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Partner still triggering my symptoms

T

taliaaa92

New Member
Hi everyone,

I know I’ve already posted about this in the past how my husband is a trigger of one of some of my symptoms. But I feel stuck and need help :(

the most annoying symptom that bothers me the most happens when I’m around my husband. My body goes into a braving pattern around him. My breathing gets short, and I get tension in my jaw and neck. I’ve been journaling and listening to Nicole’s podcasts and doing all the things. The tension has eased up maybe just a tad, and of course I’m getting new symptoms on top of it. But I guess the one thing that prevents me from feeling like I can heal while still being around him is I noticed in my body that when I think of the word divorce, the tension I feel in those areas start to relax, and my breathing feels easier. I’ve journaled about it so many times about it and I’ve really let myself think of the possibility of divorce (even though I want to work on our marriage problems). I guess I just want to have a reason of why my body relaxes at the thought of this word? I’m so stuck on finding the reason.

Journaling has made me realize certain needs I need from my husband and he’s been working on himself SO much (he now journals and talks about how he feels instead of avoiding it) so we are both actually committed to working on our marriage. So what the heck gives? Why is my body continuing relax at the thought of divorce? Ugh. And then I end up obsessing over it and any time I feel tension that I can’t release when I’m around him, all I do now is think of the word “divorce” to alleviate my symptoms.
 
This one hits close to home. I read a few of your other posts too. These bodily sensations you're describing, they are the emotion of fear. I had the same emotion around my wife, and I still have it around my son when he misbehaves. Basically you're afraid of him for some reason. You could say your brain is perceiving danger. The perception may not be logical, but that doesn't change the fact of its existence. You have to sit there or lie down quietly and let those sensations be there without trying to change them, until they go away on their own. It may be due to unresolved conflicts, or if they been resolved it could simply be a learned response, conditioning in other words.

I don't know exactly how to advise you, but I suspect this has something to do with you forgiving your husband for whatever the problems were, assuming they have been resolved. I read something near the end of Steve Ozanich's Great Pain Deception book about forgiveness. I don't know how to explain forgiveness, because there are many people I do not forgive, and still actively despise in fact. I did forgive my wife though for problems we had. Anyway Steve said in his book that unfortunately sometimes our Ego prevents forgiveness in the time we're allotted in life with our loved ones. Then I thought of a most important person in my life who is dead now, and with whom I had some arguments near the end of her life. The troubles were never entirely resolved before she died and I felt deeply guilty and full of regret. I thought of this as I considered Steve's statement and my tears of sadness flowed. I did not want to repeat this with my wife. The next day and thereafter I no longer was afraid of my wife. Whatever that emotional change is, that's forgiveness.

A few more things
- As you are afraid, he must totally and completely approve of you. He must show no disapproval and that must be genuine or your subconscious will know. Call it telepathy, and there's a neurological basis for it too.
- Neither of you must want to extract anything out of the other to make yourselves feel good, safe, complete, etc (you meet your own needs).
- Any expectations or disapproval that either of your family members have for him or for you, they have to be eliminated completely. That kind of interference is poison to any relationship.
- Unless and until you are both 100% confident that these issues are all worked out, I would not have a child. These problems are hard on children emotionally.
 
And I'm thinking that this happens because deep down you actually want to be single?

Forgive me if I think this is blindingly obvious, @taliaaa92. The fact is that I've been there. I reached a point in my marriage where I was not merely unhappy in the relationship, but I had to face the truth about reality, which is that the thought of being attached to this other person for another three decades or so was very much NOT what I wanted for myself.

Mind you, we went to counseling, because neither of us wanted a failed marriage, but fortunately we were both able to get over ourselves and admit to each other that maybe we'd be happier apart. Thankfully, we were on the same page, and it was a huge relief and we are still really good friends. There were no children, no financial inequities, total agreement on who did or did not want to buy the other out of the house, not even any pets to fight over. There were a couple of former foster kids in their twenties, and a lot of very surprised friends, but they got over it.

I recognize that not everyone is so lucky to have it so easy and relatively painless. If the attachment is one-sided, if there are children, if there are financial hardships, or if there are extreme cultural or familial expectations to stay together, those things are going to get in the way of what you really want.

To the extent that any of these pressures are non-negotiable, you have to figure out how to accept them and move forward.

Note how I emphasized the all-important "P" word above, which is Pressure. Pressure is at the heart of all symptoms. There's the pressure of your emotional repression, and the pressure of outside expectations, and the pressure of self-judgement. Until you can figure out how to eliminate, relieve or learn to live with these pressures, you can't actually expect to heal yourself. This is the painful truth about reality.

I mentioned what you really want. My therapist says this is a crucial question to answer, because it's one that we often don't ask - that's because we're consumed by all the things that we DON'T want. You already know that you don't want to suffer the pain of your symptoms, and you don't want to suffer the pain of your emotional turmoil. You're going to have to decide what you DO want, and figure out how you can make that happen within whatever constraints you might be dealing with.
 
