Dear Katie:

I will be summarizing your account on this thread as I understand it:

You have been in a relationship with your husband for 10 years, married for 6, and you have a four year old daughter, currently seven months or so pregnant. For three years the marriage was up and down, temporarily separated December last year, reunited and attending marriage counseling since January this year.

You feel lonely living with your husband, lonely when you are apart and lonely in his presence. You don’t feel that he loves you, that he appreciate you etc. He says so in therapy but you don’t believe him. You are frustrated by a lack of physical affection on his part, and see your marriage as “a loveless marriage”. You are “so confused about whether to stay or go”.

Every time you leave a marriage counseling session you feel positive but that feeling is short lives. You feel that you have withdrawn from your friends. You seem to be crying a lot, “in floods of tears”.

You wrote: “I feel like this relationship has really eaten away at my self esteem. You wrote about your marriage: “I would like to see a small step in the right direction, and I don’t.”

You wrote about your history before the relationship with your husband: “I was always just trying to find love” You reached out to your absent father when you were 9 or 10, he visited you a few times then stopped one day. You met him again at 16,  a few more visits, and nothing after 18. Your mother struggled with anxiety and depression on and off and had a series of dysfunctional relationships over the years.

You wrote: “Maybe there’s always been a bit of a hole within me”.

Your husband complains to you at times that you take too long telling stories, stories about work, taxi rides and such. He told you that he prefers you tell him these stories in a short, sharp sentence. On the other hand, he talks on and on to you about his work.

This is my understanding at this point: you had a difficult childhood with a mother who was not emotionally available to you because of her anxiety and depression and you had a father who was not there physically and who didn’t care to be in contact with you. This is that “hole within me”, that you mentioned.

That hole always caused you pain but in the last three years, this pain has intensified into what I see as depression. I don’t think you are able at this point in your depression to see or evaluate your marriage correctly and to make thoughtful choices about your marriage. I think you blame your husband and the marriage for the pain in you that was caused long before you met this man, your now husband.

Like your therapist, I don’t see red flags about his behavior toward you. He may be unaware of going on and on about his work and it may bore you, so you may need to ask him to  not go on and on about it. And you may want to make an effort to tell him trivial stories in shorter accounts or not tell him at all if there is no value in him knowing.

I think that you need individual, one on one psychotherapy so to look into that hole-within, that intense loneliness experience of your childhood, an experience that you keep re-experiencing through adulthood, on and off before, on for three years.

The marriage counseling can go on in addition to the individual therapy.

anita