Therapy the Third

Update: Thank you for your comments.  I really appreciate your insights and advice.  I'm too close to this and too confused by what happened.  Your input is really helpful.

I don't know what to make of this session.

The therapist mentioned that my wife called her during the week.  She hadn't mentioned this to me.  During the previous week, she hadn't mentioned any of what follows.  I guess she thought I enjoy surprises.

My wife did almost all of the talking.  The only time I chimed in was to directly refute what she said, which is all nonsense.  As before, I'll only talk about dressing issues, although there's a side issue that I don't want to discuss but I think I need to ~ your wife (or therapist) might be thinking along these same lines.

She started by saying she doesn't like to look at pictures of me dressed (and that's how she refers to it if she even says that much) because it reminds her of "my pain."  I asked what she meant by that, because I never said that dressing causes me pain ~ I said that hiding does.

She also said I was "incurious" about dressing.  The therapist interrupted to ask me what I thought about that.  I said that she has no idea how much reading I've done on this, how many people I've spoken with.  The therapist asked my wife what she knew about t-issues.  She said she had borrowed books from a therapist friend (who they both know).  Great.  My wife is learning about this from a strictly clinical point of view.  This, as my son would say, has not gone well.

She said that it reminded her of my "shame and humiliation" about dressing ~ how I'm ashamed of it and how going out allows me to be humiliated which, apparently, I get off on.

This is all news to me.  I know some folks do get off on humiliation, but I'm not one of them, I've never expressed any interest in being humiliated, and that's kind of it.  If that works for you, that's great and I hope you find what I don't have ~ a spouse who has at least a grain of understanding what you're all about.

She repeated this assessment of me several times, in different ways, during the hour.

I asserted each time that I enjoy dressing and that's why I do it.

Facts don't seem to have a place in this world.  She upped the ante at one point by announcing that she understood why I enjoyed being humiliated and shamed: it was because I was sexually abused as a child.

Steven Hawking tells a story:

A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"  The old lady replies, "he's standing on the back of another tortoise, of course."  "And," asked the scientist, "what about that tortoise?"  "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

When I denied any sexual abuse, her answer was "there is such a thing as 'repressed memories.'  It's very real."  What can I say?  To her, it's tortoises all the way down.

She started telling me of all of the "clues" that led her to this diagnosis.  I won't repeat them here.

Suffice it to say, I think there's a bigger problem than I thought there was.  What do you do when your spouse thinks you're fundamentally flawed?  I really don't know.  I don't know what the way forward is now.  From the hour in the office I realise that I'm not understood at all, and there's probably nothing I can do that won't make her think I'm acting out the trauma of my childhood.

And now I'm wondering if her agenda is to lay the groundwork for custody.  She clearly has no interest in letting Meg come out further ~ that would just encourage my personal perversion and keep me from letting go of my horrid youth.

I feel like I've walked into the Twilight Zone, one of those episodes where nothing makes sense.

I used to enjoy those episodes.

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