Avoidant, since you are married, all your financial decisions should be mutual. Currently you're spending $400/month to see a woman who you seem to be more in love with and more attracted to than your wife. She probably realizes that. I can imagine it's going to be a pretty tough sell to her.

I think you need to respectfully persuade her of the value TO HER of you being in therapy, and listen to and validate her concerns about it. Find out what she wants YOU to work on in order to be a better husband and make sure you are working on that in therapy, too.

Best of luck to you with this.

(((BLT)))

I hear what you say and yes all financial descisions
are mutually agreed.

Yes, right now, because of strong attachent and transferennce issues with T, I fully admit to loving T more tha W.

My relationship with W has been very shakey for a long time.

I am prepared to invest time and money to find who I really am and what I want.

W has issues of her own to address and after much persuading by me and reassurance that i would pay for her therapy also she went to see a different to me.

She gave up after just one session and is probably hoping that my sessions will sort both of us out.

Just as long as it doesn't put her long term dreams in jeopardy it seems to me.

This might sound selfish, but this therapy is for me as a person.

I lost the real me decades ago and just for once I am doing something for myself.

Hope this makes sense, and do appreciate your best wishes.

(((AVOIDANT)))

Like BLT says, she's probably picking up on some level that you are more invested (and not financially) in your therapy than you are in her and if she's not working right now, that could feel even more threatening than it would even if she was working.

Can you just be straight up with her and tell her you need it and that it's not up for negotiation? Is that too harsh? It's not like you're being irresponsible with your bills and you are the breadwinner. I'm not the grandmaster of relationships, so take what I say with a grain of salt. It would get my back up too especially considering all your feelings going on right now.

Liese

AV

That must be a tough situation for you, I can understand why you need your T and also why your wife might resent it, especially if your relationship isn't strong. Have you ever been to couples counselling/RELATE or something? I guess the bottom line is about you knowing what is right for you and her, separately or together, and I am glad your T is able to help you.

To answer your initial question, I have have never had H question my therapy or the cost, although we both work full-time so both contribute to bills etc. I would find it really hard though if he did. Actually it's normally ME who asks him about it cos I feel guilty, but he is always very affirming that this is what I need and that's ok. So I can imagine how hard it must be for you to be questioned in that way, but you have to trust your gut instincts and your T , that this is the way forward that is most helpful for you.

Take care,

starfishy

Hi avoidant,

It's funny, I was having a conversation with H about this just last night. In our relationship, he's the breadwinner and I'm the one in therapy and so I've been worried here and there that he might decide to cut funding, or at least threaten to, if he didn't see the value in what I was doing in therapy.

It's true that in the beginning months he would sometimes ask when I thought I would be "done" and if I actually thought therapy was helping me any. He was skeptical, confused, maybe even a bit frustrated and impatient, especially during the times when things seemed to be getting worse before getting better.

He hasn't talked like that in awhile though, so yesterday I expressed to him that I was surprised that he hadn't been pressuring me to quit before now. We had a good conversation about it. Basically, he feels good about me being in therapy now and this is for two reasons: 1) my functioning has improved and my symptoms have decreased in ways that have benefited me as an individual and us as a couple, and 2) I've opened up to him a little bit about some of the problems and traumas that have made me need therapy in the first place.

In short, seeing improvements and increased understanding of the problems have been huge in changing his attitude to my therapy from one of suspicion to one of support. Don't know if that would be of any help to you or relevant to the situation with your W, but. . . maybe?

Anyway, best of luck.

AV, from an outsider looking in I know it is easier for me to make comments than it is for you to deal with your situation, but hear me out.

I think it is important that you do not become too obsessed with therapy, if it is in fact not the therapy that you are obsessed with in the first place. How much of it is about therapy, and how much of it is about your obsessive feelings for your therapist? Lets be honest here, transference becomes like an addiction, and it masks our reality in so many ways. Addiction in any form is not a good thing.

Can you deny that your addition to her is not perhaps making your relationship with our wife worse? I think you need to be honest with your T and ask for her advice in trying to sort out your relationship with your wife, and getting a healthy balance between your wife and therapy, because like it or not, at the end of therapy your T goes home to her family and doesn't think about you. Your wife on the other hand cares deeply for you and probably at the moment sleeps right next to you ALONE.

