We Accept the Love We Think We Deserve

So much has happened since I last posted. I’ll start with therapy…

“Faith, how can you say you haven’t made any progress? You’ve been seeing me for years, trust me when I tell you that you HAVE made progress. It’s just hard to see it because the kind of progress you’ve made is always hard to see.”

“But I did the exact same thing I did before.”

“Exactly the same?”

Dr. Sheehan looked at me over her dark rimmed glasses.

“Okay…no…not exactly, but-”

“Why are you so determined to undermine the successes you’ve accomplished here in therapy?”

“I’m not…I just…it doesn’t feel any different to me. What I did feels exactly the way it did with Mike…with Sean…”

“Why do you think we keep coming back to him?”

“Mike?”

“You know who.” Dr. Sheehan said it knowingly.

I sighed.

“Sean was a…he was a big part of my life. He had an enormous impact on who I am, I think he might have been the first person I was ever truly in love with and I allowed my feelings for him cloud all of who I was and am…”

“Why do you think you allowed him to continue to be in your life after you ended things with him?”

“Isn’t is obvious? I was lonely. And sad.”

“Yes, but why SEAN?” She asked.

I stared at her blankly.

“If it was only because you were sad and lonely, you could have found sexual gratification elsewhere. With Randy, for example.”

“I tried that, though…I put myself out there. I went on dates….”

“And, yet, you ended up with Sean anyway.”

I saw her point and couldn’t answer. She eyed me closely.

“I…I don’t know.” I said.

“When you were with Sean, before you ended your relationship and took up a sexual one, how did he make you feel?”

“So many ways…” I looked down, “I felt safe with him, at first, but then when we actually started dating I felt lied to, like something was off and I was never allowed inside. And then we seemed to be okay until the tour happened and he had to leave.”

“And when he would come home for visits after being on tour?”

“I…sometimes I would dread them.”

“Why?”

“Because it seemed like every time he’d come home he’d be just a little different, we were always just slightly less close.”

A tear escaped my eye and I wiped it away. Thinking about the relationship I had with Sean was painful.

“And then he told you he cheated on you.”

“Yes.” I looked away with anger.

“And you tried to repair what had been broken.”

“And it didn’t work.”

“Right. So why do you think you ended up in a sexual relationship with him after all of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.” She said, “Tell me why.”

“Because I…I still loved him. I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Why would you take him back after he hurt you so much?”

“Because it was easy. I didn’t have to work at being around him.”

“And why was that?”

“I don’t know!” I yelled frustrated.

“Yes you do. Why was it so much easier to be with him sexually when ending your relationship with him would have been the cleanest way to go about it!” She challenged me.

“Because being with him like that made me feel safe!”

I stopped and my eyes were wide. Dr. Sheehan nodded.

“Faith, what you see as self-destructive behavior was really just a way for you to make the breakdown of your relationship with Sean less devastating. It was a way for you to remind yourself why you were with him in the first place. And it explains how you saw yourself so long ago. Which you’ve also made progress towards.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we accept the love and treatment we think we deserve. The relationships you choose to enter into seem to reflect the way you feel about yourself. When you ended things with Sean, your self-esteem was very low and so you accepted him back into your bed because he made you feel better about yourself.”

I thought back to that time and realized she was right. When I was sleeping with Sean after we broke up, I constantly made comments to him about how horrible I thought he was and I realize now that that was because of how I felt inside rather than how I felt about Sean. After all, if he was cheating on Karen and leaving his responsibilities behind then I didn’t have to deal with my own ugly feelings.

“And, again, with Brad.” Dr. Sheehan pointed out.

That one hurt even more to analyze.

“You’re right. I hated myself for what I did to Mike so I accepted a relationship with Brad because I hated myself so much and I didn’t want to accept that I’d hurt someone as good as Mike for someone I practically despised. I entered into that relationship because I felt like I deserved it.”

Dr. Sheehan handed me a tissue and held my hand.

“But none of that explains why I did what I did now.” I said after a long time.

“Yes it does. You and Sean fought almost constantly. Fighting, making up, and being together was exclusively connected to sex when you were with him. It makes sense that you would try and resolve conflicts that way now when that is what you did in such an important relationship.”

“Why would I react that way over this fight with Zoey, though? She and I don’t have a romantic relationship at all.”

“Is it possible you hold a grudge against her for the way she treated you when she discovered you were still sleeping with Sean?”

I was struck by the question and felt ashamed when I realized it was true and told Dr. Sheehan as much.

“That happened so long ago, I don’t know why I would still feel angry with her over that.”

“Maybe it’s because you feel like she never really understood why you had allowed yourself to be with Sean again.”

A thoughtful silence fell between us as I thought about this new breakthrough. A dark thought came over me, though.

“So…if all of this has to do with me feeling safe and my behaviors are linked to that then why did I cheat on Mike? Why did I overreact and convince myself that Adam had stopped loving me when we had that fight over the book deal?”

