Brian and I had a cocktail hour that went awry, unexpectedly off the rails into The Great Matter once again. There had been a brief flare-up when She Who Will Not Be Named tried to get Lisa Heckaman to become her spiritual director (again). Lisa checked it out with me, to confirm or deny her own gut-sense that such a re-arrangement would be a bad idea. “I know the whole story, after all,” she reasoned, “so could I help her? Yet it seems unwise too.” I confirmed it would be a bad idea, simply continuing the destructive pattern this woman has shown again and again: getting her emotional needs met in the covenantal intimacies of others. This time, she was hankering for Lisa’s and mine, not Brian’s and mine.
A distinctive reaction in me was my own utter visceral wallop: feeling a loss of oxygen, slight panic, wave of sensation then tears. I tended myself well, honoring the visceral wisdom, letting it be held in witnessing with a friend, moving my body through it. And the next morning, still aware of it, I did the online instruction research to invite Brian to block his email addresses from her, finally. He’d nodded he was willing when we were away in Minnesota, but such things are rarely of his own agency or energy. He won’t pursue things of potential conflict, even when–or especially when–they are in his best interest. It’s like he doesn’t value himself enough to protect himself. For others he’ll fall on a sword to protect. Himself? Rarely if ever. Maybe he thinks that’s manly. Myself, I see only a soul-wound or deficiency. An inability to believe he matters for who he is, as he is, not for what he does. A refusal of an abandoned little boy unable or unwilling to grow-up into a deeply grounded, loving man, Image-Bearer, knowing his own needs matter to Godde, not just for him.
And my part in the debacle? Let’s see what an autopsy might reveal…
Whatever was triggered within me started slowly, gained force, then ultimately refused to withhold itself, to the point that Brian nearly walked away from the walk we were on with Nala. Part of me regrets that. I never want to see him in pain. Part of me is proud of it, as I rarely speak openly in tender spaces with him. I do my best to be as gentle and as translated as possible, attuned to his insecurities, his griefs, his desires. Then every once in a while, I disregard all that and simply say what I feel I need to say. It’s his and my version of both of our parents’ disagreement styles. True to expectation, he and I live utterly parallel “stories” of wounding, each projecting onto the other, both available to grow us up, if/when we're willing. This whole 9-year narrative is the shark that’s taken bites out of me for years.
When he’s had more than he can withstand, he stops listening and begins counting: his experience of “bites” I’m taking out of him. “You’re like a shark,” he finally said. “Taking bite after bite.” I wish this were not so, of course. How painful. Yet his incapacity to continue to listen, to really hear and understand amidst this Matter continues to surprise me, wound me, anger me. He continues to have the assumption of relationship renewed, regardless of what he and I seem to have agreed. All while she has done more and more to demonstrate any relationship would be unhealthy, inadvisable, dangerous to him. He cannot root out the presumption of relationship, hoped-for connection, which will only continue to wound him and me.
He named “the hypothetical” of the one conversation he would have with her, if/when she finally does reach out to him. “I would answer one direct question from her, which would be why I blocked her from my personal and formal email contacts.” He gave his threefold answer of what he would say. He outlined that any return to relationship would go through me and only through me. This is when my trigger popped, I think, if slowly at first. It was only a hypothetical, after all.
I tried to name my once-again frustration/anger at “having to revise what we had agreed upon” understanding of no-contact. How even imagining this one-question-response was a betrayal of our agreed-upon no-contact, which I then try to reconfigure in my own gut-sense as not a betrayal. The word betrayal is a charged word, particularly for him, so I have learned it’s not very useful for us together even if it is what I experience. I stayed with my own experience, even if I tried to soften it. Projecting his need for relationship with her onto me, onto "my choice" or "through me" was the other "pop" I now see in my trigger. This is the responsibility for his relational life that I am attempting to release. It is not my responsibility, ever. "I will never open that door," I told him. "Ever."
