[CHANDLERS WISH]

This is what I used to tell my hubby when I went through 8-10 years of not wanting to have sex with him. You know why? Because by saying this, I was placing the blame on him, not myself. If it was HIS problem, then I didn't have to change, even though I KNEW deep down, it was entirely my problem.

Finally, I decided to grow up and deal with the situation. Now looking back, well, yeah, of course all he thought about was wanting to have sex, I was never giving him any. It's like telling someone to not think about the pink elephant in the room, well, that's all you end up thinking about. I'm kind of surprised that your counselor hasn't brought up that little nugget.

You are not overreacting, but she needs to change. She needs to do a little self examination, a little self reflection. I KNOW how hard it is to accept the blame in these situations, it's not fun because that means she has to change and when someone has to change, they are thrown out of their element and comfort zone.

Good luck to you.

Lana, there is so much I want to say...

I missed your post, for that I am sorry.. maybe many did...

You just spoke... a woman, whom stopped loving, stopped feeling sexy, intimate but, somehow, saw that there actually was real love? And, from that changed... dramatically, 8-10 years, dear lord... that's a life time in reality.. To focus? Re-gain that chemistry from the beginning because you evaluated, and saw, felt, love... and changed? My goodness, that takes one heck of a person, one with pure understanding of what the word love actually means.

I'm gobsmacked and proud, rolled into one.

This is what I used to tell my hubby when I went through 8-10 years of not wanting to have sex with him. You know why? Because by saying this, I was placing the blame on him, not myself. If it was HIS problem, then I didn't have to change, even though I KNEW deep down, it was entirely my problem

Yes, if, and if, he was loving, intimate, giving, wanting, you... And, you totally ignored that for what ever reason. Mostly, it's two people, is it not?

Realising that you don't want to.. And, him stating that, letting you know, asking why? Will make you one day accept the guilt.

But, remember, he communicated but what? Maybe, you saw that previous love, I am so proud of you and honoured to call you a woman... But, again, remember, something triggered it to start with... It takes two.. Maybe you were more stubborn, maybe you saw what you were taught, and couldn't see.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is that you "saw" and in that you regained not sex, but love, intimacy, cheekiness, chemistry, lust and love.

I hope

Thank you for being real.. And, telling a tale that can encourage others to see.

[MiniVanMan]

I thought this thread had died. Nice to see people are still talking.

Well, here's where I am at this point.

I understand that we need to work on making things better now and not dwell too much on the past. However, I still feel that unless we address the past I will never heal AND we are doomed to repeat it.

I made a list of questions, asking about my wife's needs and also asking for clarification on what seem to be conflicting statements she's made. I also had a list of responses to her reasons for sending me to a sex therapist. These are things that I really need to talk about if I'm going to get past the hurt and other strong emotions I'm feeling. If I can't discuss these things they will linger forever and I will never fully heal. Additionally, I will never feel that I've had the chance to explain my side of things.

Our couples counselor agreed to see me alone. I showed her my questions and she read them over very carefully. We then had this exchange:

Counselor: What if your wife doesn't know the answers to these questions?
Me: Well, she should. They're all about her feelings.
Counselor: But what if she's just not as in touch with herself like you are? She may not know the answers.
Me: Then this is a good opportunity to get to know herself better. I think these are things she needs to understand about herself.
Counselor: I think you should shred this list of questions, delete the computer file, and forget about them.

She said if the questions are important to me then I won't forget them. I can ask them later after things calm down. If I forget them then they weren't important in the first place. But shred and delete. Don't keep them around.

Wow. I couldn't disagree more. Problem is in every other case I've found this counselor to be extremely helpful and insightful. I trust her and am comfortable with her. I just think she's wrong about this.

We go to counseling once a week as a couple. In between counseling more questions pile up and I get more agitated. Our counselor won't let me ask important questions and my wife says "go ahead and ask but I probably will refuse to answer". She thinks that the answers will just cause me to "overreact" again and she doesn't want that.

I feel stonewalled by both of them. Even if I don't like the answers, at least we've confronted the issues. Burying them isn't going to help.

