control

Why do I feel so out of control? Why do my children and my wife make me feel so awful?

 

 

Is it just the very fact that I’m letting them in to a more vulnerable part of myself?

Is it that they make me feel alone?

 

 

My youngest son doesn’t. My oldest son and my wife do.

 

 

They are very much like each other. And they both make me feel out of control. Which then leads me to hate myself for letting them hurt me. Recently I’ve been getting better at not hating myself for letting them hurt me/being vulnerable, and weirdly I’m able to still be in a happy mood. But It Is Tiring to constantly feel so annoyed and angry and having to let it go.

When it goes well, I’m able to be in a really fun, loving mood even when things aren’t going my way.

My wife and I are just very different.

 

 

Very very different. So it’s constant running up against each other’s differences.

 

 

Is that why I feel so alone?

 

 

When some of my friends hug me, it feels better and more connected.

 

 

I’m forced to sit in uncomfortable emotions all the time. Because my wife is stuck there, and our oldest is there too. Their personalities feel those emotions much stronger than the good ones.

 

 

I feel drowned in them. They are people who are like that character in Sunshine, who likes to stare at the sun as it slowly burns his skin. I am forced to sit in the dark emotions constantly. I just want joy.

 

 

Is this my call? My cup? My cross. To drown with them? To sit with them — how do I sink next to someone who is drowning, or stand next to someone who is burning, without drowning or burning too?

I feel out of control of the dark emotions they are stuck in. I tried to stop my wife from them. I can’t anymore and that was not right.

 

 

How do I stand in a burning building without the smoke killing me?

I just wanted this to be happy. I just wanted to have fun. I just wanted to feel close and known and intimate with my wife. A best friend.

But once married, and this side came out, I didn’t want to know her sadness, her pain, because it was constant and debilitating.

 

 

So I’m angry. Angry that this is my choice. Learn to not lose joy while drowning or burning, to be known and know a person who makes me feel like I’m dying with their pain, or — leave it.

It feels wrong to leave it. Let me be out of control for a moment though.

 

 

It is a possibility. I just don’t want to ruin my family, like if I knew by me staying somehow everything would get better. If I learned to breathe water, would my wife learn joy instead of constant pain, and my firstborn too?

It feels too heavy. I know that my wife has put that burden on to me to a large degree, wanting me to heal her sadness and pain and hopelessness. Punishing me hard core for years when I haven’t. I think the punishment might be over, just like my controlling her to make her not be sad is over.

Now we sit here with the reality of our situation.

She has emotional pain that is unbearable and up till now unstoppable, with someone who cannot stop it like she had hoped I would.

And me, a person who hates sitting in shitty dark emotions and runs only to joy and fun, has to sit and be close and support and…love someone who is everything I hate about this world. The pain, all in her.

So this is either a hero’s journey for both of us, and we’ve been refusing the call up till now, and soon we finally come to life, or it’s just a terribly sad situation for both of us. And our children.