You organise meals, the children and everything else the day brings. You know what time the other person will be home. Yet even an ordinary conversation can be difficult. One withdraws, the other holds back. The love is still there, but there is less and less room to reach each other.
You can keep a life running together and still miss each other
When there has been a lot of tension for a long time, you may start adapting around it as a partner. You take something over. You avoid bringing up that subject. You try to choose the right moment so that another conversation does not go wrong. That can help you get through the day. Meanwhile, what you really want to tell each other is increasingly left unsaid.
I know from my own life that love and being on alert could exist side by side. I could sit next to someone and still be constantly on guard. In De Manke Wolf, I write about being at home without truly arriving home. The people I loved were close by, but that did not automatically mean I was available to connect with them.
That is why I take both experiences seriously. The person who is struggling may long for peace and closeness. Their partner may miss that same closeness while becoming exhausted by constantly adapting. If you look only at who has which symptoms, part of your life together stays out of view.
Marieke and Barry could talk to each other again
Marieke Vierwind described how her husband Barry’s PTSD affected their whole family. For years, she tried to keep the peace. When Barry took part in the training with me and Daniëlle, Marieke was involved as his partner too. She wrote:
“We had the chance to talk in a way we had not done for years.” — Marieke Vierwind (translated from Dutch)
In her account, she describes the distance between them shrinking and finding each other again as partners and as a family. In the same account, she writes that three months later they were experiencing connection and happiness again. Her experience shows what was at stake alongside Barry’s own change: she too wanted to be able to reach her partner again.
What would you like to be able to share again?
A partner has a story of their own. What have they missed? What has it cost to keep accommodating the tension? Understanding what is happening to the other person does not make that experience any less important. Nor does it make the partner responsible for resolving it.
That is another reason I want to know what you would like to be able to do together again. Have a conversation in which you really listen to each other. Go out together and both enjoy it. Say what you need without deciding in advance that it will not work anyway.
Distance between partners does not always have the same cause. I listen and ask questions, including about what each person experiences individually. Starting from your own situation, we look at what you need to connect again, alongside everything you organise together.