Dear Boris1010:

You are welcome. Correction: I am not the owner of this website, neither am I a moderator. I am a member just like you. What makes me different from any member here is that for the last five years, I’ve been posting every day, numerous times per day, interacting with many hundreds of members from all over the world, continuously looking at myself as I read other people’s stories and as I interact with so many.  Much of what I know, and what I get to know more and more every day, is a result of my work here, most of which is on record, if you go to past pages, starting May 2015.

In my following response to your recent post, I will quote from you and respond to each quote. I will number the quotes in case you will want to refer to these.  It will be a long post, so take your time with it:

1. “I’ve been living from the neck up for the vast majority of my life” and you are not alone, living this way. You have lots and lots of company. We can tell the difference between young children and adults because young children, before they get very hurt, live from their hearts. I don’t know any adult who lives from the heart with just the right amount of input from the neck up, just enough to keep the person healthily and happily walking on a reasonable path of life.

Disassociation from the heart is the norm, the difference is in the extent. (There are people even more disassociated than you have been all  these years).

2. “I’m not sure I can live with buying my own happiness at the expense of another’s.. to inflict such pain on another person just slams the brakes on everything”- you are assuming here that your wife is happy, and that if you separate from her, she will experience much pain. What if neither one of these assumptions are true.

3. “my wife.. she genuinely cares about me, in her own way, and seems to want me to be happy”- I wonder about the nature of her own way of caring about you. I will give you an extreme example, and it is extreme, but to make a point, here it is: Mengele, the Nazi pseudo doctor who performed terrible experimentations on concentration camp prisoners, the man who  with the move of his hand decided who lived and who died in Auschwitz, cared about one particular gipsy boy in the camp. He gave him treats to enjoy, kept him around, dressed him nicely, and one day led that boy to the gas chamber with a business as usual attitude. Mengele genuinely cared for that boy in his own way.

4. “we do things together and have our little routines and rituals and all.. but it’s so sterile for me, no joy, no real happiness”- those little routines and rituals don’t give you joy, but they do give you emotional comfort, and therefore you are motivated to continue your way of life with her. Don’t underestimate how important these routines and rituals are for you.

5. “She is not aware of the nature of my feelings toward her”- once in a while she is aware, but she doesn’t care to remain aware, is my guess.

6. “I always seem to feel I have to hide everything from everyone, especially who I really am”- it is not difficult to accomplish that, to successfully hide from others who you really are, because most people don’t care to see who you really are. They are too busy with their routines and rituals, too busy hiding themselves, too busy with their worries and anxieties and obsessions etc.

7. “Like so many other alcoholics.. I am a ‘collector of masks’, one for any and every occasion.. every response gets parsed by the ‘context’ I’m in, the kind of people I’m with”- it is a social skill, to adopt and adjust to different people and situations/ contexts: people other than very young children do behave differently in different situations and with different people: one way with a supervisor at work, another way with a friend in a Saturday outdoors barbecue, another way with the dog at home.

I think that in the context of this thread you are not hiding, are you? You definitely have the opportunity to be you, here.

8. “perhaps the saddest thing of all is that there’s a mask for her, too, and that’s what she sees”- I am guessing that your mask is what she wants to see. I don’t think that reality is that you are denying her something she wants, fooling her, not at this point after so many years at the least. If you removed your mask now, she will urge you to put it back  on.

9. “the thought of causing such pain to another person is distressing to the extreme… trash somebody’s life so I can improve.. my own?”- again, this is an assumption that you are making, that she will experience such pain, and that her life will be trashed if you were no longer in her life. Seems to me that you are afraid of being in such pain yourself, that your life being trashed if you lose those routines and rituals with her.

10. “I don’t know how to resolve this dilemma I’m facing (dilemma: a situation requiring a choice between two unsatisfactory ends).. as a kid when my best friend blew a test in school, and his dad was drilling the things he got wrong into him.. and me, because I was there with him”-

– the dilemma: to pursue this woman from AA vs. your marriage, to live from the heart or stay neck up, at this point, so far, seems to me that this is a dilemma in theory, for you. Not something you are really considering.

Regarding your childhood friends blowing a test, you are welcome to tell me more about it, about your childhood experience with your father, your parents, but only if you want to look deeper into why this memory “has stuck so tenaciously all these years”.

anita

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