I do understand your addictive feelings - I experienced them myself, although not in an erotic way, but I do understand how they take over your life. I'm not a therapist, but my suggestion is that you speak openly to your T about this, because it seems to me that the path you are traveling is a dangerous one.

Thats my truth anyway. I hope you don't take that the wrong way. I really do feel for you, but I'll feel even worse if your marriage breaks up. Your marriage may have been on shakey ground as you put it - well maybe instead of focusing on where it was, you might want to consider putting up some reinforcements to help stabalise it.

B2W

Hi everyone, and thanks for all the feedback.

(CTL)) I’m glad it isn’t just me who has FiM syndrome!!

Thinking through everything these past few days and reading your replies, I may have got the wrong idea of W’s reasons for asking me questions. Perhaps it was incorrect of me to use the word resent in this thread title. I’ll apologise to W here for that.

I think what is happening is that W is really banking on my therapy helping us to repair our relationship as she knows that we have been drifting apart for a long time, and I fully understand her wanting that. Ideally, I would want that to happen as well.

She is seeking reassurance from me that the investment we are making in my therapy is going to pay off. Unfortunately at the moment, I can’t give her the reassurances she is looking for as it is still too early in my treatment to do that, and my lack of reassurance is concerning her, understandably so.

Perhaps we are both viewing my treatment from different angles, she from a point of me overcoming my depression and saving our relationship, and me from a point of discovering the real me who somehow got lost about 25 years ago, with a view to understanding who and what I am and want from life. If that saves our relationship as well, then that will be fantastic. These slightly different agendas may be the reason I find it so hard to talk about sessions with W, along with the underlying avoidant personality issues.

(Liese)) yes I am more invested in my therapy than W right now. W has issues that I’d hoped she would address, but she is unwilling to go and see a T because of bad experiences of NHS therapy some time ago. W has needed and still needs huge emotional support from me, and throughout the 12 years we have been together I have given it to the best of my abilities, through her losing all the last members of her family etc etc. However, towards the end of last year I seemed to have given my all; my tank was empty and I was at rock bottom. I knew that I needed to get help for myself before i was able to give any more. That is still the case today, although I still give all I can. W does understand that I need my therapy and that it isn’t something to be negotiated on.

(Starfish)) T did suggest to me quite early on that W and I consider couples therapy but she picked up on my resistance to it and realised that for now this is about me and my issues. T is a fully qualified relationship counsellor and is giving all the support she can.

(B2W)) I understand what you are saying about being obsessed with therapy and with T. As I guess you are well aware, one of the main traits of AvPD is a very strong desire for closeness to others, and I’ll freely admit that that was why I chose my particular T in the first place. To be able to experience this in a safe and controlled environment with strong boundaries and a T who understands the issues seemed like a sensible thing to do. With T’s help the attachment and transference is beginning to subside and I would have to deny that any feelings I have for T are making my relationship with W worse. By the way, I KNOW that T thinks of me between sessions. She tells me she does; she says things like “ I was reading this article and I thought of you” or “I saw this on line and thought it might be helpful to you”. I’m sure T thinks of all of her clients between sessions not just me, that seems to be the way she works, and her ongoing support is a comfort.

Hopefully, I’ll get me sorted first, with T’s help, and then W and i can work on our relationship afterwards.

It has to be this way round.

I’ll keep you posted and thanks for all your support.

Awww, AV, I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties your wife has been through. It sounds like she is pretty alone in the world and once again, if she's not working, she's not going to be out there building the relationships she needs to build and will become (if not already) increasingly dependent on you. I can see how that would feel like a big drain.

Liese

(((Liese)))

Thank you for your support, it means a lot to me.

W decided to retire early from work about 3 years ago and is really just waiting for me to do the same. She's a few years older than I am and I just don't feel ready to give up the one thing ( apart from being on here of course ) that keeps me in some sort of contact with the outside world.

It is a drain emotionally sometimes but we'll get there somehow.