by Buddhakrishna (Gary) Newton
The depth of my sadness was immeasurable. The burnt-out cavity inside my chest became my retreat from feelings. But this fortress around my heart had grown so thick, so calloused that it almost cost me my marriage and any hope of happiness. I was lost in desperation, alone and rudderless, when I finally discovered that by surrendering my mind’s story about my despair, I could live free of it, replenish my marriage and experience a whole new life.
I learned before the age of thirteen that survival meant going along with my father’s plan. It was dangerous to disagree with him. I maneuvered around his intimidation by tightly packing my emotions into an airtight container, lest they dare challenge his rule. Retreat. Keep quiet. Numb out and live another day – a skill I honed well as a teen.
I married at twenty-three. She and I truly enjoyed each other’s company but having different values, we drifted apart after just a few short years. Not knowing how to share my anxieties about our marriage with her, true to form I stuffed my apprehension away to ferment while I retreated into my own world. I could be completely silent for hours, even a whole day – that’ll show her, I calculated. While that did cause her pain, it did nothing to numb my own.
I began hanging out after work in places I had no business being just to buy myself a few hours of home-avoidance. I drank socially but alcohol was not my drug of choice. Sex was. When I discovered how many pretty women would tolerate a well-dressed, computer-programming married guy, it was on. I escaped into a sexcapade of attention-starved hotties. My sexual lashing out was in direct proportion to the misery I hid from until the day it smacked me cold in the face. It was only our second private encounter when one curvy acquaintance said she loved me and that she wanted me to help her quit cocaine. What? This is not a relationship, I replied… silently. What am I doing? This is getting way out of control. Who have I become? I didn’t like the answer. I stopped long enough to tell my wife that we needed to divorce and she readily agreed. So we did. The interruption was temporary.
My early thirties as Single Man were really just more of the same except I didn’t have to sneak. I allowed no one to leave so much as a toothbrush and they each knew there were others. I still resonated with the idea of marriage, mind you, just not the getting close part. I spent many a lonely holiday but it just wasn’t worth the risk of making a meaningful connection. Then came Sharon. Her tidal wave of beauty and passion sucker-punched my emotional fortress, annihilated her competition – there was no competition really – and reawakened my hope for mankind itself. We fell deeply in love and began living together – her Jersey apartment during the week as it was closer to our jobs, and my place in Pennsylvania on the weekends.
Our first year together featured female surgery, Sharon’s own divorce, the loss of her job, major leg surgery to relieve some of the severe chronic pain from her original leg surgery two years earlier, counseling to help her deal with her brother’s death and a natural gas pipeline explosion that vaporized her apartment and our cars. One bright note: escaping from the explosion with just our lives and the clothes on our backs sharply focused what we meant to each other. We married five months later. The stage was set.
Having no chance to grieve even one of her back-to-back traumas, Sharon bottled up her pain and anger and slid into a bottomless pit of suicidal depression. I spent every day of our first eleven years of marriage wondering, “Will today be the day I find her dead body?” Her suppressed rage boiled over several times a week and I, being who she trusted most, took the brunt of it. At first I struck back, feeling obliged to protect myself with stinging verbal comebacks, but that only escalated things. I eventually became quite good at reading her patterns and realized that her outbursts had nothing to do with me. I just had to learn to let them flow around me rather than through me. Calling on my familiar toolset, I prepared my own hurts and sadness for cold storage, beefed up the wall around my heart and settled in for a long marital winter. I pretended to myself that I was OK and did what I thought I had to do to get through each day.
Why me? What did I do to deserve this? This isn’t fair. Should I stay? My pity routine alternated with telling her many times, and meaning it, that I would gladly transfer her pain into me if only I could. It killed me to see her this way and to know there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless, powerless, impotent, unable to protect my wife. The relentless cycle of cautious highs and desperate lows was exhausting. I continually struggled to summon enough energy to emotionally support Sharon through her tantrums, breakdowns and threats of suicide, which had become an occasionally attractive option even for me. It was all-consuming and overwhelming.
My few gambles to voice my own despair were nullified by Sharon’s sharp attacks, which instantly transported me each time right back to that cowering teenager shut down by his oppressive father. Entombed in her own anguish, Sharon thought that my hurt, as compared to hers, wasn’t worth discussing. So I didn’t; there was simply no room for mine so why bother. Alone again, I robotically plodded through the motions, but still firmly committed to seeing our marriage transcend her depression. Beneath it all, I did still love her and I had more faith in Sharon than she had in herself.
