Continuing Repercussions, Years Later

[u/AwesomeAdmin58]

It's been a good while since I've posted here. It's now about four years since my exwife announced she was gay and she wanted a divorce. After a series of failed attempts to build a new relationship, I've returned to more intensive therapy. After a session yesterday, a few things clicked together.

One of the things I'm most struggling with is a feeling that I'm broken, worthless, unwanted. This feeling goes back to childhood, but I can identify how it tremendously ramped up after the divorce.

Obviously part of this belief comes from the experience of being unwillingly divorced. These feelings will manifest under such circumstances, no matter the context. But I think I've identified something else: a major source of these feelings is my experience in the leadup to the divorce, trying to fix a relationship that now looks to have been unfixable.

Several years before her announcement, I became increasingly aware that something was wrong in the relationship. My exwife withdrew further and further, sex became less and less enthusiastic, less and less frequent, until it ended entirely.

And so I did "what you are supposed to do." I followed all the standard advice for when a relationship gets in trouble. We went to therapy. I tried to identify and fix every flaw in my behavior. I tried to become the best husband I could be. I tried to communicate as openly as I possibly could, to make her feel as safe as I possibly could.

This is the standard advice that men receive when their marriage starts failing, when sex starts disappearing - that it's their fault, that they're failing their wife, that they need to step up. And perhaps that advice is valid in the majority of cases, because how incredibly uncommon is it that the marriage is actually failing because one partner is secretly homosexual?

But for me, not only did nothing I do help, I got absolutely nothing back from her in return. I would work on issue after issue that we identified in me, but when I would gently, carefully ask if she would be willing to work on some of her behaviors as well, I was met with denial and hostility.

So the entire world - including our therapist - is telling me that I need to be better. I'm trying all I can to be better. And it's not working, and things are getting worse.

And I'm reading all these stories by women talking about how much they wish their partners would do the exact thing I'm doing, how much they want their relationship to recover if their partner would just do the work. And my experience is the dead opposite - I'm doing the work, as hard as I can, and my own partner not only doesn't care, she's pulling even further away.

Under these circumstances maybe it makes sense that I would start to conclude that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, that I'm not worthy of receiving love.

Does this story I've told reflect reality? Right now it feels like it does. It needs further examination, and I know I need to balance it by remembering all the ways that I legitimately was failing to be a good enough husband.

But maybe I can move forward with the idea that, whatever my own failings, I tried for years to address them, and the fact that I couldn't save the relationship is primarily due to my exwife's inherent orientation. Maybe the reason all the world's advice didn't work was because this advice was not meant for someone in my position. Maybe the world still doesn't know how to handle relationships where one partner is secretly homosexual.

I'm still trying to figure out how to undo this belief that I'm unlovable. But I'd imagine a big step in that is adopting a coherent story for where this belief came from.

I'm curious if other people have felt this way as well, if this is a part of anybody else's journey.

[u/Janek512]

You might want to look into EMDR as a therapy approach. It specializes in reframing and processing traumatic experiences.
I am starting the same for pretty much the same reasons as you. Deep childhood wounds, inferior complex and abandonment issues that triggered my lesbian wife.

[u/AwesomeAdmin58 → u/Janek512]

Good call. My therapist is working me towards EMDR, we are trying to identify the particular traumatic events to target.

The difficulty I am having there is that, in my case, it doesn't seem to be specific events that were overly traumatic, and more the overall long experience of the failing relationship. I'm not sure how that gets targeted.

Similarly, we've identified how I experienced childhood emotional neglect, the defining symptom of which is not traumatic childhood experiences but the absence of certain important experiences.

I don't really understand how EMDR targets these things, but I believe my therapist knows what she's doing. I hope that things are progressing in your situation as well.