“Well, look at your relationship with Sean. He may have made you feel safe but he certainly hurt you more than he should have on nearly every level of intimacy. Being with men who make you feel safe, like Mike and Adam, also makes you uneasy. And why not? Sean hurt you. Sean frequently gave you the silent treatment and was cold to you. When Mike let his sister treat you horribly and then suggested that he needed space and then didn’t call you for a week, it probably felt like Sean all over again, right?”

I thought about that and definitely remembered feeling panicked.

“But I TOLD him to never call me again. I did that, not Mike.”

“I’m not sure that matters here.” Dr. Sheehan said, “And when Adam said he needed space, you jumped to the worst possible conclusion: that he’d fallen out of love with you because he hadn’t talked to you in a few days. It seems that when you find yourself in a happy and healthy relationship, you don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like and so everything seems foreign and weird to you and you end up constantly waiting for it to crash and burn down. Because that’s what happened with Sean. And when the other shoe DOESN’T drop or you feel like it is about to or even COULD, you tear it down yourself.”

She was being blunt and a little harsh but I knew she was right. Hadn’t that been what I’d been doing with Adam? Waiting for the other shoe to drop until he left me or cheated on me?

“So now what?” I said after a long time, “How do I fix that? How do I just allow myself to be in a relationship without constantly expecting it to end?”

“Trust who you’re with. And trust yourself to be able to work through it.”

“Isn’t that what I did with Sean, though?”

“Faith, trust has to be mutual and you and Sean never had that. He never trusted you. Getting him to talk to you was almost impossible. Relationships aren’t supposed to be a huge struggle to be together. Fighting, even big fights, are normal, but it’s how you respond to them, together, that matters.”

She was right. Sean and I never really did have a lot of trust and after he cheated, and, if I’m being honest, right before he cheated, all the trust we’d had between us disappeared. I smiled wryly.

I found myself on Zoey’s doorstep after my therapy appointment. I knocked for what seemed like forever and the walk over had been a long one, too.

“What?” She asked with annoyance when she opened the door.

“I want to apologize.” I said quietly, “The things I said to you were really uncalled for. You deserve better than that. And I deserve an apology, too.”

Zoey gave me an angry and surprised look but she pushed her door aside to let me in. I sat on her couch and she sat in a chair across from me. I took a deep breath and started the speech I’d practiced on the way over.

“Whatever you do with Wesley is your own business and I’m sorry I made it about me and my own past.”

Zoey sighed, her anger gone.

“You were right, Faith, the day you and Molly came over was the first time I’d seen him outside of work since I moved my things out of our townhouse. I…I was upset after our lunch about Anna…about being single…and I…I invited him over out of sadness and loneliness. You were right about that, but I still love him, Faith.”

“And about the Sean thing…”

“I said some horrible things to you.” She said.

“No…Zoey, when you got angry with me for sleeping with him, I understand why, but you don’t understand why I let that happen and it’s not fair for you to boil it down to me just being sad and lonely.” I said.

“Then why?” Zoey asked with confusion.

“Because…because I felt safe with him. And I felt stupid for staying with a man who cheated on me and I felt like a sexual relationship with him would make me feel better about…about myself and the things I’d done to others.”

“I’m sorry, Faith.”

“I’m sorry for judging you and Wesley. Truly. If you want to be with him, you know I’ll support you.”

Zoey smiled and got up to hug me. When we pulled apart both of us were crying.

“If you love him, why don’t you just see if he wants to get back together?” I asked her.

She wiped away her tears.

“It’s more complicated than that.” She said.

“Explain it to me. You never really said why you guys broke up except that he wanted to get married and you didn’t.”

“That’s…not really true. I mean it is…but it also isn’t…”

Zoey made us both some tea and we sat at her kitchenette while she talked.

“I wanted to marry him. I just wasn’t ready for what came after.”

“What? Marriage?”

“No. He…he wanted….wants kids, Faith.”

“And?”

“I…he wanted them right away. I wasn’t…I’m not sure…”

“…that you want kids?”

“No I do.”

“Then what?” I said laughing out of exasperation.

“I just don’t know that I can go through another miscarriage. If I get pregnant and I lose another pregnancy…I just don’t know how I’d ever overcome that. Again.”

“Oh.” I said looking into my cup, “Zoe, you probably won’t have another one. I mean, before, you were in college, under a lot of stress…it would be different now. And if you did have one, you wouldn’t have to go through that alone this time. You’d have Molly and me and a man who adores you and will be right there with you.”

I hoped I’d said the right things to comfort her but when I looked up she looked just as sad as before.

“I just think that you shouldn’t put what you want on hold because of the possibility that something might happen. You deserve to be happy, Zoey.”

And so do I. I thought to myself smiling and thinking of Adam.

Speaking of Adam, I’ll write about him in my next post. We went out to celebrate my closing night and things went very unexpectedly…