Dear Michelle:

“I just wonder if maybe.. he was testing me to see if I would stick around and now I’ve just abandoned him.. he may never have left me for someone else, but he wanted to always have that out… Do you think that if I’d stayed that it would’ve shown him that someone would ultimately be there for him despite anything and soothed some of his inner child scabs? Or would he have kept pushing me away because a mother’s love is not a void that I can ever really fill”

My answers: no matter how loving, accepting, undemanding, enduring woman you would have been with him, he would have continued to push you away forevermore, even  when the two of you are 80 years old, unless he had some serious psychotherapy for a couple  of years or so. His mother created a void in him, and the filling of that void was time limited. After too many years of void, it is no longer possible for it to be filled without healing. Not even by his mother, if she changed her ways.

“I’m pretty sure his mother has expressed love to him at some point, it just doesn’t seem to have been a consistent thing growing up?”- no mother never expresses love for her child. No person in the world never expresses love for another. But a smile and favorite food on occasion, even daily, do not make up for repeated anger and hostility toward the child. Her being cold  means she was angry and hostile- the motivation behind her rejecting her son and bickering with her husband for years.

“If love requires pain, some self sacrifice.. because they need you?”- without him being motivated to attend and seriously work in the context of professional therapy for about two years, your sacrifice would have been for nothing. He probably would have stayed with you. He probably wouldn’t have looked for the ideal woman, a concept that was indeed “a ruse he was using to push” you away, just as you stated. But at the end of the story/ the end of your lives together, he and you would be where you are today, just older, sicker and exhausted.

In other words, what is the point in sacrificing for a relationship that will not change? You invest in a child so that he or she will grow up to be a healthy adult; you invest in a plant, so that it will grow and flourish. What is the point of investing in a man so that he can keep being the hurting child he’s been for so long, into old age?

I think that you see yourself in him, you see in him the unloved child that you were and you want to save him from the pain of being unloved. Question is, will you direct your efforts toward yourself and save yourself?

* It is way easier to try to save another than to save  ourselves.

“My mother was anxious avoidant in childhood… Now my mom shares her love with me any chance she can get”- the time limit to fill the void that she created in you is gone now. Just like I mentioned regarding his mother, it is too late now for her to fill his void.

“I have been in therapy before as well. Did I mention that both me and this man have degrees in Psychology.. he seems so entirely uncomfortable with emotions”-impersonal, academic, outside-learning is very different from personal, inside-out learning, when it comes to emotions. He can have a PhD in any subject, and yet be as uncomfortable as he is with his emotions, having no insight, so it seems, into his mind and life.

anita

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