Then I realized it was this matter of “presumption of relationship” driving the ship once again. He cannot adjust to the reality that she broke their relationship. Continues to threaten him in ways he refuses to see. On our walk, then, I tried to name the issue as this presumption that was driving the hypothetical. We weren't arguing over a hypothetical, in other words. It's always the presumption of relationship. The hypothetical only arose because the presumption pushed it. “What do you get out of having this one-question conversation that not having it does not provide?” I tried to invite us to see together that his need to be loved by her, understood by her was his proverbial Achilles Heel. He refused to see it. Or simply couldn’t, in his own grief and sadness. Instead, he did what is the next best thing for him: project it onto me, my desires. He knows how to do things he doesn’t want to do if someone else is responsible for “making him do it.” I forbear this most times, but this time, with less patience. Yes, I am holding a fierce line because in some increasing areas of tensions between us–The Matter, his own body-activity-care, for instance–I recognize I will be hurt when he refuses to care for himself. In this narrative, I am my father, trying to get my mother to believe she matters. Fool’s errand, and I know it. I wish I could just stop it. I honestly don’t know how and tend my own fear. Yet.
He remained out in the living room for the majority of the evening, as I moved into bedtime and reading in bed. “I just needed some space,” he said, as he finally came in. Yeah, me too, if not in the same way.
Francis Weller speaks of what I see in Brian (and in myself) as developmental trauma, or slow trauma, which “occurs from an experience of absence rather than from something dramatic that happened to us. … In those moments when we needed to be soothed or held, the touch often didn’t come, or what was offered was a partial and distracted attention. What we were granted was too thin and didn’t provide us with enough substance to calm the effect of the experience we were having. … It shows itself in the inability to regulate internal states of distress as they arise and in feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness.”[1] Brian and I both share these behaviors, demonstrated responses when the experience we’re having touches this longstanding experience of absence, “the touch that didn’t come,” or what was offered was simply insufficient to hold what we were/are feeling. Brian's grown-man-self, his outer-shell, knows his worth and fears becoming arrogant. His little-boy self sabotages him all the time with self-doubt and fears of worthlessness. And so they dance, pushing away the self-doubt and fears, never facing them, never knowing how to face them.
This morning, I awoke to a bit of convergence or an ‘a-ha’ feeling about it all. This young woman has such drive to have children, to fill the emptiness within herself through another she can control. Though she has never had any deepening intimate relationship with anyone, she will pour that voracious need into some biological form from her own womb. I lament that so fully…I pity the child. While Brian loves his mother, she was also overwhelmed with depression and migraines in his earliest years. He never got the message that his own needs matter. No one’s needs in his family of origin can be claimed to matter: selfish, self-centered, etc. Swedish-Norwegian culture, we say, pushing it outwardly. He honestly has no spiritual-muscular-capacity to know what his own needs are, let alone advocate for them himself. To do so in his own family would further isolate him from his family. So he refuses. In The Great Matter, I now see: this no-longer-young woman attached her neurotic need to mother to this abandoned little boy inside of him, whom he regularly refuses. (As most men "to be manly" are taught to do too, btw).
He won’t ever get himself free until he learns to feel, discern, and protect his own needs in healthy ways, which as a pastor he faces obstacles against, which as an abandoned little boy inside, he simply doesn’t know how, nor even have any motive to get curious about. She’ll always have this hold over him until he grows up inside, recognizing his own needs matter. I need to remember that he has to be the one to name, claim, and pursue them. Well-bounded. Clear. In conversation with me, yes, but not always met by me. His work, not mine.
My work is how to hold my own fear as we age, even if it means he self-destructs. I need to practice remaining vulnerable with him in the times to come when this aspect of him means that I will get hurt. I need to practice releasing him to Spirit’s care for all these things, for him to do what he’s chosen to do, ready to do, willing to become. To love him, in other words, without unhealthy attachment or presumption. My challenge here is protecting myself while he refuses to claim his own agency in protecting himself, protecting both of us. All he knows right now is his sensation of "Lisa is controlling what I do." Which I am apparently willing to do for now, to tend my own fear.
So how do I tend my own fear in the midst of a trigger-fest? Well…that’s why it’s called practice. I need to learn to welcome fear as wisdom, alongside a deepening trust that I am learning to name my needs, knowing that they matter. I could imagine that as I get better at that, specifically with him, he'll get more and more pissed off. In the past, that has led to us finding our ways to grow in this invitation together. Will he get curious about strengthening his own ability to name, claim, his needs? I wonder... He doesn't need to, ironically, for me to love him, as clearly I do.
[1] Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, 38.