JanAtheCPA said:
And I'm thinking that this happens because deep down you actually want to be single?

I do think about being single sometimes, and how it would be so much easier than having to work on our issues.. but even when I’m not around him I do still get symptoms, they just end up being different symptoms. We had to live apart the last year and a half due to mold ruining my health so we lived separately at our parents due to me being allergic to his family cat and my mom being allergic to our dogs. So we would only see each other on weekends. But the entire time I was living at my mom’s, I still had a bunch of different symptoms (including the bracing pattern, but just not as bad). So it’s confusing. I guess I’m just hoping I can heal if I decide to stay with him, because I do love him.
Click to expand...
 
JanAtheCPA said:
And I'm thinking that this happens because deep down you actually want to be single?

Forgive me if I think this is blindingly obvious, @taliaaa92. The fact is that I've been there. I reached a point in my marriage where I was not merely unhappy in the relationship, but I had to face the truth about reality, which is that the thought of being attached to this other person for another three decades or so was very much NOT what I wanted for myself.

Mind you, we went to counseling, because neither of us wanted a failed marriage, but fortunately we were both able to get over ourselves and admit to each other that maybe we'd be happier apart. Thankfully, we were on the same page, and it was a huge relief and we are still really good friends. There were no children, no financial inequities, total agreement on who did or did not want to buy the other out of the house, not even any pets to fight over. There were a couple of former foster kids in their twenties, and a lot of very surprised friends, but they got over it.

I recognize that not everyone is so lucky to have it so easy and relatively painless. If the attachment is one-sided, if there are children, if there are financial hardships, or if there are extreme cultural or familial expectations to stay together, those things are going to get in the way of what you really want.

To the extent that any of these pressures are non-negotiable, you have to figure out how to accept them and move forward.

Note how I emphasized the all-important "P" word above, which is Pressure. Pressure is at the heart of all symptoms. There's the pressure of your emotional repression, and the pressure of outside expectations, and the pressure of self-judgement. Until you can figure out how to eliminate, relieve or learn to live with these pressures, you can't actually expect to heal yourself. This is the painful truth about reality.

I mentioned what you really want. My therapist says this is a crucial question to answer, because it's one that we often don't ask - that's because we're consumed by all the things that we DON'T want. You already know that you don't want to suffer the pain of your symptoms, and you don't want to suffer the pain of your emotional turmoil. You're going to have to decide what you DO want, and figure out how you can make that happen within whatever constraints you might be dealing with.
Click to expand...


I do put a lot of pressure on my marriage and on my symptoms to go away so I can go back to enjoying being around my husband instead of obsessing over the symptoms around him.
 
Another thing you can try is asking yourself in your dreams. Before sleep write down the question, how do I feel about my husband? The dream(s) will tell you. Write them down as soon as you can on awakening. The points to remember are that this is a query to YOUR unconscious, and while it will always tell you the truth, it is not omniscient or infallible. It also portrays your unconscious at that very point in time only.
 
Conditioning.
I haven't seen anyone on this thread mention it yet.
There are two kinds of TMS... First is 'cause-effect', but second is conditioning....the harder one to detect is conditioning.

any discussion about recurring symptoms w/o considering Conditioning is incomplete. You might divorce him and find it with the next person you partner up with.
 
taliaaa92 said:
I do put a lot of pressure on my marriage and on my symptoms to go away so I can go back to enjoying being around my husband instead of obsessing over the symptoms around him.
Click to expand...
I think you should try and focus on yourself as much as possible. Dedicate to your TMS healing. Your brain is distracting you with the divorce idea. Just learn who you are. Dig deep. Learn all about the changes you need to make to heal from TMS. It takes awhile. After you grow and heal doing this, you’ll know what to do with your marriage. There isn’t going to be an easy way around this situation.
 
Diana-M said:
I think you should try and focus on yourself as much as possible. Dedicate to your TMS healing. Your brain is distracting you with the divorce idea. Just learn who you are. Dig deep. Learn all about the changes you need to make to heal from TMS. It takes awhile. After you grow and heal doing this, you’ll know what to do with your marriage. There isn’t going to be an easy way around this situation.
Click to expand...


Bingo!!!
 
taliaaa92 said:
... but even when I’m not around him I do still get symptoms, they just end up being different symptoms. We had to live apart the last year and a half... So we would only see each other on weekends. But the entire time I was living at my mom’s, I still had a bunch of different symptoms... So it’s confusing. I guess I’m just hoping I can heal if I decide to stay with him,
Click to expand...
Hmmm... think you might have some misperceptions getting in the way here.

It doesn't have to be confusing if you step back and understand that your TMS brain mechanism is making sure that you are in a constant state of fear and confusion.

