I’m tired and confused after today’s counselling session.

When my husband is anxious, he vibrates. When I am anxious, I get migraines.

I am getting a lot of them at the moment – and today has been no exception.

I woke up in the night with strange dreams and a headache, which never passed all day. By the time I got to couples counselling, I had, what I call, a “collapsed migraine”: I am exhausted and all I want to do is sleep.

I began by describing of the stress and anxiety of the weekend, of the cuddle after my shutdown on Saturday, and husband coming to sleep in our bed Monday night. I said that I thought that one of us was sure to break and say “it’s over”, but I also felt confused by the cuddles.

This seemed to start the theme for the most of the session: ongoing clash of our communication styles. Mine has large nonverbal elements to it: cuddles, squeezes, touching. My husband is almost exclusively verbal.

He said that on the weekend that he’d come to accept that he was never going to get what he needed from me emotionally. That was upsetting to hear – I do not like to admit defeat over anything to accept that I’m anything other than completely capable.

I said that I was finding it increasingly difficult to touch my husband lately. As we talked, we established that these physical messages were not only about reassuring me, they are me reassuring him: during the time when my mind was blown apart by all the possibilities that I could not think of for my life after I came out as non-binary and freed myself from the shackles of self-deception, touch was the only way that I could offer reassurance to my husband – they were completely honest and without any kind of guile.

As we were talking about misfiring communication, I connected it with a small affectionate gesture that my husband used to give me, although I couldn’t appreciate it at the time – as with most things, you never appreciate it until it’s gone.

He used to dangle a necklace in my face when I was snuggling him while we were watching telly or a film. Since this was in the evening, I would be wearing my glasses. I have always felt very sensitive about wearing glasses because I was bullied a lot for them at school; as a result, this gentle and affectionate teasing wasn’t received very well. I cannot remember what I said or how I said it, but I’m pretty sure that I was irritable. Bless him, but he stopped doing it! It was only years later that I understood that this was an affectionate tease and was very different from the teasing of bullies.

The conversation often returned to my husband feeling judged by me. An example of this, that I can still remember from the session, was when I accused him of only being able to show love through sex because he’d been sexually abused. I’d never thought of it as being judgemental before, and whilst I now have some idea that it was hurtful, I could see and hear that it hurt him very deeply all those years ago, and still hurts him now.

From there, the talk went to the pedestal that I’d put him on when we met. I absolutely worshipped him and thought he was so wise (as well as sexy). When we’d met, he was in recovery in AA, and I thought that I’d never end up in a relationship like my parents (mum and I both thought that my father is an alcoholic).

His fall from the pedestal wasn’t when he faced a personal crisis and relapsed, but when he failed to get back into AA.

My husband seemed to get angry at that point; he asserted that he wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t need to be in The Rooms being told his bad he was. I said that I understand that now, but I was very young and very naive.

I think that this is something that we’re going to have to come back to in the future; I might have been a git way back, but his verbal and physical abuse of me started not long after the drinking began.

However, what this does highlight is that I came into our relationship with a load of hangups and baggage from my own parent’s marriage. I never even considered them as problems that affected me because I thought that I knew “the answers”, so never looked at myself. Why should I, when my husband’s own behaviour could be easily used to eclipse anything I might do?

So, after all that writing, what do I take from this?

Nothing yet: I need to go to sleep and fix my headache and come back to this when I’m feeling fresh. What matters is that the session won’t be forgotten by me and I have something to jog my memory later on.

Thanks for listening!