Anyone ever feel like they’re stuck in a fog when it comes to healing?
My wife (34F) and I (35M) have been together for almost 10 years and this has been the most loving , challenging, and realest relationship we’ve ever been in. I say this because being in a healthy relationship with a safe person has caused me to start really looking into my trauma and trying to heal from it
But healing hurts so god damn much! I’ve realized that my partner is someone who I have become enmeshed with because of how I was raised in my family and the trauma of living with an emotionally abusive mother who constantly made me question every move I made is negatively impacted how I interact with my partner.
She says she needs to feel seen and heard and to be loved, which I understand completely. These are emotional needs of her that have gone unmet. But every time I try to show it to her, I hesitate and get stuck in my head and end up causing her to feel neglected and alone. And when she feels that way, I feel even worse because the way she feels always impacts the way I feel. Which has always been one of my struggles: constantly feeling that my emotional stability was reliant on how people around me felt rather than being able to separate my emotions from other people and be independently stable
Everyone says “you have to love yourself” and “get out of your own head” but that shit isn’t going to happen overnight and I feel trapped in my own body because no one has ever really shown me how to process what I’ve been feeling for so long. I hate feeling like this because I don’t have a concrete way of navigating my own feelings.
I came into this relationship with so much trauma and pain and only this past year, have I discovered that I’m autistic and have CPTSD, which has been a lot to take in. I don’t know what to do and everything feels so damn stuck, like I’ve hit a wall. I’ve avoided my traumas for so long, partially because I thought I could just stuff it all down and pretend it’s not there (which clearly isn’t working anymore). My wife feels stuck too and it’s killing me because all I want to do is show her that she is seen and heard and that her feelings truly do matter and that her needs deserve to be met, but I can’t do that when I don’t give that same love & care to my own feelings because I want to be seen, and heard and loved and protected and I’m realizing this very minute as I am typing this that I have never felt that way either and I still don’t feel that way and I just want to feel okay, I want to feel stable and happy and not constantly feel stuck inside of myself.
This shit really sucks, this was an emotional rant that I needed to get out of me
If you actually read all of this, thank you for reading