When We Trigger Each Other
Got really triggered the other day with my husband. I was not happy, stuck in my responsibility of putting my baby to sleep when she wouldn't go and my husband went to sleep peacefully. I thought about how i was stuck for hours until i could rest my sleep deprived body, and reached the end of my rope. I sobbed that nobody cared about me and i felt alone. I said he didn't see me, nobody did. I thought about the escape of suicide, that's how far i was. After a girl I knew committed suicide even with a baby and husband because nobody understood her depression, it was on my mind when I got frustrated. My husband answered that he was there and did see me but rolled back to sleep. I lost it and yelled that he did not even see me. He yelled back, that he was tired too and I wasn't fair not to care about his needs. It was a back and forth with nobody really being heard, just both feeling so angry and indignant. I went to the kitchen and drowned myself in cake self-deprecatingly. I stopped talking to him because I felt so stuck. I knew he was right, but he kept nagging me to admit I was being wrong and arrogant. It hurt me, and I refused to satisfy him with an apology because of my ego feeling unappreciated for its sacrifice.
It hit me that we are all with ego, but as Ralph Smart says a relationship cannot exist with the ego in the way. We have to drop our barriers that prevent us from seeing another person, and take in the other's truth so they feel heard and loved and supported. But I just couldn't do it with my unseen cut off limbs. When you are fragmented from a hurt in your past that was never healed, your ego tries to defend yourself against getting hurt again and have you acknowledge it. So I sat with my feelings of utter self-annihilation and betrayal of those closest to me, and took it in as much as I could silently with eating my favorite food and I angrily ignored him to punish him for my hurt ego. Every fiber in my being was screaming for justice, to cut him off for being such a whiny baby, but a voice inside me said I had the same problem. I finally calmly said, "No, I won't talk to you know, because I am not in the right state to." He retreated into the other room, and my defenses collapsed and I sobbed and sobbed on my daughter's high chair next to her. I cried for my hurt, cried for how exhausted it was making me, for my husband's pain, for it all to end because I didn't have the strength anymore to fight. My daughter just watched quietly, making nervous sounds and reaching out to me. I cried for her too not to be too affected.
I went back to the room, subdued, and finally broached an argument about how I was upset at him for still going to his parents even though I was out of touch with them and I felt he enabled their mis behavior. He was scared to let go. He told me so, that he is at his pace. Instantly my anger dropped, realizing he was right and I was being self righteous again. Ashamed and battered inside, I said sorry and lost my vengeance. We both sat quietly, so broken and dejected from our own demons fighting us. Our own confusion and hurt from unseen parts. We sighed and admitted our responsibilities in the blowup, letting go of the defense of having to be right and just feeling wrong. Me in my alone child and baby state of being abandoned, him in his own abandonment and pressure to be perfect and helpful even when he was tired and not in the mood of helping. We each had our pasts of not being allowed to be human when we most needed it, and we were still pining for it now.
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