Ooooh babe, don’t leave me now.How could you go?When you know how I need youTo beat to a pulp on a Saturday night.
Pink Floyd / The Wall

You love her, But she loves him, and he loves somebody else, you just can’t win. And so it goes, till the day you die. This thing they call love, it’s gonna make you cry I’ve had the blues, the reds and the pinks.One thing for sure: Love stinks

The J. Geils Band

I decided to explore what has been, so far, the hardest blow to my ego, which in a way lead me to CIIS.

I got married at age 25. Until then, a “successful man” in every way. Almost a straight “A” student from elementary to high school. President of the Student Union during my college years. Had a good job and married the woman I loved.

But “suddenly” things went really wrong…

It is not the place to go in depth to my marital problems, suffice to say that she cheated on me (more than once), so I decided to leave her.

There is a saying in Spanish: “The worst blind is the one who refuses to see” Sure we had our problems; but even after all the cheating, I never even considered that our marriage could end. I mean, until then, I had been able to accomplish anything I had put my heart on. Why would this be different? I was sure that together we could make it work1. Talk about a blow to my ego! I felt devastated, confused, lost, betrayed, responsible… I guess you get the picture.

I want to focus on the mourning process (or perhaps melancholia, as we soon will find out) that followed my decision to leave her2.

As I said, I felt shocked and unable to think about what I was going to do. Being a man (I am aware that is a stereotype), I am task oriented, so I tackled the crisis as a problem to be solved. I began reading everything I could about marriage crisis and divorce. I already had a psychotherapist, and even subscribed to a divorce bulletin board3. Since I still have a couple of the discussion I posted back then (January 2001), instead of relying on my fallacious memory, I will refer to fragments of those, to illustrate my morning process. To do it, I will follow the stages suggested by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia”

Streaming in De-nial
Mourning and melancholia entail similar symptoms: “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world … inhibition of all activity and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings… Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment… This demand arouses understandable opposition.”

My first reaction was clearly denial. I did not want to accept that it was over, so I opposed the idea with all my might. I only took a few things and moved to a hotel, somehow believing that I would be moving back soon. Even after a couple of weeks in a hotel, when I moved to a less expensive place to live, I told the property owner “it is only for about a month, while I sort some problems in my marriage”4. I kept thinking that we could make it work, kept thinking about giving her another chance. I wrote then:

I’m going through a lot of mixed feelings, from anger and sadness to desiring to believe and give us another chance. The fact that is not the first time hurts but the idea of not being with her again also hurts. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about it, actually is the ONLY thing in my mind right now (which I know is not healthy either). I’m afraid that I could get used to they idea of being alone and quit the one of getting together again. Weird, isn’t it?

I lost something, but not what I thought…
“[In melancholia] …one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love. [The patient] …knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. …he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.”

I just could not understand why it was being so hard for me to accept what was going on. After all, the woman had already cheated three times before; still I could not convince myself that the marriage was over. Someone at the bulletin board made me a very enlightening remark: “You cry for the lost of the ideal marriage you wanted to have, not for the actual marriage you had.” That was absolutely right! My sadness came more from the lost of my belief of what my marriage should had been like, not the real thing. I just could not accept the idea that I (my Ego) had been unable to make it work. It was a failure (so I thought) and I was not a going to let her make me fail. I guess that my fear to get used to be alone was fear to let go, to give up my love-object, namely my picture of an “ideal” marriage and the fact that I had been unable to keep it together.

The guilt trip…
“The melancholic displays… an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. The shadow of the object fell upon the ego… the patient…succeeds, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object… in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly.”

I honestly feel that I have done my best for this marriage, yet something inside me tells me that I still could do more by giving her yet another chance, that I should be the “bigger and better person”, still doesn’t seems fair, [but] this idea of forgive and keep on with live, keeps bugging me.

I just could not get mat at her!5 Unconsciously, it was easier for me to beat me up, to blame myself for the loss of the love object. To think that I had not being good enough, that I could have tried harder, done better to keep her from leaving me.

Feeling “not good enough” had been a common theme in my life. I do not know whether this would be reading too much on it, but it could be interpreted as a reminiscence of me not being enough to my mom (thus she “preferred” my dad). Could it be that I was going through the same process having the love of my life taken by another man? I was not ready to accept that. Who would?

It seems clear that I was doing just what Freud mentions, my self-reproaches were really reproaches against the women of my life, but could not articulated them that way, so turned them towards my own Ego. Only when I started to be able to see beyond my sorrow, guilt and confusion (in Freudian terms when I had being able to withdraw at least partially, some of the invested libido –anticathexis– attachment) I was able to begin to understand what had really happened.

Life goes on…
I’m living by myself now and its being a revealing experience. I’m realizing that I changed in many ways in order to please her. I thought it was part of being in love, my therapist says that it just shows how much I had being manipulated and actually diminished by my Wife. Still it does not make a lot of sense that someone that loves you (and in her funny way I know she does) can be so bad for you.

It seems that by this time, I had already decathected enough libido energy (not all though, mind the parenthesis), to be able to see things differently. It seems that it was at this point when I stop going down the melancholia hole and went back to healthy morning.

Again, using Freud’s words:
“…in mourning time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and that when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object.”

I am glad to be able to bring this paper to closing with a happy ending (better yet, a new beginning). Yes, I plunged into melancholia, had a very dark night of the soul that lasted about a year (I even had my mania moments, where I sought “like a ravenously hungry man” a new object-cathexes) and eventually came out renewed. The crisis hit bad, made me question my life as a lawyer (which I quit), eventually took me to India (where I decided to study psychology) and back. Now here I am, writing a paper for my Psychodynamics class, I have a new couple and a newborn daughter.

Who would have thought?

Postscript.
There is one thing that still eludes me regarding my mourning process. If, as Freud modified his position when he wrote “The Ego and the Id” introjection is also part of healthy mourning (and not only a psycho-pathological reaction), how did I introjected my ex-wife? Could it be that by being able now to acknowledge my marriage, her and the betrayal as part of my history?6

  1.  As strange as it may sound, it took me a long time to understand that in marriage “it takes two to tango”. ↩︎
  2. The actual legal divorce took place about six months after we stop living together, but the suffering began the very day I left the house. ↩︎
  3. http://www.divorceonline.com/ I have to say that it was really helpful. ↩︎
  4. I end up living there for almost four years. ↩︎
  5. Not being able to own my ambivalent feelings towards her. ↩︎
  6. I.e., having a “benign internal image” of that period of my life. ↩︎