Leslie Cane Articles

By: Leslie Cane:  You may not start your separation with the intention of closing yourself off from your spouse or other loved ones.  In fact, many of us start with the hope that we will restore the intimacy to eventually become closer.  This is the ideal.  And it happens for some of us.  But for others, the separation doesn’t always go as planned.

The Process Of Closing Off Your Heart: There can be disappointments and hurt feelings during a trial or marital separation.  There can be rejections.  And because this process can be painful, we can begin to close ourselves off just to keep us from becoming hurt again.

We may want to openly love our separated husband more than anything.  But that love can come with a price and with risks.  And eventually, no one wants to keep getting hurt over and over again.  So we close up.  We batten down the hatches.  And although we may hold out hope that things might change one day, we become numb and we close off our hearts because we feel that it is the safest, most logical thing to do.

When The Tide Begins To Turn: And then one day, the unthinkable happens.  The thing that we thought that we would never see.  Our husband begins to be a little nicer, a little more receptive, a little more vocal about his desire to spend more time with us.  Initially, we may even refuse because we’ve become so numb to the idea of a reconciliation.  To save us from disappointment, we have told ourselves that improvement was never going to happen, so why get our hopes up?

When the potential for improvement becomes obvious, we struggle.  We may eventually talk ourselves into being receptive to seeing him or talking to him, but it’s hard to lift the veil.  It’s hard to be open.  You may hope that the awkwardness and coldness are just a momentary blip, but the lack of vulnerability can continue until it becomes a problem.

Someone might explain: “I honestly do not intend to be cold to my separated husband.  In fact, if you had told me four months ago that I would not light up when he wanted to hug me or hold my hand, I would have said that you were crazy.  It’s just that I’ve felt rejected by my husband for so long, that I eventually stopped trying and I shut down.  It was literally like flipping off a switch when my husband was around.  I had to do it in order to survive.  Well, for the last three weeks, he has been calling me every day.  We have gone out a handful of times.  Last night, he asked me why I was so cold to him.  I told him that I didn’t mean to be.  I told him that I truly loved him and wanted for things to work out.  I don’t know why I can’t act like it.  But I feel afraid.  My husband said he misses the open and vulnerable person I used to be.  I miss that, too.  And I know that I will have to open myself up in order to get close to him again.  But I am so scared.  Because I don’t want to go through the pain again if this is not going to work out for some reason. How do you be vulnerable again when you worry that it will hurt?”

Either Option Has The Potential For Risks, But Only One Has The Potential For Gain: This is tough.  I am not going to lie.  I had this issue and so do many others.  Self preservation is a very very strong inclination.  This is especially true when you had to act in such a way in order to protect yourself from emotional pain.

However, I can tell you what helped for me.  It was a bit easier for me once I realized that there was the potential for pain with either strategy.  What I mean by that is that being with my husband but being flat and guarded was painful also.  I was there, but I wasn’t.  I wasn’t experiencing any of the joy that I should have been experiencing.  I wasn’t allowing myself to do so.  So yes, maybe that felt “safe,” but it didn’t feel great.

At the same time, it was admittedly going to be painful if things didn’t work out.  So there was the risk of being disappointed. But being guarded was also painful.  So in either scenario, I was still going to feel pain.  I wasn’t truly escaping it either way.

Yes, opening myself up was a risk.  But it did allow me to feel joy at the time and it also allowed me the biggest chance to have the saved marriage that I wanted.  At least this option gives you a chance of happiness to counter the risk. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to create any sort of intimacy if I wasn’t able to be vulnerable.  So I just took a deep breath and tried very hard to be present in the moment.

This may sound silly but you have to break it down to very small pieces.  You have to notice the sound of his voice when you talk.  Or the touch of his hand when you’re together.  You make an attempt to notice these things to slow down the worry and hesitation in your brain.  You want to feel with your heart and not with your brain.  You have to force yourself to REALLY experience whatever is around you without over thinking because doing so helps you to not shut down.

A Comparison: I am a visual learner, so one thing that was vital for me was analyzing this process in my journal.  I’d think about the encounter and I’d note how I felt when I was closed off around my husband and how I felt when I made a very conscious effect to be vulnerable.  I could tell from my handwriting that I tended to write very fast and was more animated when I wrote about being open.  It was easier to describe because I enjoyed it more.  I can’t tell you that I was open without fear or doubt, because that just wasn’t true.  Much of the time, I let my husband take the lead because I was so scared of rejection.

But once he did take the lead, I was very aware of trying to be more open, spontaneous, and positive while we were together.  And it made a big difference. In fact, the difference was so big that we eventually reconciled.  I do not think that we would have the marriage that we have today without the openness and vulnerability, although I did move quite slowly in the beginning. There’s more at  http://isavedmymarriage.com

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