I wrote this in response to Sue's post (previous to this one) announcing her creation of a new Blog, separate from this and from me, to express herself in the future. I wrote it as a comment to that post but, when I attempted to post it, it exceeded the number of characters Blogger permits in a comment. (Imagine that..........me being long-winded.) Thus, I have turned it into the following post.
This action by you makes me feel the greatest distance from you I have ever felt, other than when you called 9-1-1, and, yes, that was calling the police to arrest me for no reason which was the precipitant of the cascade of events that has led to our crisis.
I have read your "new Blog" and, while it makes an overt pretense of being some sort of expression of neutrality in the midst of all this, one would have to be an idiot to not perceive the obvious passive aggression, of virtually every expression there.
Your rules for conduct there are absolutely a complete reactionary response to what you perceive me as having written here. I have had the temerity to express my feelings here on our Blog about our relationship. I am sorry. I am more hurt devastated, betrayed, damaged, wounded, and emotionally broken than I have ever been in my life. I awaken each day to not wanting to live. I am angry. I have dared to express that anger. So you have now created a Blog where anger cannot be expressed, other than as back handedly as you have by decreeing (inferentially in your "rules")I have "trash talked" you. I have sought no one's "siding" with any of us, nor has anyone other than a misguided few, whose reaction to all this has been so immature as to express that they were in support of You and Teresa, as though this is somehow a bar room brawl, or some sort of sporting event to root for sides, and not a family in crisis. Fault finding is of no value to any of us. That does not mean that there is not responsibility for our situation, however. I am trying amidst this to assume mine. Your insistence is that all of our problem is my drinking. I have stopped drinking. If my drinking was the gun powder of this explosion your 0-1-1 call was most certinly the spark. I have not drank since. I will not drink again....so next issue?
I have expressed my feelings on the Blog we have lived by for six years or more as the sounding Board and chronicle of our lives. I need this vehicle now to survive. I do not know how to express feeling angry, betrayed, hurt, paranoid, scared, and not sound angry, betrayed, hurt, paranoid, and scared.
I am most disheartened by your feeling that your life is greatly enhanced by my silence and withdrawal from you. If that is the case, what purpose could there possibly be in our relating further? Your silence through all this has been at least as profound as mine. You have made it clear repeatedly by rages and retaliation that you have absolutely no interest in hearing from me what I have felt and thought the last month and eight days since you began this crisis with your senseless 9-1-1 call. When I have occasionally, as recently as yesterday, attempted some mundane conversation about life in general, you have bitten my head off. You have not attempted to create any conversation yourself, but have remained at least as sullenly silent as I. Now I learn this is because my absence from you is life-enhancing for you.
You have asserted on your new forum, that is so "neutral," that I have never been told "no" in our relationship and so now I am spoiled. This is a blatant lie. You have said no literally thousands of times thriughout our relationship to aspects of our life great and small. I have modified our most intimate relations to try to help you deal with challenges you have faced over and over again. I have never violated a limit expressed by you, or refused to accept one.
Unlike you, our silence and distance is not life enhancing to me. It is one further devastating wound piled upon a whole series of horrible wounds that I have experienced over the last 6 weeks. I am sorry, but there is no behavior you can engage in, that would ever cause me to cast you out of our family. There is no behavior you can engage in that my love for you is contingent upon. You have interpreted my agony and rage as not loving you or wanting you. These feelings are in large part based upon my incredulity and pain at your role in all this.
You have asked me repeatedly to "forgive you" and, I have, again and again. Forgiving you does not heal me. My hurt and pain in all this have not even ended yet. I likely have years of hurt now to live through with the legal system, up to, and possibly including, further incarceration, but I am supposed to somehow just be better.
I am in the throws of post traumatic stress reaction. I have continual "flash back pictures" that invade my consciousness at all times of day and night of jail. I have panic, and huge fear, and I feel like having lost trust for the two people in my life I thought would always give me unconditional love, no matter what, I trust no one, least of all myself.
If you, indeed, are being truthful about having some desire for our relationship to go forward, this is not the way to make that happen.
I love you,
Tom
I know you are angry and hurt, and that this sentence is a vast understatement. None of us can fully understand all that has happened, and none of us have walked in your shoes. Your pain is still so raw and big.
ReplyDeleteThis is through my vanilla filter and we both know that our paradigms are very different.
But from my pov...the trauma that has occurred is so great that it has caused all of you to question and examine not only the family relationship but who each of you now are. You are all different people than when you entered this arrangement.
It seems perfectly normal and healthy that each of you would want some mental distance and space to examine who you all are now. I don't see Sue's creating a new blog as way to betray or cause you further pain..but just a place where she can sort things out on her own.
Things have sadly changed. All of you have been traumatized to the core. And each of you will need to find a way to heal. The three of you have been so enmeshed that when one of you or all of you move away from the center the whole of gravity shifts for the others as well.
Sue has been your slave and now she is not. She is being more independent and she is finding a way to survive. And not everything she chooses to do will be to your liking. Welcome to my world. ;)
You have to find a way to survive as well. I think the legal stuff will work itself out. You are not a danger to society (and even if you were the jails here are overcrowded and underfunded--hopefully they would choose to hold on to murderers and rapists and not 61 year olds who had a fight with their spouse.)
You have endured much. I don't know why it was in the cards to have every thing torn apart...but I firmly believe that you have much more in hand than you think you do. You have the tools to rebuild.
