped up in my anger toward mom as well as others to now really working on my own identity apart from them with still needing to address one thing that is at the very core of all of this family of origin mess. Yeah!!! Progress.

This "light bulb" moment has captivated my attention ever since Tuesday. So, I've been creating and editing another one of my therapy films which I've shared before is my new way that I've found to work through things. Some people journal, etc., but for me over the last 5 years of the 8 I've been in therapy, these 'therapy films; help a lot in both working through things and letting my therapist know where I am in the process of working through all of this. Some emotional issue are best expressed through visual arts than through written or spoken words alone, particularly when they are very deep. In reflecting over my film today, I'm certain my therapist will agree with me that I'm part way there, but this is more difficult to work through. I can tell that I'm objectifying and intellectualizing my emotions, (that's also a first of being so self-aware) in this film because I've written the script mostly in third person than in first person. In some of the past films, my wife was sometimes one focus of my anger, but in these last two I've written the script such as she is the third person via the very heart of my family of origin issues are told and or explained in a very supportive tone. I can tell that she understands some of it from our conversations, but intuitively, I think she understands more than words are really needed for, plus she's had to deal with many of the same issues of enmeshment with her own mother while mine are a bit different being between an intrusive mother and an only child, son.

I think the bottom line of what attracted me to my wife was feeling more comfortable with her than anyone else which has really been demonstrated as very true while I've been working on my family of origin stuff. She's told me that her mother had put so much distrust and fear of men in her that amazingly, I unlocked all of that, (plus as I learned later she was in therapy and dealing with some other stuff which she trusted me with knowing much later that is TMI). Plus, she was very comfortable with a mama's boy who focused more on the needs of others like I had with my mother and did not mind someone being intrusive as my mother had, so it was like I found someone like my mother for that's what I was comfortable with. Looking back I don't think a non-mommy's boy could have relaxed her defenses and I don't think I could have married a healthier woman who did not like such a feminized man. We did spend 5 years in dating and experienced some high anxiety times before we got married. Despite all of our problems individually and together their has been this sense of accepting each other issues and all plus the way my mother raised me made me feel comfortable with the role reversal that our marriage reflects and how my mother raised my wife be a little more like her mother's relationship with her dad who like me was a very nurturing person. Now, we have both had to work on boundaries so that our marriage does not totally reflect my mother's second marriage or her mother's marriage, but some things just can't be totally changed in one generation. I agree with what my therapists, SIL and friends including my friend from high school who has always been like a sister to me that I've functioned much more like the nurturing, submissive wife in this marriage, but hey we survived and my therapist tells me that we have a sense of togetherness and a "romance life" that few people in their marriages have.

Since the night before my uncle's funeral, I've not been sleeping at all. I've had the generalized sense of anxiety and yesterday I washed and waxed all three vehicles with the idea in my head that I need to have these done before my mother dies, but I have no reason for thinking that she's going to die right now. Her dementia has gotten far worse and the social worker told me two weeks ago that I'm going to really see her go down hill now. Part of my anxiety this week might be related to this new light bulb in therapy. I know my wife loves me, understands, and accepts me more fully than anyone except my therapist and God, but I'm not so sure about others but at this age I'm worrying less about what others think of me. This, I think, is a big part of deciding and being comfortable with who I am and want to be when I grow up or like my therapist said once my mother is dead and it's fully just me and my wife. I've always been far too concerned with what others think and in self-denial I used to make fun of 'mommy's boys' and I was at one time very judgmental, but now it is more 'but by the grace of God go I" or so what that's a legalistic issue and not a plain biblical issue. All in all, I'm not fundamentalist like I once was in reaction to my mother's nominalism nor am I liberal. I am a Christian in agreement with the Apostle's and Nicene creed plus the other ecumenical creed of the Church before it divided into eastern Othodox and Roman Catholic apart from the religious trappings of denominationalism. My dad's side of my family is Roman Catholic and my mother's is Presbyterian. My own spiritual growth led me to see strengths and weaknesses in both plus seeing the same in my journey with charismatics, Pentecostals, fundamentalists and holiness Christians. I appreciate all that I've learned, but in my mid 20ties I had grown up enough spiritually to chose for myself what church to join which is United Methodist although right now I have post denominational stress syndrome.

I know what you mean about sides on the family. My mother completely rejected my dad's side of the family but they never rejected her although they did note how different she is from them. My mother's side of the family never rejected my dad nor his side of the family, but my mother got mad when dad's siblings said when they met me as a little baby "he sure is a ___ baby"

Well, I'm glad that I am able to be here for support and to offer support much out of my our journey, but I am also someone with his own issues as an imperfect human being.

Thank you! It's nice to know that what I have contributed has touched more than just me ... thank you for sharing your support and encouragement. {{{{HUGS}}}}}
~FyreFly

Thank you, Mary! I wasn't sure my message would be received well. God bless you! Hugs back! ~Anne

Thanks! This past week and so has been rough with my uncle dying last Saturday right after the night of my wife and I 22nd anniversary, a week and one day after we had seen him after learning of his diagnosis with liver cancer. Then I had the weird dynamics of his oldest daughter to deal with who got God Almighty self-righteous on me about something that neither I or my therapist could understand, but I was like "chill cuz I know your past all to well, plus some-TMI" which got her quiet. Then, that Monday, my family and I drove down for the funeral which I was asked to help with and did. My cousin Frances acted a 180 degrees different than two days before. Since the night before the funeral, I have not been sleeping well at all. I've been terribly inconsistent with my meds, eating habits, etc. while tending to getting finished the 2007 taxes for my mother which are now in the mail and then visiting her with a CD of the funeral service, plus dealing with her dementia taking a drastic downward turn, problems with our son's ADHD care, my wife's new health problems which messed up many of our plans from last year's anniversary about what we were going to do this year. Well, maybe next year, we will get out on the town that night and live a little. Plus, I've had muscle pain in my upper back due to stress; putting much of our furniture in a POD while our wood floors were refinished and then trying to paint these old walls which have not been painted since the house was built in 1965. It's terrible to say but sometimes at 53, I feel like I'm probably already 65. I wish that my cousins on my dad's side of the family were not so far away. I've always felt closer to them for I spend so much time with them as a child that I basically grew up with them and my cousins on my mother's side are so much younger than me with the exception of the oldest one.

You are so right that we must take responsibility for ourselves. It's like my therapist and I discussed. Once you see how your family of origin issues led you to make certain bad choices or have poor boundaries, then you can no longer use what your parents did as an excuse, a crutch for now you can make a choice to stay that way or not. There are something things I really want to change like not letting people be so intrusive and having stronger emotional boundaries so that I don't absorb other people's drama so easily, but I must be honest there are some things about what my past did to me that frankly I find enjoyable and when I combine that with the fact that I've known since high school that God is the only one who loves me just as I am, then I'm ok with that although some stuck in the muds might not agree. I will conclude with this that my self-insights have led me to be more compassionate and understanding of how family issues can shape someone for I have issues myself, thus while I don't agree with some choices people make, but for the grace of God go I, thus I cannot condemn like in my more ultra conservative days.

Thanks for listening to this rambling middle aged mad who is still trying to figure out who he wants to be when he grows up or as my therapist seems to think, when my mother is totally out of my life via her death.

Mary,

Your latest respone to Jsomebody was absolutely wonderful. I don't like trite, silly spirituality or pat phrases any more than you do for it's all so invalidating of a person's feelings. I've tried twice to write something on that thread. I feel like I"m bombing out and must not be firing on all cylyndars lately.