Jane9Senior Contributor
When our partner's needs trump ours
I have worked so hard on setting boundaries and creating better social supports but resentment continues despite improvements in our relationship and having a partner who is mostly kind, generous, considerate and loving now I've put my foot down. I thought it would be enough to reduce the terrible moodiness that darkened the house and to stop the meanness and jealousy that she felt about my little dog and decrease the angry recriminations when I made changes to the house like bringing in a new stool or buying a mattress to replace a futon for the spare bed that I often end up on with stress fuelled insomnia. I thought that now I've finally recognised and named the emotional abusiveness of some of this behaviour (thank you to my psychiatrist/analyst and domestic violence line) and given enough time for her changes to be more than a honeymoon period that I might feel happy again in my life like I used to, but I don't.
I love her company. She is intelligent,interesting, engaged in the world and career savvy but when I try to disclose a few of my own small childhood issues and talk about my own family members with mental illness she gets overwhelmed and shuts down. It seems like she can't bear to consider that others also might have childhood trauma like her and struggle with mental illnesses. She has some compassion which she says comes from her lived experience of meeting people in the psych ward but ultimately she can't take it on and I suppose why should she. I can see that it's hard to think about other peoples issues when you're trying to hold yourself together but it's not altogether satisfying for me when I want to share myself and tell the family secrets to deepen our relationship, trust and intimacy. It goes the opposite way as she gets overwhelmed with information and trumps my minor childhood issues with detailed reminders of what happened to her . It becomes about her again and I wish I had never shared anything and I become angry and resentful and shut down.
I've finally after 3 years together figured out that her bi polar diagnosis (where she is well medicated and largely not symptomatic) is not the end of it. I hadn't bargained on what seems like borderline traits as a result of her significant childhood abuse. She now tells me that her psychiatrist prefers to name it a mood disorder instead of bi polar although her meds are for bipolar. I feel trapped in a guilded cage. Our life is pretty good and we share values and interests but if I can't freely share myself without worrying about overloading her and if we can't have sex because it retriggers her childhood trauma if I initiate anything then it starts to feel like it's not really an equal relationship. It's not enough just to not be angry and moody and blaming.
I want to feel that I'm equally heard and understood. Is that too much to ask? It's probably unrealistic in this relationship so then I get stuck with having to decide what to do. Leave and lose out on all the great stuff (she opens my mind up to creativity as she's a poet, she teaches me about business as she's corporate, she takes us to her beach house for relaxation, she looks after me when I'm physically ill, empathises about my childlessness, encourages my career and creativity and is reliable, ethical and honest ) or stay and put up with feeling like a chunk of myself is missing (as she can't listen to my needs very well as I express them or anything too "deep")
