A way of living

 

My wife’s sister is the person who needs to be accommodated to, cared for, listened to. She has no concept that my wife has feelings that should be considered. She does not know “thank you” despite all the money, time and service my wife has dedicated to her.

My wife is the person who comes to me for support, for deep and long listening. She is not a good listener, and assumes I am the vessel and the provider.

She knows her sister is a one-sided coin, a taker, and claims she will not put up with it anymore. But that is not true: She will. She will keep giving, and she will keep leaning her emotions on me, as oblivious as her sister is to her.

My defense – and all these dynamics are defenses – is to be the absorbent block of wood, the leaned on not the leaner. This is because I have never been comforted in my entire life by any person. My mother made a perfunctory effort lasting all of one minute, when I was five or six years old. She put me on her lap then removed me when I threw up from too much pent-up needful emotion. There has never been anything since then.

It’s not, though, that simple. I lean on my wife to the depth of my being, but I’ve settled for her somewhat secluded presence. In one particularly destructive way, it seems, I became my father. He would not talk, relate, never knew how to be a dad. He would say, eyes and smile glazed inward, “I feel good just knowing you’re somewhere in the house.”

I brought this up with a client recently, but as “projective psychoeducation” as I knew her child­hood and later situation. “You have never been comforted by a person in your entire life.” One could say we lose everything when this is so. Or, we lose a big part of our humanity, the true joining part. It’s one of the most perverse qualities of my Self that I give every day, six to ten clients a day, and to my wife, and manage forever without ever asking for anything.

At least I’ve not added a link in the chain of taking. Of course, we each perpetuate the other’s dysfunction.