I need to know that my wife has some sense of contribution to my 20 years of unhappinesProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 She's pretty much come right out and said that she sees nothing wrong with making a unilateral decision to have a sexless marriage. That I'm overreacting and it's all my problem. Yet the blogs and forums are teeming with guys like me (and women too) who have had their once healthy sex lives ripped out from under them, and their spouses just shrug with callous disregard for the health of their marriage. And they use the exact same words I've been using: hurt, angry, duped, betrayed.

And my wife continues to believe that my feelings are "not normal". That I need to see a sex therapist to work this out on my own.

It's all just so frustrating.

- MiniVanMan

[WildChild]

It sounds like this therapist is not sex positive. She's not hearing you and not encouraging your wife to hear you either. You may need to find another therapist.

[jns]

MVM: your therapist was smart about the questions, if they are really important, you could recreate them, even in your sleep. What is more important is: does she think you have any valid points.

If she is not being dismissive of you, she should be willing to keep a copy of your questions to go over at some undetermined time in the future to see if the points in them were valid and if they were worked on in the therapy. When you are distrustful of her attempts to change you, you could see if she kept the list. Make the list on paper that is hard to duplicate or sign and date it on the back so you will know you are seeing your list.

Asking 20 questions of your wife automatically puts you and her in an adversarial relationship. Maybe you need to use a reverse psychological approach and describe how you are damaged by wanting sex at least some of the time like normal people and how hard it is for you to become celibate. This may make her see things from the other side. Maybe not.

Ask your therapist how celibacy cements bonds between loving couples and how this has worked through history to propagate the human race. The Shakers of the late 1800s promoted a sexless existence and separation of the sexes. They died out and their religion was of the ages.

[MiniVanMan]

Sunday my wife could see I needed to talk so we went to a local nature preserve and walked and talked for over an hour. She agreed to answer some of my burning questions. We each became agitated several times during the discussion but by the end we had both calmed down.

One thing I learned from our talk is that masturbation is not a sexual event for her. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around that, since any dictionary definition you find will tell you that it is a sexual activity. She says she does it to relax, or to get her mind off things, or simply because she's bored (even if she's extremely busy!). Still, I believe she feels it isn't sexual, so I'm going to have to let that go. For me this makes things even worse, though. As someone said earlier in the thread, "at least she has a sex drive", but now that I know she's not being sexual when she masturbates, this has no bearing whatsoever on her sex drive. She could have no drive at all and still masturbate. For me this begs the question: If she can masturbate to relax, why can't she have sex to relax?

The other thing I learned was that she really doesn't remember much of the last 20 years of our relationship. So many of her answers on Sunday were "I don't remember" when I asked her about how she was feeling or about how she behaved back then. Last night our counselor asked her if her answers were a response to feeling attacked by all my questions. Was it that she wasn't invested in thinking much about the answers due to the pressure I was putting her under? My wife said, no, she just plain ol' didn't recall those events that I was asking about. Now I can see why she is so eager to forget the past and move on. If I could forget all the hurt I'd be willing to move on, too.

She still maintains that she never rejected me. That saying "no" to my sexual advances for 20 years wasn't rejection. It was that she just wasn't interested in sex. Everything else was fine. She still loved me. She still had the emotional connection. She still had her sex drive. Just no interest in sex with me. She said I "chose" to see it as rejection. When I asked her if she "chose" to lose interest in sex with her husband, she said no. I explained that my reaction was no more of a choice than hers. Not sure if she got that.

Now she and our counselor want me to accept the past for what it is, acknowledge the pain, but let it go. Concentrate on the present. On making the marriage work again. I can see their point. It's all very logical. It also, at this point, seems impossible.

Our counseling session ended when my wife talked herself into a frenzy and stormed out of the room in tears. She exclaimed that she just couldn't deal with me saying that it was all her fault, that if only we'd had a healthy sex life all these years things would be okay. But that is exactly how I feel. That is why I went looking for a marriage counselor 5 years ago. It's why I've been unhappy all this time. It's why I'm still unhappy. For me, sex leads to intimacy. When the sex stopped, rejection was my response and intimacy virtually disappeared.

