Today is the 10th anniversary of Dday for me and sisoon. This year has been a hard one for both of us, maybe because 10 is such a round number. After ten years, the Inner Child can’t pretend that this never happened – that it’s just a bad dream that will go away. But I did what I did, and I hurt sisoon, and it will never go away.
We’ve had more flashbacks, more questions, and more discussions. A lot of them were about our courtship, which was both happy because we stuck together through misunderstandings and got to the point of feeling safe in our connection with each other, and sad because we didn’t realize earlier that we both wanted to be together and just had different issues and different ways of communicating that we needed to work through.
For me this has also been a good year – painful, but good. I have little by little gotten to the point where I can be conscious of and work through some of the issues that supported my affair – codependence and Rescuing, underlying negative beliefs about myself, and fears of others, that led to my putting up walls between myself, others and life, and piles of old and new grief, anger and shame.
As Churchill said, this is not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning. I can sometimes, and to some extent, live in reality rather than my old scripts. The reality of me, as an ordinary human being (that’s the ‘plain’ in plainsong’), and not a monster or saint, the reality of others, as basically well-intentioned, and the reality of life, as unpredictable (which I hate), but as a source of joy as well as of pain.
I know the future will also have both joy and pain. I am so lucky to have a partner with whom I share so many values, interests and goals. How rare is it that both of us are connected to our synagogue, like blues, bluegrass, Indian classical music, and percussion, and enjoy discussing history, language and psychology? We also have differences that make life more interesting. And some differences in temperament and processing style that can create difficulties, which with the help of our therapist we are learning to deal with.
My coping mechanisms are in the nature of compartmentalizing. As I integrate myself more, my issues don’t go away. I now just have to deal with them without those defenses. I need to deal with grief, guilt, resentment, fear, and shame, as well as relationships, productivity, contribution to the common good, learning, appreciation of art and nature, and connection to spirit, as a person with what has been called “single personality disorder,” rather than “multiple personality disorder”. Or, to put it another way, to deal with the shared existential dilemmas of human life, where we are not perfect but can and must continue to develop and increase our capacities to be kind to ourselves and others.
Wishing you all a good new year.