My Breakdown

Sam and I had established long since that my challenges within my marriage were around the fact that while I knew my wife loved me, I didn’t feel that she particularly wanted me anymore, I didn’t feel desired. I had repeated several times that at my core I needed to be wanted and I wanted to be needed (trite haircut on the Cheap Trick song as that might have been). And now she had played directly into that vulnerability: She told me she loved me one week and that she didn’t want to be closer to me the next. Traumatic, confusing, crushing.

Sam texted me while I was driving to the Jersey Shore, where I had some work to do on a cottage Erin and I own as rental property. I told her I was having a breakdown. She wanted to speak. I told her that speaking to her right now would do the opposite of helping, but she insisted.

I told her how the prior day’s conversation had devastated me. I told her that I was confused by the turnaround from “I love you” to her forgetting what had transpired the session before. She denied having meant anything beyond the fact that I “move her,” and made it seem like the “seductive” quality of her language she’d owned a week earlier was now a product of my imagination.

I said I thought that I needed to terminate “therapy,” and that I would cry if we did. I asked her whether she would cry too, and she replied that she doesn’t cry. She disclosed that her best friend in high school had been killed by a car while crossing the street walking home from a party and that she didn’t cry then. She told me that when things get emotionally difficult for her, she fights to remain “with it” and she encouraged me to do the same. 

I told her I didn’t understand why she would tell me she loved me if she didn’t, why anyone would tell anyone that, but particularly when she knew I had feelings for her. When, particularly, she was my fricken therapist. I reminded her of the “why the hell not” comment she’d made about being friends and for some reason I still don’t understand she suggested we role play what it would have been like to have met in other circumstances. We role played meeting at a function and making small talk over snacks. The exercise was devastating—by asking me to imagine a different beginning, she was asking me to imagine a different relationship entirely.

My mind spun: What could possibly have been her goal? Or was she just flailing, not knowing how to handle the effect that she’d had on me? What could have been the positive outcome of her asking me to role play a fantasy relationship with her in the same conversation in which I’d told her (again) that I had for months been consciously avoiding fantasizing a different relationship because I needed to protect myself from its impossibility. Was she that eager to prove that I’d been wrong two years prior when I said that I didn’t think we would be friends if we’d met in other circumstances? Was this whole “relationship” conversation she’d led me into a year prior her effort to demonstrate that I would indeed have liked or loved her if we’d met in other circumstances? Did she need that much to be right?

In that same conversation, I asked if she was happy. She said “no.” She then told me a story about being angry at her husband but going for a walk and realizing that it is “better to be with someone than to not be.” That seemed as minuscule a reason to stay in a marriage as I could imagine, and while she was telling me I was wrong about everything I’d thought she’d said, she thereby simultaneously seemed to confirmed what I’d long suspected: that her own marriage wasn’t any great satisfaction to her. Was she playing out her own issues on me? Trying to create with me what she wanted but didn’t have at home? What the actual fuck had been going on for the past two years?

I left that FaceTime a wreck. I canceled our next session. I spent hours shaking back and forth. Every thought I had was about her or something that could have led to this, some sign I missed that could have put a different and less “seductive” spin on the signals Sam had seemed to be—had been—giving me. Over the next couple of weeks, I twice, at night, felt pain in my chest and thought I was having a heart attack; both times I decided not to fight it or call 911 or ask my wife for help – I just wanted to let the heart attack take me. I could not hide my distress from my wife or son. I moved into another bedroom because I was in tears all the time. I took baths constantly because then I could explain why my face was always wet. I told my family that I felt betrayed by my therapist. I told my son I felt like no one really loved me, maybe no one ever had. I fought with my wife and accused her of not caring about me. My life went completely sideways, I couldn’t keep myself together for more than a few minutes at a time. I couldn’t trust myself; I couldn’t trust anyone to help me.