Tired of the drama...

[MarcPa]

Ihclacs, you know I've pondered the question you posed for a long time. It seems intuitive that harboring resentment is wasteful and ultimately self-destructive. It's a lesson I learned early on in my life when I worked to come to terms with the abuse I suffered when I was a kid. Psychology was one of my fave subjects in college and I was lucky to take away one of the most important lessons of all - in the context of human behavior there is the seemingly intuitive way things ought to be, and then there is reality which is rarely intuitive. Intuition depends on understanding a set of variables involved in the situation, and our minds biggest failing is the illusion that we know and understand what the other person is dealing with. We usually do this by using our own experience as a model for understanding, but that's the trap - we do not understand the other person's experience, and we shouldn't assume that we do because we have not lived their lives. There are similarities, yes, but each individual experience is different in subtle and major ways, yet it's those similarities that trick us into thinking that we know what the other person is going through. This is why it takes such a long time for psychologists to work their way down into the roots of the problem, because it takes a long time to gain the patient's trust and peel away all the layers of scarring, and conditioned coping behaviors, to get at the underlying truths. 99% of the people don't study psychology so to them solving the problem seems simple. Ultimately the job of fixing the issue is that of the person dealing with it. In my situation it's a lesson I forgot, unfortunately.

I've come to understand why things went so wrong with my wife. Once I've learned of their family history it added another puzzle piece into the 'big picture'. Her life was hard. Her parents live deep in denial of their own issues and unresolved traumas. Her dad is a decent man, but so riddled with insecurity that he can be very narcissistic and impossible to deal with at times. He's a good person who's done a lot of good things for others, but it's hard to escape the feeling sometimes that the goodness is motivated by need of approval from others. That's why it's so counter-intuitive because how can you be a good person and be so destructive at the same time? But that's the source of my wife's problem - he was emotionally unavailable when she needed her feelings validated the most. Her mom has had a traumatic upbringing as well. My wife's grandmother was a strong woman, but someone who never dealt with her own trauma either. When she was young, and became pregnant out of wed-lock she was put into a mental hospital. Unbelievable that this was a common practice! I even saw the intake record. She has never dealt with it, but had four more kids - all girls. My wife's mom was the middle and mostly left ignored because her mom at the time was a single and raising 5 daughters by herself. To make things worse, the grandmother repeatedly indicated that my wife's mom was 'an accident' because her attempts at home-baked abortion (it was illegal at the time) failed. But hey she has come to love all her kids anyway. Such a seemingly throw-away comment, but traumatic to a kid that needs to have absolute faith in their parent's love. Dnfortunately my wife's mom never came to understand that and allow herself to sort it out. Instead, both parents became deeply enmeshed and sunk into deep denial of their own issues, while passing the trauma on to their own kids. Unfortunately denial is not a coping strategy that works to prevent damage done to the subsequent generation, and the end result was that they were not emotionally available to their kids - my wife.

I've come into a relationship with my wife not knowing this, though I had hints. At the time I was a happy, athletic, successful man. I had a lot of my stuff figured out. I forgave my parents because I have come to understand how, and why, their parents messed them up (my dad's father was a malignant narcissist who killed my dad's mother). When I've met my wife, she was strong, very intelligent, and into sports like me. Soon after we started dating she also revealed that she was date-raped a year before we met by her boxing trainer. My initial thought was, "Wow, this girl is so strong, but she's dealing with psoriasis, has faced her sexual-victimizer in court, but then pushed her self academically, and take a beating in the boxing ring (lol, I got some disapproving looks from people while strolling with me and sporting a black-eye she got in the ring). But it's all so intense! Do I want/need this in my life?" We broke up for a while, but the attraction was so strong we got back together and stayed together for ten tumultuous years. Little did I know, that it's exactly because of our own yet unresolved traumas we connected and stayed together.

Sorry, I'll come to the point. Yes, resentment is a self-destructive trait in us. It's sneaky, because many times we're not aware that we're holding on to it. It's easier for our partners to see the end-result of that resentment because these also need outlets, and tend to go after things closest and most vulnerable to us - people who love us. Love, is vulnerability. In order to love we have open ourselves to deep emotions and a potential for hurt. This means that an opening is also left for the other person's resentment to create resentments of our own, and because they are sneaky like that, they create a dynamic that ends the relationship. It takes a lot of introspection and vigilance to be constantly aware of what is cooking in our own minds, and often times we're so busy with our lives that we fail to notice what is going on. I've come to realize this too late, or perhaps it was unavoidable. To me it seem s that I am way ahead in figuring out my own issues, and the scary thought is that through the codependency (Melody Beatty's "Codependent No More" is a must read for everyone here) that I developed with my wife, I enabled her not to deal with hers. However, the positive thing is that I was finally able to slay a lot of my demons through this, and come to understand my wife in a different way. Once I understood why she was hurting me, and how her pain drives her to make choices that cause me pain I was able to forgive her. However, resentment is constantly chipping away at me, but the difference is I know what it looks and feels like, and I can dissipate it easier than in the past. Most days.

Sorry about these long posts. I'm working on processing my own grief and it really helps that I am able to put it in writing. Also, I absolutely appreciate other people's insights and advice. As I head into my separation, I'm going to need a lot of it.