Journal Entry: August 11, 2014
I wake up sad and lonely. I want to go back to the place where someone took care of me, where someone loved me unconditionally, where someone nurtured me and didn’t take me for granted. I want to go back to the place where I played all day, out in the sunshine, without a care in the world. I want to ride my bike to the little store and spend a whole dollar on something totally frivolous. I want to burst through the door and share with my parents my perfect straight A report card, and watch the smiles light up their faces. Because I’m that kid. I want to go home. And then, I realize I am home.
There is no safe place anymore. No matter how good I have been. No matter how loyal and kind and loving, none of it matters. I have done everything right and I am hurting anyway. Today I woke up with severe back pain. I think I am going through menopause. My whole body is changing before my eyes. I am weaker. Everything is different. I am sick all the time now. I am unmotivated. I do not want to make myself breakfast. I do not want to take a shower. I do not want to take a walk or do anything around the house, and I especially do not want to work. I do not want to do anything. I want to go home.
My mind holds the pain of his betrayal, but my computer holds the fuel to feed my mind. I wake up and go to my computer, ostensibly to do some work, maybe I will get in two or three hours today, but fear and anxiety overwhelm me. I match dates on my calendar to known acting out dates. I am shocked by his double life. I am shocked he had a whore. I am shocked that he lied so destructively about me to another human being. I am overwhelmed by the lengths he went to to feed his own selfish desires. I am also disgusted by his rationalizations. I do not ponder the specific details, as much as I think about how I was just another pawn in an elaborate game he was playing with everyone. No matter what was going on in our life, he ultimately chose his addiction. I want to go home.
I do not want to go back and think about what happened all those days. But if I am not aware of what happened, how will I ever feel safe going forward. Can I ever really feel safe again? As much as I want to believe the work he is doing on his recovery will be enough, fear overwhelms me. How can you betray a person to the extent he betrayed me, and then expect me to be able to believe anything he says? I want to go home.
When he expresses his love, I do not really believe he knows what love is. It makes me sad that I used to think he loved women, and that was why he flirted mercilessly. I used to think he respected women. Now I don’t believe it. I believe he resents women. He uses women. The thought of how he objectifies and manipulates women makes me want to run far, far away. I want to go home.
When he does things for me, I feel it is out of guilt. He is so unstable. He is unable to make plans and keep them. He is indecisive. He is unbalanced. I know I need to practice patience. I am running out of patience. I want to go home.
I used to think my husband was devoted, passionate, wonderful, well-intentioned, confident, considerate. He was loving, quirky, charming, and kind. To me he was brilliant, affectionate, ambitious, enterprising, and gentle. I question everything now. Now I know him to be petulant, emotional, selfish, self-absorbed, insincere, spiteful, resentful, pensive, distant, cowardly, condescending, manipulative, and immature. I want to go home.
Will I ever feel safe and loved in my own home again? When will I stop feeling like the only way through this, is out of this?
I want to go.
try not to cry on my rainbow 
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This post touched me deeply. While we are suffering from completely different types of trauma, I have spent so much time lately wanting to go “home,” but as you stated there is no more home, no safe place. I’ve been constantly wearing a watch my mother gave me and have a strange attachment to it (my mom is still alive and well), and I finally figured out it’s because I wanted to be “mothered” again, to have someone take care of me while I was going through deep trauma. What is the answer when we can never go back to that protected place? I think it’s that we have to mother ourselves, to be our own safe place, which is hard to do but not impossible. Practice radical self love when you need to…for a time you may have to give less love to others to love yourself so thoroughly, but that is what needs to be done. One other tiny thing I did to help: my mom helped me re-decorate a bedroom in my house, a beautiful feminine sanctuary, just for me. No one else gets to use that room. It’s a place to go when no other place feels like home. I hope you can find the same.
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I love how you are connecting with your Mom on an adult level, and I love the idea of a feminine sanctuary. I have my own home office that is filled with beautiful items I have picked out like a gorgeous rug, and a beautiful chandelier. Unfortunately over the past year, I have not taken care of it and it has become messy and cluttered and I just look the other way when I am in here. You have motivated me to clean it up so it can be my sanctuary again. I haven’t read your blog, so don’t know your story… yet, but trauma is trauma. We did not tell my parents about my husband, his illness, and my pain until months into the process. Before that, I longed to just go over to my parent’s house and sit on their comfy sofa, wrap myself in a blanket, watch TV and have them feed me comfort food, while they commiserated with me. I knew I could not do that. Pretty sure that is not how they would have treated me anyway. My parents raised me to be independent and that is what I, generally, am. Very independent, strong, and self sufficient. My husband’s betrayal changed everything, but hopefully only temporarily. I have been building back my own strength and trying to move past the trauma. After many hours of therapy, I realized that some of my old strength was built on the facade that I could help people and no one would hurt me, especially not the man I chose to spend the rest of my life with (and because no one had ever really hurt me before). I hope that my husband will be able to earn back my trust and step up and be the man I thought he was. I will never again be that woman who fell so fast and so hard after discovery day. People get hurt, it’s a fact of life, it’s how we deal with it that matters. I feel stronger every day. The PTSD does knock me on my ass many days, but I am learning how to deal with the triggers, and I think a lot of my trauma comes from fear. As I realize things will never be the same and I can move forward regardless, strength is overpowering the fear… if ever so slowly. Thanks for your beautiful comment. You have inspired me!
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This is so near what I’m feeling.. I posted just moments after you but can totally relate to what you wrote. I hope we can. xo
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I know this is a journal entry from the past, but my heart breaks still as I read this. I remember this feeling so clearly. I remember waking up every day with that sense of dread that this is my life now and wishing with everything in me I could just go back to feeling normal again. I was sure I would feel that way forever. That was the feeling I would wake up to every day from that point forward. I know you’re further along in your healing now. I hope you’re a little past this point. I wouldn’t have believed that I would get past it if someone had told me I would (even though I would have WANTED to), but I did. Each day takes me a little further from that feeling. Eventually there is more peace, more contentment. Of course it will never go away, but you already know that. The important part is putting yourself first in this process and if he is a good man he will fall in line behind that need. If not, you get to decide if this is the life you want. Either way, for once we get to dictate the future… they got the past.
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