Closure

It never happens. I know. I’ve known forever. Closure was a weird concept someone drew up a few decades ago.

“The family therapist who created the field of “ambiguous loss” — loss without closure. Complicated grief: parents, divorce, addiction, dementia, aging. “You love somebody. And when they’re lost, you still care about them. You can’t just turn it off.”

There is no such thing as closure. In fact, Pauline Boss says, the idea of closure leads us astray. It’s a myth we need to put aside, like the idea we’ve accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term “ambiguous loss,” creating a new field in family therapy and psychology. She has wisdom for the complicated griefs and losses in all of our lives and for how we best approach the losses of others.”

But you do ruminate and recycle. Less as time goes by, but for me, it is still gutting. I can’t fathom how he repeatedly told me how much he loved me, made love in a close and connected way (those eyes still drill into me, blackening as he got closer to orgasm …) and how he “promised” (cough) with a deep, lingering kiss, that one day we’d find our way back to each other. 🤢🤮😱😳

I have to always pull myself back up from those black holes. Those spirals of utter despair.

He didn’t love me. He used me. As BG says, I am too good to him. I was also “too good” to Rog. I gave and gave and gave.

Until he thought he had enough, I was no longer required. He had found a replacement. Someone he “loved” more than he ever loved me. I was a piece of shit.

I thought about this this morning after some deep and fast shower sex. BG was preoccupied. Is interviewing two young women this morning as potential bar staff.

So I got in the shower with him, and scrubbed his back.

He’s not usually a fast starter when thinking about something else. But holy hell, we were away, and things were over loudly and quickly, him saying, WTF, how did you do that to me? I’m gonna have a damn heart attack, babe!

And as his eyes drilled into mine, I saw Rog. His eyes connected with my soul. Penetrating me harder than….

Yeah. With only two lovers ever, I am uber aware of avoiding comparisons.

But they do inevitably occur sometimes.

Closure. Hmm.

I wish.

Mind movies

Anyone else have mind movies every day, and then the overactive dreaming every night? For six years? Constantly?

I have been counselled about this countless times. The standard advice (once people finally get that I can’t stop them by “just letting it go”, or trying not to think about it….) is to let them run their course and eventually you will be desensitised. But that hasn’t happened for me. I have tried mindfully pushing them away, then sitting with them, letting them play out hopefully to peter out. I have tried hypnotherapy to devalue them. But I had a teary moment again today as I drove home. I saw (and when I say saw, I mean I literally SEE these scenes, very vivid and 3D) how delirously happy I was, back as a young 20-something, talking with him about cheating, how I understood that temptation comes to many of us, throughout life, but that how connected people communicate and work on their connection to bond them to their partner. My movie today wasn’t originally about Leanne – they most often are. This one was about the stag party prostitute he lied to me for over twenty years about. The one I knew he visited, the one I was told (and believed) that he had been pressured into a drunken hand-job with by “the boys” and had felt disgusted about later. The one I never knew he didn’t have the cash to pay, and a friend pressured him into the room and paid (more married men at a brothel doing things that I thought they were better than) and he had to surreptitiously find to pay back at the wedding the week later. I talked to him about it at the time. I was actually okay with it. We were young, he was curious, VERY drunk, and I asked him to tell me the whole truth. He told me when he returned home from that night how awful he felt about what he’d done – the hand job – and until after his affair, I totally believed that story.

So, today’s movie production was of him sweating, drunk, and pumping away on a prostitute in a brothel, with a bunch of young guys, the majority of who should have “known better,” “got that out of their systems before now,” etc…. One in particular disappoints me more than the rest (other than Roger) as I adore him and his family. Dumbass. Him, not me. But I feel like one too. As I told Roger when he finally told me the truth about two years ago (that I genuinely believe he kind of almost forgot about as it was so long ago – in the first year of us living together) I don’t care if he came in her hand, her mouth, or her vagina, or her….. It is all sex. I care that he lied to me about it, and created an atmosphere that seems to have allowed omissions and lies. He swears he never used a prostitute before or after that time, and that it really did disgust him.

But he doesn’t understand fully the repercussions of that lie AFTER he cheated twenty something years later! The first crime was forgivable (to me at least) especially if he told me the truth, but it is material to the second one. He does NOT seem to get that, in fact, it is the one time he has ever got angry with me during our post-affair years, when I have tried to get him to understand that it affects me monstrously because the two events are linked. The first lie set up the rest decades later.

But, I digress. My question is this. Has anyone else struggled with this debilitating problem? If so, what worked to soothe the pain, and reduce the occurrences? Even after separation? After letting the perpetrator go from your life? How do I get some sleep without this? How do I ever re-paper my mind with more pleasant images? Your thoughts, please.

Steps

Another step has been taken.

Last exam for this year has been completed, last research project submitted. That was yesterday afternoon.

Today I did a twelve hour day in the office to try to catch up on some of what has been piling up as I studied. I love my boss and her support and patience as I climb this maybe silly little mountain. I worked for her when I was happy, when she saw how in love we were. She would often comment on the hilarious, loving texts he would send me most days at work.