In year eleven, while in India seeking solace in a month-long program of deep introspection, Sharon phoned to ecstatically report that she truly wanted to live. By now too numb to even muster excitement at this incredible news, I simply put my head in my hands, leaned on our kitchen counter and felt a thousand pounds of stress shed from my shoulders like sheets of dead skin. I was grateful beyond words that my wife would not take her life in order to end her pain. It was finally over. Or so I thought.
Home, having emerged victoriously from her emotional prison, Sharon was a brand new person: calm, energetic and fully engaged in life again. We started getting reacquainted as the void left by her depression could now be replenished with joy and happiness. But an invisible tide was turning. With my wife having faced her demons, it was now my turn.
Sharon deferred processing the grief from her traumas and wound up in full blown suicidal depression. I know now that I ran from processing my distress during her depression. Yes, I definitely found ways to let her anger flow around me rather than through me in order to get through the day, and I learned some valuable coping skills. But after so many years of living behind that iron curtain around my heart, I had become so emotionally comatose that I didn’t trust enough to fully come out of hibernation. I had tricked myself into believing that I could just stuff my feelings so far away that they were no longer even there. Boy, was I wrong.
I projected my now-boiling rage at the one I trusted most – Sharon – so she took the brunt of it. I often felt angry for no reason and, needing a convenient target other than me, blamed her Depression Years for my snapping sarcastically at the slightest provocation. I made it her fault for making me furious for even remembering why I punched ten holes into our sheetrock walls four years earlier after she said something that badly hurt me.
I allowed work to distract me. I went in earlier, stayed later and didn’t miss days. I even took the long way home to extend my trance. Sometimes I just felt confused. This was not supposed to happen. Hadn’t I just survived the most grueling eleven years of my life? Why am I not happy?
So true to pattern, I withdrew. I played cold and distant to avoid the reality of what I was feeling, adding rebar to reinforce my barrier. The closer Sharon tried to get, the further away I slipped. I held back from fully loving her for fear of getting hurt again. All aspects of our relationship suffered: our friendship, our fun, our finances and, ironically for me, our sex life. We argued and blamed and it intensified weekly. Finally, we both reached the breaking point. It was time to make a choice.
I knew I was projecting my pain onto her. I knew I was actively maintaining, no, expanding, my emotional blockade. I knew the wall had to come down if we were to have any future together. But it wasn’t just about my future with Sharon. It was even more about my future with me.
I had to come to grips with some serious questions about myself. Am I this hardened heart unable to love? I already knew that if the answer was yes, then this issue would play out in my next relationship, no matter who it’s with. Not very appealing. Was I shutting myself out from all that life has in store for me? If I was then all the trauma of the last dozen years was surely in vain. What a waste. Would resolving my recurring issues turn out to be easier than continuing to suffer through them? I didn’t know but just the thought of having to come back in my next life and relive this one… I don’t think so. So there it was. I had to beat back my demons by asking the truest question of all: “Who Am I?”
Yes, surrendering my wall was scary as hell. I didn’t really know who I’d find on the other side because I had been hiding from myself since I was a young boy. Yet my fear of letting go of my emotional fortress was, I know now, far worse than the actual work of dissolving it. I’m not saying it was easy. No. Hell no, even. There was that mirror of truth thing to deal with. I am saying it was possible. And doable. And I did it. And it was worth it.
All the anguish I’ve been through my whole life now makes sense – I can see that it served a purpose. I realize that I got lost in the stories I told myself about my memories of pain and went to great lengths to pretend my stories were reality. Now, equipped to observe disturbances without the need to identify with them, I can simply acknowledge their presence without being consumed and controlled by anger or sadness or fear. The first time it truly struck me just how much time and energy and heartache I wasted identifying with things, I actually broke out laughing at the absurdity of it.
Now Sharon and I, both 53, are living a whole new life together. We have replenished the essence of our marriage with calmness and peace. I am often happy for no identifiable reason. I am very grateful for all aspects of what I’ve been through because it helped me remember who I really am. I am not alone. I am free.