You all need to decide what the new picture will be...and you are going to have to cut each other slack because each of you will make mistakes.
This is the most terrible thing that has come to pass in a long line of hardships...but you are all strong and good people.
You can get past this.
Tangerine, you are as always a good and dear friend. Thank you for your very reasonable words, and unbiased caring.
ReplyDeleteIt is clear that the way things are in this family now is that we lay down unltimata and if they are not adhered to, then we end our "love." This is a reciprocal process. I want to make it clear that if our relationship is not going to return to D/s then it will end.
Sue has used this Blog for 6 years to explore her thoughts and feelings and chronicle her life. Easily 98% of what has been written here has been hers. Nothing here has changed other than that I have used this same forum this past week or so to express my pain, sorrow, fear, and anger.
She needs no new Blog except to further her passive aggressive expression of her anger with me.
Tom
Wow. There are two phrases in the above which make me especially sad...but I will say this.
ReplyDelete1) You sound very clear on what you want.
2) This comment sounds a lot like the old Tom.
I have deleted the offending blog.
ReplyDeleteThe posts that I made there have been imported and published here.
I'll never again try to ever make a separate or independent move.
Any "ultimata" that I have made, or that you have perceived as such are hereby rescinded.
I'll never say another word about what you choose to do.
I'll never again respond to your suicide threats with a call for help.
I love you.
I am sorry.
I am here.
Sue
The very most I will say .. about any of this..
ReplyDeleteis that I am sitting here shaking my head feeling for all of you - more than any of you will ever know
Tom.
ReplyDeleteSue.
I am very sorry that Sue felt pressured to delete her blog. I feel passionately that even in a D/s relationship the parties should come to it with a sense of strength, of knowing who they are, what they want and need, and where they are going.
Relationships grow and change, even without crisis interruptions. They NEED to change, because people change, both in themselves and with respect to each other. It is when we can't adjust to the evolution and struggles of the other(s) that relationships founder.
Sometimes, that entails a period of personal thought, outside of what was there before, whether that involve a separate blog or private conversations with friends, or even time living apart. A little distance, even if just to a different web address, can provide the perspective that someone needs to sort things out and continue in a state of clearer commitment.
Tom, I know about PTDS.
I know about flashbacks.
I know about clinical depression.
Still, those were mine. I'm not in your head and don't know what you went through and are currently going through. But I can't help but think that you are not the only person suffering here, you are not the only one responding to traumatic events, you are not the only one who sees the structure of a life shaken. Yes, you are angry and scared and depressed. But can you not imagine that Sue and Teresa might be as well?
I don't want you to feel that I am yet someone else who is beating up on you. But my own reactions to the accumulation of your recent posts has been so strong that it seems unhelpful not to point out that the way you are presenting things is making it harder for me to see only your own picture of what is going on.
I don't think this is a bar room brawl, and I don't think it's a question of needing to root for any one of the parties. In fact, there is no need for any of you to justify yourselves before us or to play things out in public. But however you may actually think the way you write does give the impression that you see yourself as the innocent party who has been done wrong by the other two, rather than that you are three people who have a long history together who have to sort things out and then seek a way - if that is the answer - to continue as a fully functioning family unit in which each of you is given both love and respect.
I do mean this to be constructive, and apologize in advance for the intensity with which I may have framed it.
o.g.
Dear Three Friends,
ReplyDeleteI have not posted because I am not yet clear what I want to say. But you remain my friends.
I know we have different spiritual sensibilities; still, ever since the postings stopped and then restarted, I have been praying for you every day.
Tom, just one comment. One of the things we tell people is not to make any major changes in the first year of sobriety. Learning to live without your "good friend" isn't easy and most individuals suffer major difficulties as the brain begins to need to find the dopamine and other chemicals that the alcohol had been providing from another source. Be gentle with yourself and those around you if you can.
With love and prayers,
Lyn
Tom,
ReplyDeleteYou don't know me, as I don't comment, but I have read for years and have always admired you as a Dominant.
I understand, I think, a bit of how you're feeling. Its not about the alcohol. Its about having the choice taken from you. A real and true choice. Not just "choosing" to refrain from drinking because you have to. I understand your anger. I understand why you feel betrayed. I can see why a dominant man would feel anger and betrayal having his submissive "pull rank" the way it went. I do believe Sue was well intentioned. I do not believe she meant to hurt you this way. But alas, it did.
I am not sure what I hope this comment does. I just feel compelled to say what's on my mind and while it might seem I am taking your "side", its not about that. I just want to say I think I understand and I feel for you and I do not think you are violent or dangerous or an alcoholic. I think you had a series of horrible things happen to you in a society that doesn't always see fairly.
Something makes me want to tell you that you have a right to be angry and betrayed. And to express that hurt and anger and betrayal. Certainly I don't want to sound like you need permission to feel as you do, but sometimes hearing that you are justified from another person helps.
I wish I could reach out my hand to you and tell you that it will all be okay again, but instead please know that I do understand. That someone does.
Be well.
Sue and T - always, with strength and grace.
ReplyDeleteTom - I hope you can look back on this as a valuable growth experience in a year.
I've tried 20 different times to write something without it sounding judgmental or hurtful. All I can manage is keep shaking my head, express my support for Sue and T, and leave it at that.