II asked my husband to go to counseling to deal with some anger management issues that had started surfacing. I didn’t think too much about it but thought it might helpful. He agreed. I found a licensed professional Christian counselor recommended by a trusted LPC & longtime friend of my mom. She recommended Jane, and he began counseling.
Things seemed to be improving, but at the end of the year a new wrinkle surfaced. I accidentally stumbled upon an email with a link to a few porn websites. Peculiar, I thought. This was a first-time encounter.
I mentioned this to my husband, and he readily assured me he had no issues with porn. He totally convinced me that he was “just like any normal man who had looked at it a handful of times.” He told me to look up the statistics, and I did. He granted me permission to meet with his counselor, and she confirmed that this hadn’t been an issue in their counseling, and that was the end of that.
Later on, he asked me to go to counseling with him. I was puzzled but happily agreed. I thought “things were fine” between us—not great but fine but realized he had a need for me to go, so I wanted to meet that need.
In our first session together, Jane did a “trust” assessment. I said, “I trust my husband 8 or 9 in all areas, except “porn use” and that was around a 5, but he had told me he had no issues and I believed him, and I was just working on building trust by reading some books and articles. It turned out that my trust of my husband was much higher than his “trust” of me. I was quite puzzled, and he expressed even more puzzlement over my high rating of trust in him. All of this was indeed confounding and a bit perplexing. I trusted him, but he didn’t trust me? This made no sense.
We were on lockdown for the summer due to the onset and surge of Covid 19, and I had tons of time on my hands- unlike every other summer where I was a very active volunteer at church camps.
My parents wanted to do their will, and I thought we should too, and so we did.
It was really here, doing the will, that I realized for the first time that my lackadaisical involvement with the finances under the notion of a traditional division of labor in our marriage had unknowingly paved the way for me to “under function” in the finances and “over function” in the parenting.
My old-fashioned generational beliefs kept me blindly trusting, naïve, and submissive. My husband’s past trauma over poverty and bankruptcy kept him in the financial driver’s seat. We had minimal strife over finances and parenting, and we both liked our roles. We were certainly a match made in heaven…until we weren’t.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we were meeting regularly with a Christian counselor. I thought this was the opportune time to ask questions, prod, and bring up finances. To be fair to my spouse, there was nothing really nefarious about our finances, and to be fair to my counselor, she also was unaware of the deeper underlying issues, as I was.
I realize now that I helped secure an unhealthy system of codependency and an unequal balance of power from the beginning. When I began to assert myself and question, this upset the apple cart. I was changing the role that I had played for my entire married life. I knew nothing about the finances, and then I eagerly wanted to know everything and all at once. I also wanted to immediately share everything. What I also didn’t know–was that my questioning was starting to chip away at a much deeper, underlying issue, and thus the defenses started to go up, which brought to the surface a new side of my husband. This makes complete sense to me now, though it does not excuse the unhealthy behaviors.
It was as if I opened pandora’s box, and with each discovery that I brought out in our counseling session, a new manifestation popped out of the box like the vintage toy where the melodious song “Pop Goes the Weasel” dribbles on…then “POP” goes the weasel. That popping continued incessantly throughout the year. I never knew when, I never knew how. I just knew out of the melodious song of life, the eruption would come forth and seize the moment of peace with each question, with each discovery, with each new unveiling of “truth.”
At that time, I just knew COVID-19 was taking the world by storm and something was up amidst what I thought was a stable, solid, and secure marriage.
After I had devoted an entire year to Christian marriage counseling, I recognized the futility of it all, and chose to discontinue my detective work, and with that I graciously withdrew from counseling.
I went into counseling full of faith, hope, and love, and I came out a year later disheveled, shell-shocked, having no idea who I married and to whom I had been married to for 14 years. I went in fully expressing myself, fully questioning, fully trusting…and I came out scared to question, silent, muted, and walking on eggshells.
What is going on? I was more confused than ever. My entire 14 years married to this man and the 6 years knowing him prior to marriage formed what I thought was a beautiful, solid vase, full of labor, love, built with aged cracks due to what I considered normal striving and struggling and suffering and sifting together…
The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty. Proverbs 27:12 (NIV)
