So...here is my update.

Life has been really tough for me lately it seems. It's a lot about my marriage. I've been married less than two years, and it's been a challenge the entire time. Around the time I first started in therapy, I was concerned a lot with cleaning up my side of things. I had been screaming, freezing up, and other extreme behaviors in response to things my H was doing or saying, and I wanted to stop. I worked really hard on regulating my nervous system and building up some boundaries, sorting out what was mine and not mine, and I have become much less reactive than I used to be. But all along I never focused entirely on issues with my marriage, because there were so many relational issues between myself and T (trust, attachment, transference, blah blah) that were also coming up.

Anyway, I'm not sure how it happened, but as I started to improve myself, my relationship with my H almost seemed to start to resemble how a therapeutic relationship might look if the client has very insecure attachment. H would act out in very dramatic ways (not so that I was physically in danger, but certainly very unsettled), and accuse me of not caring about him at the slightest provocation. I would try to remain calm, and reassure him somehow without being overly caretaking. This has proved incredibly difficult for me, and he is still doing those things, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. He is in therapy himself now, but he has no apparent attachment to his T, only to me. At least, one improvement I have seen in the last year is that he now realizes (in his calmer moments) that he needs to work on his own anxiety and insecurity and not put everything on me.

Still, H remains consistently inconsistent, and I am exhausted because I never know which version of him I am going to get, the child or the adult. I have considered separation as I can't keep dealing with it forever and I don't know if there's enough positive to really make up for it. So somehow, in the last couple of weeks, therapy has finally become about my need to figure out what in the world my plan is now and facing the hard realities of where I am.

So, that is the difficult part. But along the way somewhere, there is a miracle that happened. The miracle is that I can actually have that kind of conversation with my T, and that being with her and talking about it makes me feel safer instead of more terrified. Whereas when I started, just sitting there with her attention on me was almost more than I could handle, and I spent the first 3 months or more worrying that she was going to refer me to someone else. The miracle is that even when I lapsed into (mild) SI behavior recently which I had avoided for an entire year, and I felt so horrible and ashamed part of me thought I could never face T again, another part of me was just longing to be able to sit next to her and be comforted by her presence, and instead of cancelling, even though whole episode was partly triggered by my interpretation of her last email, I emailed her and told her how I was feeling, talked to her on the phone, and made it to my session as usual.

It's kind of like somehow when I wasn't quite looking, or as I was freaking out as usual on a regular basis about how I should leave and be done already, the relationship became deeper in hard to explain ways. It feels like new territory for me. I notice the tiny things like how I can look in her eyes sometimes and it feels comforting instead of scary. I notice how I look up and we are sitting in mirrored positions, or taking a deep breath at the exact same moment. I notice how I can come in completely grumpy or out of sorts, and she just gives me a couple of looks that make me laugh and pull me right out of it. I notice that when I get overwhelmed, she notices and stops talking and just sits there with me for as long as it takes.

I expected to be done the moment I could stand my life without therapy, but I've just kept growing. I feel like I'm capable of whole worlds of things that weren't possibilities for me a year ago. Even though I feel like I'm failing miserably in my marriage and it's my own fault, at the same time I'm turning into the person I always wanted to be but didn't know how.

Here's a poem I wrote about T recently. I hope you like it:

Sometimes, we can wait a hundred years for a completion
For that thing...unnameable thing, we didn't get, and couldn't find
The void we just can't fill
And we look...everywhere
Every relationship is a disappointment, thrown away, or held at arm's length
When it didn't satisfy the longing, never felt quite right

But you were the one I couldn't seem to throw away
Although, God knows, I tried
In fact, you have been so faithfully, transparently imperfect
As though apologizing tenderly on behalf of the whole Universe, for all the times it let me down
That I finally forgave, and slowed my ceaseless searching for perfection
First around me, and then within myself
Haltingly, awkwardly at first, I stopped fighting limitation and started dancing with it
And that one change is slowly changing...everything