Our therapist really has had his hands full: my wife and I are BOTH the childhood victims of some form of abuse -- her sexual, and myself emotional/physical. On a subconscious level, one of the reasons that we are together as a couple is -because- of our abused backgrounds. To explain:
I am very certain (although it's never been verified) that my mother was sexaully abused as a young girl. As a result, my mother has an extreme fear of intimacy, was very hands-off and critical as a mother, and yes, my mother and father were in a very frustrating, sex-starved marriage for 19 years until they divorced when I was 18. Ironically, I had always vowed to never have the kind of marriage that my parents had....And yet in a VERY subconscious way, I somehow sought out and married a woman with the same tragic background and life-long consequences as my mother. My therapist says that it was (and is) my sub-conscious yearning to finally prove myself and achieve the loving, intimate relationship that I never had with my mother, using my wife as her proxy. Not exactly what I had in mind on my wedding day....
I have read in several books/articles on the topic of childhood sexual abuse, which state that through a variety of unfortunate circumstances, childhood sexual abuse is often inadvertantly "passed on" from generation to generation, as with my wife and her mother (but NOT my daughter, thankfully). Well, I'm proof that the men who love the victims of childhood sexual abuse also tend to run in generations -- I'm following in my father's footsteps there.
My hope is that my wife and I are in a sense, uniquely suited to help heal -each other-. That is, when one of takes a step forward, it carries the other along too, altough the flipside, unfortunately, also works --> when one of us stubbles, we both do. For the first year of seeing our therapist, we have focused on -my- past and -my- issues. It is now time, however, for my wife to step up to the plate sometimes too.
And she has, most thankfully.
-- B.
Me 50, W 45, M for 26 yrs S25, D23, S13, S10 20+ year SSM; recovery began Oct 2007
