Contemplating leaving my dismissive avoidant husband
long post ahead
A few weeks ago, my husband and I got really sick with the flu at slightly different times. He got it first and it knocked him out for a week. Then, after 4-5 days later of him being sick, I got it and I was sick for a week too. Then bronchitis and an awful cough for another week plus after.
It's been the sickest I've been in years (and also for the longest). But what it did is... it totally and completely stopped me. Arrested me. While he was sick and I was taking care of things (cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, house chores), I realized how I resentful and angry I've become about our relationship and then had to sit with when I got sick. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Can't escape home or go anywhere else. It's just us and our house, no kids and we've been together for 11 years, married for 8.
While sick and just wanting to feel better, I was filled with a new sense of dread: having to actually return to my life when I got better. I realized then and there that, if nothing changed, I wouldn't continue our life and our relationship.
I feel like I've been the sole emotional engine and regulator of our relationship while he was so focused on being a good student (grad school, teacher's pet) and good worker (gold star employee). I think that he has dismissive avoidant attachment style and I've learned about that. I thought I was pretty secure but am now a shell of myself, anxious all the time, where within minutes waking I feel like I want to cry. On days that he doesn't go to work I think, "Shit. He's here," and on the days he goes into the office I feel a sense of relief. I was in an emotional spiral the other day, at the end of myself, and went out for a drive and felt better every mile I drove away from our house.
In our conversations, I realize how many different roles I play: couples therapist (objective), the regulated one, the investigator ("what does that feel like to you?", desperate for information and feeling blind), the insight generator, the list manager, the initiator. When emotional connection and vulnerability on his side happens, I feel that he reaches and uses vocabulary that I have used previously, leading me to feel suspicious that they're even his own words that originated inside of himself. It's dawned on me that nobody should ever have play this many roles or maybe any of them at all. And that in all of it, I haven't gotten to be me. I've slowly died and withered away inside. And that in playing these roles to maintain a connection, I've lost me.
We tried couples therapy a few years back (granted, only 2 sessions) but it wasn't a good fit with the therapist. She was a little old school and into "communication styles" and I remember during thinking, "Just let us talk instead of giving us a prescription about I-based statements." I felt like my husband took the obvious therapist mismatch as a green checkmark that we weren't "in crisis" and didn't need to continue. Already burnt out even then, I sank further and didn't fight it. Couples therapy ended. The root of our issues never reached. To try couples therapy again, demanding a better match, now feels like energy I don't have.
Sex has always been touch-and-go between us after getting married and when does happen it feels so "high stakes" that it's happening that it feels like a performance, leading to it feeling mechanical, trying to curate or force an experience that's no longer representative of the actual emotional container of our relationship, if there is one.
As I've learned about dismissive avoidance, I've learned two things: (1) learning about dismissive avoidance will do absolutely nothing to improve our relationship [insight stagnates with an avoidant, because it's disconnected from meaning for them] and (2) my husband isn't an avoidant who is out to get me, he doesn't have capacity in the emotional register to meet me where I'm at. It's so lonely.
So, I'm at the place where my eyes are completely opened more so to my own actions of making myself small and for carrying everything. That's the thing that's stopping for me right now. Now I'm facing the terrifying question of, "If I'm the emotional engine of our relationship and if I stop being that engine, does the relationship even exist?" I'm genuinely not sure. I truly don't know but I have sinking feelings about what I'll discover.
I know something has got to change. But I don't really know what to do. I'm starting my individual therapy back up in a week with my therapist from a year ago (she knows me already, which is a good thing to have) and cancelling the cancellable shit in my life that doesn't matter to me.
Any others went through something like this? Total burn out? How did you recover from the depletion? And when faced with all of the realizations, how did you move towards action? Do I sound like a person that's still capable of being "in it" anymore anyway or have I already left inside of the relationship? This all feels like a slow fade and slow withering where I haven't even realized what threshold and limits I've crossed in myself. I don't know anymore but what I do know is that I feel helpless and alone.