Round three of couples therapy and an unsettling perspective from a therapist.

My wife and I have been married for 9 years. We have one child. We have a lot of mutually inflicted damage in our history as a couple, split for a year to work on ourselves, got back together during COVID. Our struggle has always been around communication, it’s as if we speak different languages to each other.

To speak about myself, I lacked a lot of self awareness until my late twenties (I’m 33 now) and spent a lot of time investing in therapy and a healthy lifestyle and while it’s helped immensely, I know I will always have much to learn.

We had some success in couples therapy right before COVID, when we were separated but that was cut short by the lockdowns.

We tried couples therapy 4 or so of months ago with my wife’s individual therapist. The day of the second session we were in a bad spot emotionally, the energy seemed off during the session and near the end of the session my wife said she’d like to focus more on individual. So we got two sessions in total with her.

Fast forward to now. During her individual session today, my wife talked to her therapist about starting back with couples and the therapist mentioned she was unsure about whether or not it’s a good fit with her. She said her hesitation is with sharing criticism with me and me not taking it well. She said she would have to show me a lot of mirrors of myself and that she doesn’t know if that would go over well. She referred us to someone else. All of this was passed along by my wife.

I know I’m not a bad person but I’m just in my feels about the work I’ve been doing on myself, feeling like maybe it hasn’t been for much. I thought my self-awareness was okay but not so much now.

I don’t mind someone not vibing with me, it’s more about feeling ungrounded now, like I don’t quite know what’s real.

Thank you for reading. Marriage can be a grind. I know I’m right where I need to be, it’s just hard to practice that sometimes.