A philosophy that was shared with me and a few other WoPAs by a therapist has stuck with me lately, and I can see truth behind the words, at least in my life:
Men and women addicts lose two main things because of the addiction:
Men lose the desire to protect.
Women lose their desire to nurture.
This same therapist also said something that I don't 100% agree with: That our addict husbands never loved us, and that they literally don't know how.
It just shows that sometimes you have to listen to everything you hear with a filter of what speaks truth to you at the time. I honestly believe that my husband loves me- but the addiction robs him of certain critical things that must come with that to ensure a healthy relationship.
What's that saying? "you can't live on love alone?"
Anyway, I want to process why the first part spoke so deeply to me (because I know that this doesn't necessarily apply to everyone).
I guess I am a little lucky(?) because I have experience in both ends... But even the feminist in me believes that men and women were born with gifts specific to each individual- which includes our gender. I believe that men are given the gift of desire to protect, and women the gift of desire to nurture.
I also believe that like all gifts, there is the chance that the gifts might be temporarily unavailable- whether by our own doing, or the doing of someone else (such as abuse).
I say temporarily unavailable because every once in a while, we can see glimpses of it. I saw glimpses of my husband wanting to protect me before the shame of the addiction shut it down. Recently I've been seeing more of it- and it is incredibly confusing what my emotional response is to it (but that's another blog post). But despite the adversaries best efforts to snuff that gift, I don't believe it is possible to snuff it out entirely because it is a gift that is built into us- like a car stereo.
It's funny, because when you are in the midst of an addiction, you don't even know that it is missing. I sincerely thought that I was just an oddball because the thought of children just "was never appealing to me." And it doesn't necessarily mean just the nurturing of children per say, I cold turkey quit, and after about six months of sobriety, I nurtured the heck out of my husband... problem was that he was consumed in his addiction and pushed me off so many times that I went into survival mode.
I believe that being in trauma robs me of my gift of nurturing. When I first had my son, I think heavenly father blessed me with a surge of nurturing, but after a few months of being a mom with a zoned-out husband who kept looking at porn, I tried to numb the pain- and I think that also numbed my ability to nurture.
Okay here is my point in all of this:
It's impossible for me to selectively numb. I can't just numb pain and sadness. I can't avoid the trauma. I can't run from it. I not only hurt myself by doing so, I hurt those I love- like my little guy. The greatest gift I can give my son is to actually look at the hard issues. It's ignoring those issues that has numbed my ability to truly feel joy and happiness- and the desire to nurture.
I did get a correction in this post that the therapist meant that our husband's aren't capable of loving us when they are in Addict mode, not all the time.
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