Ok…watch this disclosure, dissing the closure
( I disclose because I am helped
by others disclosing, most of all)
We went to our couples therapy this week.
I finally bring up the sex topic, blatantly I mean, as in, I say, 'I
want to talk about my lack of desire to have sex with my husband.'
This is not something we’ve discussed yet with our new
therapist.
I say, ‘I want to open sexually because I am turned on,
I don’t want to have to make myself open, which is what I
seem to have mostly done these past ten years.’
Therapist says, ‘What would make you want to open?’
I say, ‘If he was in his power around me, like he is with
other men. I say, maybe he needs to pretend I am a man.’
Therapist says, ‘Don’t go there.’
‘Ok,’ I say.
Therapist says, ‘What does it mean to you for him to be in
his masculine power?’
I say, ‘It’s when he is steady. When I can be my wild feminine self, and he
stands strong and steady, and I can do anything to test his stability, and he
is like a rock, I cannot knock him down.’
I say, ‘That makes me open, naturally, easily, I couldn’t stay closed to
masculine energy like that if I tried. I
feel safe in the presence of that power, and I am always attracted to him when
is like that. But he isn’t like that
with me, just with other men.’
Therapist says, ‘Heather, what do you want to ask David? What do you want to ask that you are afraid
to ask?’
I start crying. Then
I say, ‘David, why can’t you be in your masculine power around me?’
David doesn’t seem to know why exactly. But he does seem to know what I’m talking
about. He says he tries, that he feels
he approaches me in this way, and that if I am not receptive, if I am not open
immediately, he goes away, feeling I wasn’t approving of him.
I have a thing with feeling as if David is needy,
energetically needy, often coming to me to suck my energy. So I have a tendency to close down at the
onset of our interactions if I get a wiff of needy. I am not proud of this, but it is what
happens.
Therapist says, ‘This is where you two are reliving your
core wounds. Heather senses neediness,
that may or not be there, and she closes.
David feels he is not good enough based on her lack of openness, and
retreats. You are both left alone and
longing for connection.'
Therapist asks me to look at David. I do.
He looks like he has that needy look in his eyes, and I say 'It’s really
hard for me to look at him when I sense the neediness in his eyes.'
David says he is not feeling needy. I say, 'But I feel that you are.'
Therapist says, 'Heather, was there anyone in your life that
overwhelmed you with their neediness, that drained your energy with their
neediness?’
‘Of course, my mother,’ I say.
Therapist says I am looking through a filter that is
projecting this experience I had with my mother onto David. Even when David is not being needy, I am
projecting it onto him.
David has been looking at me this whole time, I have kept on looking at him too. He has stayed
steady. I see him now. He is not feeling needy at all. He feels safe and just like the rock that I
cannot push over.
I say, ‘Wait, David, I like what I am feeling from you
now. It feels really good the way you
are looking at me. I think I have to
test you. Maybe that is what I’ve been
doing for so long, testing you to see if you can hold yourself steady long
enough for me to trust that you are for real.’
Therapist says, ‘Yes, and when you project the needy energy
onto him, he feels rejected and this triggers his core wound, his core wound of
needing confirmation from his mother that he is okay.’
Therapist says to David, 'She is going to test you. She cannot help it. You are going to have to hang in there for
those moments while she discerns if you are for real. If you are there in front of her in your
masculine power, or if you are there to suck her dry.’
David gets it. He is
holding so steady in his seat in the therapist’s office and I am a little
wetter.
It is almost like magic how easily I am turned on by a
display of fierce masculine presence.
We leave the therapist’s office when the session is over and
go outside and look at each other. We
are both red in the eyes and wide open from this very real breakthrough we
just had.
I say, ‘We are just going to keep having breakthroughs forever,
huh? We are not going to arrive and peak
and feel we have attained couples’ enlightenment, but we are going to keep on
in the Process. It is a relief to me to
realize this. I tell him that I’ve been
having an email dialogue with a friend the past few days, and that the friend
just wrote to me saying how he feels we (as a species I guess) peak, hit our
potential, and then at some point in our ‘older’ age we look back and realize
that our potential is not what it once was.
I tell David that I responded to my friend by writing that I saw something
different in the way David’s dad lived his life out. I saw David’s dad live his life to the last
few days, working, to improve on what he could improve, in his case, it was law
suits around health care inequalities.
What could be more beautiful than that?
He never felt he peaked, he just got more and more invested in doing the
best job he could. David and I are
standing outside, and he is crying as he listens. He then says, ‘Thank you for saying that.’ I say ‘Yeah, and your dad flossed his teeth
to the very end too.’
We leave in our separate cars.
I go home to the kids, let the babysitter go. David goes back to work.
He comes home a while later, and I test him. He holds steady and it is real.
We make love that night in the most satisfying way we have
ever before.
Improve. We will work
to improve on what can be improved, because with that state of mind, we don’t
have to peak.