My counselor knows I like to write about my feelings and wants me to stop doing it. She says in her experience it just makes things worse. People will dwell on what they write about, and this will hinder the healing process. I believe she's correct. I stopped posting in this thread for a while because even though I much appreciated the help, it just made things worse for me. She says if I want to journal I should write about the good things. The small victories that bring my wife and me closer together. The little daily pushes in the right direction. The healthy stuff.

[Ashlee T.]

I can only speak for myself here, but I'd really like it if you told us the good things happening in your marriage. It is true that when you're mad about something and write the words, you can read them over and over and over,and they make SUCH perfect sense to you that you just can't get past them.

I think many of us here agree (and have said) that you're going to have to either 1. be willing to let some things go and move forward or 2. get out. You're still very angry, no one can tell you you're right or wrong for being angry.....but we can tell you that you'll not be able to move forward while still angry and lingering on the past.

With that said, please don't feel like you can only vent to us. You can tell us the good things, the steps forward, etc. You're improvements might help others.

[WildChild]

I don't know VanMan, this therapist sounds a bit biased. I'll be first in line to say that assigning blame isn't very productive but going into complete denial as your wife is, isn't productive either. My take is that you aren't feeling heard at all and it can be very difficult to move foreward with anyone who negates you or your feelings. Sometimes this just isn't resolvable.

When my ex and I were in couples counseling the counselor did something that really highlighted the relationship to me. He asked me something and instructed Hubby to listen, I answered, then he ask H, "What did you hear Wild say?" The way this essentially went:
WC "I really love it when the sky is blue"
C "H, what did you hear her say?"
H "I can't see blue or green and she can't blame me for the color of the sky"
C "That's not what she said, what did she say?"
H "She blames me for everything"
C "No that's not what she said. WC, please repeat what you said"
WC "I really love it when the sky is blue"
C "Now H, what did she say?"
H "When I had my first surgery..."

Of course that wasn't the subject area but was pretty much now it went, I have a feeling both your wife and counselor's hearing work about like H's.

I really encourage you to get another counselor on your own. Typically if they are working with you as a couple they will not act as an individual counselor. Yes you need to move on but you can't do that until you, in yourself resolve any unresolved issues so that you can let go.

There is a letter writting technique that is often recomended that I have found helpful. Sit down and write your feelings,as if writing to your wife, let it all out. Then write yourself what you would like to hear from her. Do you want an appology? Write it. Do you want acknowledgement? Write it. Then, you may need to give yourself a little time, write your forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn't about saying it's OK, it may never be. It isn't about forgetting, It's about letting go. I written about this before - I think I should write a blog on it, just so I don't have to keep saying it. This really can help.

[rcoreyus]

I agree with the therapist that dwelling on the past isn't a good idea. I don't think it matters (or is even really defined) who is at fault. What matters is what happens now and in the future. Everyone wants to fix your marriage. The problem is that you think that a good sex life is important for a happy marriage and your wife does not.

Maybe at the next session, just try to make it clear. You can't be happy in a marriage without an active good sex life. If your wife can't be happy with one, then I don't think there is anything to be done.

[MiniVanMan]

WildChild, that exchange about the blue sky just cracked me up. Our counselor actually did start to do that just yesterday. I had a reaction on my face to something my wife said, and it set her off. The counselor brought everything to a halt and asked my wife what that look on my face meant. Of course she was dead wrong. She thought I was belittling her but the counselor saw exactly what I was showing, and it was simply that I was puzzled. But my wife saw an attack.

I did have my own counselor until the end of March when insurance changed and she went out of network. I still feel good, overall, with our couples counselor and plan to see her by myself again.

Rcoreyus, my wife has said several times recently that she wants a good sex life with me. She knows it's important to me and she enjoys it when it's good. But she admits that there's a lot of baggage keeping it from happening on a regular basis. We actually have had sex recently, and she said that in the last 5 or 6 weeks sex has been better than usual because I've been more open and honest and talkative with her than anytime in, well, as long as she can remember.