It also doesn't have to be confusing if you understand that your TMS brain mechanism has been doing this all of your life. Most of us don't realize we've had TMS symptoms all our lives until a crisis of symptoms brings us to Dr Sarno, et al.

The nature of different symptoms and when they appear just means that your brain is switching tactics based on what it thinks is meaningful to you in a given situation. Remember: it's always about distraction.

1. Your conflicted emotions about your marriage create stress.
2. Your primitive brain interprets stress as life-threatening (because in the primitive wilderness, stress events WERE life threatening).
3. You remove yourself from the day-to-day stress of the marriage, due to another source of stress having to do with the safety of your shelter, and your brain switches tactics.
Why? Because the stress is different? Who knows? Does it matter? Nope!

Don't ever forget that TMS is a lifelong process, and our stress responses are developed in childhood. And so...
4. There you are, as an adult, living with your mom again. And guess what your TMS brain does with that?!

This all makes perfect sense from the perspective of the TMS brain mechanism.

taliaaa92 said:
I guess I’m just hoping I can heal if I decide to stay with him,
Click to expand...
"Hoping" is not gonna do it, as the last several responses are also telling you. It's up to you to change your stress response so that your brain agrees to disengage the fear process.

Remind us which program you've completed? You mentioned Nicole and journaling, but if you never did the Structured Educational Program, that's your next step. You can also read The Way Out or complete Alan's much shorter Pain Recovery Program first for an intro to the conditioning/neuroplasticity of it all.
 
Wow, everyone's responses are so great, I'll just add my 2 cents anyway since I've been writing while others respond, just in case it is of any help. Apologies if this is off base and just all about me ;)

taliaaa92 said:
My body goes into a braving pattern around him. My breathing gets short, and I get tension in my jaw and neck.
Click to expand...

My partner and I both experienced trauma in childhood...opposite learned attachments-me smothered him neglected, so it set up the perfect push-pull/ clinging-aversion dynamic for years. Now we are in my home town and I am way- too-close-for-comfort to my mother(just diagnosed with dementia)and all my unresolved childhood pain is bubbling up, the stuff I manage to keep at a comfortable enough distance until now.

I am discovering the deeper reality than my trauma clinging and fawning response(learning about this trauma response was enlightening!) - underneath is all the rage, the pushing away; the perceived danger everywhere. My nervous system is set to constantly surveil the landscape for potential danger, which I experience as perpetual(which flares when I perceive-no grizzlies in my home!-an immediate threat) tension in my shoulder, neck and jaw. As I drill down to the truth, slowing the habitual reactions, I notice the obsessing, the ruminating which bring on anxiety. Still expecting danger where there isn't any. Emotions are dangerous! Conflict is dangerous! Intimacy is dangerous!
Right now he's away and it's totally evident that my learned reactions to stress are not based in current reality...I still have the same loops playing, the same anxiety and he's not even here!
It's my trauma response(flashbacks are fun) and it's all I have ever known in relationship. I grasp and I cling and want and then when I could actually have the thing I have been wanting, I push it away. Of course, that's all ego knows. Push and pull. It's not love. We tend to have IDEAS of love but they're not real. So we have our terrified little egos. Terrified of intimacy, terrified of being seen. Egos love to obsess and ruminate...among many other pass times.

taliaaa92 said:
I end up obsessing over it and any time I feel tension that I can’t release when I’m around him, all I do now is think of the word “divorce” to alleviate my symptoms.
Click to expand...

Like @Baseball65 brought up...seems to me you have conditioned your brain to find relief in the word divorce? Perhaps it has come to mean a feeling of space, a break from your obsessing and ruminating, so you feel the relief you need for a bit anyway. Until we learn new responses to stress it will just keep coming back.

What @Diana-M said! Don't get distracted, or rather when you do-again and again, just keep coming back! Let's keep focusing on ourselves, keep digging deep. Let our partners off the hook. Literally.

I am listening to Pema Chodron's Getting Stuck audio. Phewf. For me it's hitting the nail on the head. If you happened to relate to what I talked about above, it might be helpful for you as well?
 
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But the entire time I was living at my mom’s

I missed this statement. I forget which book it was, but Dr Sarno said "all family relationships are emotionally loaded."

There's also an interview of him from the 2000s, he was an old man in his basement office. He said something like "I'm still trying to please my parents even though they've been dead for 60 years."

Unquestionably, living with your mom would greatly confuse these issues.
 
ahri11 said:
I'll just add my 2 cents anyway
Click to expand...
Worth a lot more than 2 cents, @ahri11! You are on fire!

@taliaaa92, you've received a bunch of great advice, and I would urge you to read ahri's response several times. There's a lot to unpack, and there are some real gems in there for you. Even if you think her story is not the same and therefore not relevant to you, the truth is that all of our stories are relevant to the basic truth about what we are all dealing with.
 
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