When I first started having therapy, this was at the point of a separation from my wife of only a few months, caused by my friendships with a number of women.  I have many female friends, some of whom have been part of my life for 40 years.  I would message these friends, some of them daily, and in hindsight, having got married, I came to realise that the closeness of these relationships was no longer appropriate.  When I separated from my wife, I stopped all contact with all of my friends, gave up a part-time job and concentrated on trying to rebuild my marriage to the woman I loved.  At the same time, I was vilified, those close to me and at my work were told that I had multiple relationships, some of them sexual, whilst married, which is untrue.  I was also subject to having all emails and phone messages screened and downloaded.  I made a number of significant changes to my life but felt that I no longer knew who I was, what I was, who I wanted to be or indeed, how I could become what I wanted to be.  I lost all confidence in my personal judgement in so many areas of my life.  I became paranoid about talking to any woman, worried every time I received a message on my phone and I turned from being self-confident to highly anxious, paranoid and with little self-respect.

Through the course of my therapy, which included attachment-informed EMDR, I feel that I have managed to regain some of my self-esteem although I still have some way to go.  I feel that I know who I am again, I feel that I know what is reasonable and unreasonable, and importantly, I can see the errors in my past behaviours, but at the same time, I am also able to effectively judge whether my wife’s reactions to my current behaviours are reasonable.  Having lived with my wife again for 6 months, it has become clear that she cannot move past what she sees as my infidelity and we have decided to separate permanently.  All conversations that we now have are laden with phrases to make me feel guilty, but I have now moved to a place where I can see these comments for what they are.  Whilst the comments still hurt every time I hear them, I have come to accept that they come from a place of hurt.  I have to look to the future, I have to rebuild my life and I have to rebuild friendships.  Sometimes two people just cannot be happy together; being philosophical, I now think that if two people are meant to be together, then they will be some day, some how and at some point.

I have experienced a degree of psychological abuse over the past 6 months from my wife.  I have wanted to retaliate on so many occasions, but have generally always managed to refrain from doing so.  I have some way to go in my journey, there will be many hurdles ahead.  I lost my father around 6 years ago, with whom I had a very close relationship.  Whilst I am frequently told how disappointed he would be in me, I often wonder what he might have said to me if he was still here.  I am then often drawn to the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.  I have put just some of the lines from the poem which rings around my head constantly, imagining my father saying these words to me.  They also help me to have faith in myself, in my ability to act fairly, reasonably, and have a future that is not blighted by the past.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!