I like the letter writing idea WildChild. I may try that. Thanks.

I appreciate the invitation to write about the good things rather than venting. I'd like to take our counselor's advice and concentrate on the good stuff. So from now on, no whining or complaining. I'll either write about the good, or at least straight up facts. But no venting. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone. I really mean that.

- MiniVanMan

[MiniVanMan]

Milestone

I think my personal crisis has about ended. My wife was out of town over the weekend, and I had a lot of time to think. Three things came together in my mind that helped bring me to a new state of clarity:

1) Having the opportunity to talk it out with my wife, as we did last weekend on our nature walk.
2) Stop seeing my wife as an adversary.
3) Getting out from under my sex therapist.

I discussed our nature walk discussion in a previous post. Won't go into it again, but the next day we had a counseling session and our counselor was not pleased with me. I understand that bombarding my wife with questions put her on the defensive, but it was necessary for me. I needed to talk and had been told that I couldn't by our counselor. But I couldn't keep it bottled up inside any longer and I feel this helped me tremendously, just knowing I was being heard, that I had a voice, and that I mattered.

In the counseling session last week my wife said something that took a while to sink in. I was talking about my belief that if I agree to move on and stop dwelling on the past, then she wins. She's had her way for 20 years and I've been miserable, and I'll be saying it's all okay. No problem. 20 years of sex down the drain? That's fine, I'm okay with it. Her response was that if I could concentrate on the present then we BOTH win. Our marriage will be heading in the right direction and we can work toward a happy future together, which of course makes logical sense.

I don't know exactly how this all works in her head, but I'm coming to terms with the notion that my wife truly was clueless about my needs all these years. She just didn't know, despite the fact that for me I couldn't have been more clear, that my needs weren't being met. She didn't know that sex once a month was way below average for married couples, so she never thought our sexual relationship was unhealthy. She didn't equate her own masturbating with anything sexual, so it had no bearing on our sex life. All those things I had viewed as complete disregard for my needs and feelings. A complete dismissal of me personally. I have to believe that wasn't the case. She says it wasn't, so I have to believe her. I just have to. And so I have to believe we're in this together. She didn't mean to hurt me, so it's not productive to think of her as the enemy. I have to think of us as a team if this is going to work.

I don't think I've talked much about my sex therapist, but let me just say that the guy is a crackpot. He pigeonholed me from day one as a sex addict without anything more than a cursory interview. Unlike all my previous individual and couples counselors, he didn't ask leading questions that made me think and come to my own conclusions. Rather, he'd form an opinion or diagnosis and then push his agenda on me. He'd TELL me (instead of ASKING me) what I wanted, who I should be, how I should behave, and what sex is. For him, any sex that isn't a cosmic spiritual moment is indefensible and degrading to those involved. He backpedaled time and time again on his diagnoses. He waffled. He pushed. He routinely dismissed me out of hand. I left every session feeling agitated and attacked. Want to know the icing on the cake? He recommended homeopathic (i.e., fake) remedies for my prostate problems.

I've told my wife about him and how he makes me feel, and she's been understanding but hoped I would continue seeing him. She thought he might be able to help me gain insight into why I behaved so "irrationally" to the news of her masturbating. Last night we talked about him again after having had another session on Friday and again leaving in a very agitated state of mind. I told her that I needed to quit seeing him, that it was just making things worse. I felt that our couples counselor could help me with any sexual issues I might be having, and she agreed. She could tell the sex therapist was just making things worse, and agreed that he was a flaky, rigid, inflexible therapist who had inappropriately lumped me in with the out of control sex addicts whose lives were ruined by their behavior. I was relieved to hear her say that she's 100% behind me dumping him.

Sorry, yet another long-winded blathering post my MiniVanMan, but I feel much better now that I've accomplished the three things I've talked about. My wife seemed pleased also, and that makes me feel good. I'm hopeful for the future.

Just a bit of good news for a change.