Why was I so physically cold to my Husband. I'm so very, very tempted to give you the story of my life, 'cuz then I have no doubt you'd understand it very well. For brevity sake, I'll try to encapsulate.
Because my parents divorced at a very early age, because of the weekend visitations and all the back and forth between Mom and Dad's, because of our many moves, step-fathers and step-siblings, two other of my mother's divorces before I was 14, sexual abuse, and a plethora of other things I won't get into, I spent the first 18 years of my life in constant emotional upheaval.
Sometimes, when continually exposed to trauma and emotional pain, the body takes over and creates a defense mechanism called detachment. As we grow-up, learning a certain amount of emotional detachment is healthy. It allows us to interact in a more mature manner with our world. It's necessary, or we'd all probably spend 90% of our time in some form of histrionics.
But sometimes, as in my case, detachment protected me from the continual upheaval in my life. The only way I could move sanely through my world was to learn not to respond to it. The problem though is that once the defense mechanism is in place, it's still there even after the trouble and trauma are gone. (And, by the way, one doesn't even know they HAVE such a defense mechanism. For me, it was a way of life, and I didn't know any different.)
You don't have to be a kid to learn this. When there are things in our world that cut us deeply over and over and over again, you learn to either avoid what is hurting you, or if you can't do that, you learn to emotionally detach from it.
A defense mechanism helps us to emotionally survive a crisis, but it goes a long way in helping us ignore a problem. Ignored problems will manifest themselves in our lives over and over again until we learn to face them and deal with them. But in order to face a problem, one must be aware of the defense mechanism that is doing all it can to protect us.
Another interesting aspect of detachment is that you don't learn how to 'selectively' detach. You detach from everything. So not only do you protect yourself from pain, you don't really experience happiness or true intimacy either. And if at any time someone or something tries to wiggle its way in past our defenses... well. That's when the fun begins.
Buried emotions will find their way out. When my husband would constantly criticize me, I would ignore it until I had all I could take, and then I would explode. If I decided to have sex with him just to get him to shut the hell up and get off my back, I would sometimes experience black rages. Black rages are so intense and so damn scary I can’t even describe it to you. Rather than give into the rage, I would just shut down completely. It’s almost like a zombie state. Hm. Anyway.
Some people experience the buried emotions as anxiety attacks. Some people get headaches. Some people get stomach cramps. Some people get extremely tired. Some people, like me, will experience severe mood swings, or explosive anger.
I had a very low prognosis of recovering from my detachment. Since I learned it at such an early age, it was as if it were engrained in the fabric of my character. As my shrink said to me, “it is counter-intuitive for you to be intimate because all that intimacy has ever brought you is pain and suffering.”
I had to unlearn an 18 year-old involuntary impulse I didn’t even know how to recognize. I had to learn not to personalize my husband’s constant criticism, and learn that the anger and anxiety I was experiencing right before sex was my defense mechanism kicking in, not my true feelings for my husband. That is an extraordinarily difficult impulse not to give in to. It would be like me telling you that you should only touch the stove when it is hot, or to breathe deeply while under water. I bet you can’t even fathom that, can you?
I think that there are many LD spouses who have shut down to sex because all that it gets them is additional pain and suffering in the form of criticism, nagging, and anger. The HD spouses are frustrated, and rightly so, but their frustration is coming out in the form of lectures, criticism, nagging and anger, which cuts a LD as deeply as the absence of sex and intimacy cuts an HD.
