Map Your Healing Journey

The last few years – since I opened Map Your Healing Journey – has been a baptism by fire (oh you want to help people dig through their deepest wounds? You first, babe. xo, The Universe et al)

Marriage counseling is the latest adventure for teaching me how to resolve my *deepest* wounds.

Sketch of tree roots, then tree that is made of two arms reaching up with fingers that lead to leaves. Black and white sketch.

People don’t talk about marriage counseling. The stigma is worse than getting individual counseling.

A therapist recently told me that couples go to marriage counseling 7 years too late.

Partly because we’re human, as humans tend to put things off until the discomfort outweighs denial. And partly we don’t see counseling as preventative; we don’t get help until there’s a crisis.

And partly we don’t go to (marriage) counseling because it’s really, really, really vulnerable.

So my husband brought up marriage counseling months ago. I said no.

Read that again: I said NO. The mental health professional who has worked through trauma and grief recovery stuff for two decades said…no.

He brought it up in December, as his therapist recommended it to help us manage conflict in an agreed-upon way (we are both…stubborn)

“NOPE,” I said again.

“NO?” Pete said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know!” I said. “I KNOW.”

I was in a panic. A deep, scary panic. Tears. Trauma responses galore.

After all of this time and practice, I’m pretty good (expert level) at figuring out what sh*t I need to own and deal with.

But this?

NO IDEA WHAT WAS HAPPENING.

But I agreed, deep scary panic and all, and we started meeting with an awesome couples counselor who is taking us through the Gottman method (which I love).

On top of some other things that were happening, however, this took me out, and by that I mean, I got physically ill. This is a clue to me that my nervous system has been overstretched. It takes a lot of time, energy, and patience to recover.

I spent that time recovering by thinking, feeling, being curious with myself, wrestling a few demons. I ate queso. I slept A LOT. I cried A LOT.

And still – nothing. No idea. The only thing I could figure was that I was grieving some buried stuff from my first marriage.

And this was true, except with this realization, my emotions and thought didn’t subside as usual in this process.

It’s been a month. A MONTH. Of being curious and patient and angry and panicky and crying and sleeping and reaching out to my friends and talking with therapists. I have been low-key MISERABLE trying to figure this out.

Finally, I got my answer.

In the middle of a conversation, words tumbled out of my mouth that I wasn’t thinking about or planning or whatever.

“…because my nervous system feels threatened,” I told our couples counselor.

“Tell me more about that,” she said.

“If we keep doing this marriage counseling thing, you’re both going to see who the *real* me is,” I said. “And you’re going to hate me.”

It was like a thousand lightbulbs going off over my head. Okay, a hundred. I littlelarry made myself speechless.

Relief. Tears. Relief. Relief. RELIEF.

A ROOT wound.

Buried DEEP.

Logically, I know that they’re not going to magically “discover” who I am all of a sudden and then not like me. I mean, I am transparent to a FAULT. People can (too often for my taste) read my face.

Logic doesn’t matter.

What I needed was a WITNESS.

And after I said those words yesterday – “If we keep doing this marriage counseling thing, you’re both going to see who the *real* me is and you’re going to hate me.” – both the couples counselor and my husband…