While he was fucking my “friend” – maybe after he fucked her, maybe before. Definitely after, and before he texted her. Because she was texted every day, multiple times per day. And me too. He was good at keeping us both on the hook.

So, I can’t go to my friend’s mother’s funeral four hours away tomorrow. I want to go, but there is no way I can take a day off work in our busy season, especially after my boss has been so fantastic this past month while she hasn’t had me there. I am sort of like her PA as well as my other roles. I need to give her a few months of full-on attention. She knows my story, she was one who held me as I fell apart. She came to my country, engaged, ten years after her first fiance died, and she grieved for the boy she loved. The second one was a multiple cheat, shagging all his staff. She gets it. We don’t discuss it anymore, but in the last week, she has told me at least four times per day that she loves me! I mean, really, amazing. I owe her.

I will go to work again tomorrow, and hope my friend feels she is doing the best she can to farewell her mother. We are inaugurating her into the Motherless Bitches Club this weekend, with a girls’ weekend at my holiday home. I say “we” – I mean myself, my oldest friend (who I have kept at arms length for quite some time, but haven’t fallen out with) and her. My old friend, J, and myself had our mothers die within two years of each other, both when we were 30 and 32. Our old uni friend, L, had hers die this weekend. (Note we didn’t “lose” our mothers, they didn’t “pass,” they died.)

I can’t wait. I need some chill time, wine, laughter and friends. Let’s hope I can recreate that like I used to have.

Before I lost my joy.

She’s gone, she’s really gone

After he left, we were doing really well as friends and parents, I was still heartbroken, and we had fun together when we did catch up. He told me the truth about his hookup with her, because I asked.  I “felt something in my bones” about it, I kind of knew, even when he was protesting to the contrary, the whole time that he hadn’t really dealt with the “whys” properly, he hadn’t really any fulfilling answers about why he had chosen her, he knew, and so did I, why he chose an affair instead of talking to me, and we had a small clue as to why her (availability, re-kindling is easy when you know you’ve got in their pants previously, you also know they are whores who never say no, and we both always knew she had regretted that they broke up.) He hesitated to tell me, but he told me the truth.  And he changed his phone number.  Two years later, he changed his phone number, and we weren’t even together anymore.  I guess it showed me he really had worked all the crap out of his system.  He got so lost and confused about who he was, what he wanted for a while there.  

We lived separately for three months.  It was hard.  I still loved him.  A whole lot.  He was so kind, the way I always remembered him, and he started REALLY looking at himself.  Why did he get to that point?  Who was he?  None of the stuff he’d done matched who he thought he was.  After three months, we bloody well reconciled!  Again.  It was different this time for me, I finally felt free of her breathing down my neck.  I saw another psychologist, I knew I needed to find some peace with what my life had become, some kind of acceptance, without condoning what two people I trusted, one implicitly, had done to my sense of safety in the world, maybe this was all linked back to the vicious rape by a friend of a friend all those years ago, maybe I hadn’t ever felt safe since?  During the third appointment, we were working through my lack of joy, my lack of safety, and what I needed to do to find some peace, and stop the thoughts constantly swirling.  Then I told Jason that Roger had re-visited skankola (she doesn’t ever deserve capitalisation!)  And he’d fucked her.  Jason held up his hand at that point and went, “what? Hang on a moment. So, he went back to her after all this time, after you both thought he hated her? Well, Paula, you are not depressed, and you are not unwell, he has been making you feel very unsafe for a very long time. What do you want to do now?”  I told him that I felt that this had finally been resolved, and that Roger could totally see how screwed up he’d been, how bad his behaviour was, and that we both felt that we were keen to carry on together, and put this sordid chunk of our lived in the past, but that I was having huge difficulty with my losses and my grief.  Jason had met Roger, and he thought he was genuinely a lovely man, who had had a crisis and then hadn’t handled it half as well as he thought he was doing at the time.  (Jason is a trauma and abuse specialist, works with a lot of under-privileged, abused, criminal youth, as well as his private practice, he’s seen a lot.)  I asked if I was being as foolish as I felt, if I was being, as chumplady puts it, a chump.  He said that he didn’t think so, that he saw a lot of genuine love, and lot of remorse in him, and a heap of desire to forgive in me.  He then gave me the contact details of a couple who live in a city three hours from us, who he labelled as “the best couples counsellors in the country.” 

I contacted them, and talked to Nic.  We decided we couldn’t afford either the time off work, or the fee to do the intense counselling he could offer (full time, two weeks) but that he was keen to work with us, and we would do double sessions, as we had to travel so far, weekly at first. Roger agreed, a little reluctantly (we had spent a lot of time and money on shrinks already that hadn’t helped at this point.) So, ten hour days, six hours of driving, and four hours, with a break in the middle, of counselling.  A day off work for both of us (I had returned to my previous job, at twice the pay, and greatly reduced hours, quite flexible, my boss was amazing to me, she knew what had transpired.) We did this for about six weeks, then went to fortnightly sessions.  Discussion to follow in my next post.  My reluctant counselling co-attendee of the past was actually getting somewhere finally!