{"id":8646,"date":"2024-08-10T12:45:47","date_gmt":"2024-08-10T16:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=8646"},"modified":"2024-08-10T12:45:47","modified_gmt":"2024-08-10T16:45:47","slug":"painful-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=8646","title":{"rendered":"Painful Relationships"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written with a friend. We wrote together for 20 minutes, and then shared. I have been reading about my relationship with my ex-husband Dana in my journal for the summer of 1996, and posted quite a bit about it. \u00a0See post for August 7<\/a> for an example.<\/p>\n

This is what I wrote:<\/p>\n

Reading all the stuff about Dana & me struggling with our lack of sexual relationship is painful.\u00a0 <\/span>Especially since I hadn\u2019t been able to work on it in therapy.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought I had been sexually abused when I was a baby, but nothing clear ever came up.\u00a0 <\/span>It was only after the divorce that I realized that the problem had been due to early trauma, caused by being left alone too much as a baby.\u00a0 <\/span>I knew I had been left alone, but I didn\u2019t realize that just being left alone could traumatize a baby.<\/p>\n

The other thing that came up really surprised me.\u00a0 <\/span>I did line dancing this morning and we did a waltz that I\u2019ve done to the Tennessee Waltz.\u00a0 <\/span>That wasn\u2019t the music he played, but the song was there in my head.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cIntroduced her to my loved one and while they were dancing, my friend stole my true love from me.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>It brought back all of the pain from the summer I was 17.\u00a0 <\/span>I heard that a young man who had met me at a party was interested in me.\u00a0 <\/span>It turned out that he was visiting the family of a friend of mine whose summer home was in Biddeford Pool.\u00a0 <\/span>So I was delighted. I thought that Pete wanted to be with me and we would have a romance.\u00a0 <\/span>He took me out for a hamburger, and sitting in the car, started talking about this girl he met that he found very attractive.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought he was talking about me, but in fact he was talking about my friend Diana.\u00a0 <\/span>It was such a shock.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t know what I said.\u00a0 <\/span>I came home and collapsed.\u00a0 <\/span>There was no one I could tell.\u00a0 <\/span>So I spent the rest of the summer watching their romance.\u00a0 <\/span>I had no one I could tell about it, so that\u2019s why I began writing a journal. \u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s so funny, I haven\u2019t thought about it for ages.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought I had left it behind.\u00a0 <\/span>But I suppose, like other painful memories it\u2019s not completely gone, but can be reawakened.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s funny, in some ways it feels more painful than the breakup with Dana.\u00a0 <\/span>That feels really over.\u00a0 <\/span>I did have to forgive him, not for the divorce, but because he so completely rejected me after it was final.\u00a0 <\/span>Later I read something in an Elizabeth Goudge novel that helped.\u00a0 <\/span>She says \u201cWe hate those we have injured because they make us feel despicable.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>That pretty much closed it for me, which may be why it feels old and dead, but the Pete & Diana story seems still very present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written with a friend. We wrote together for 20 minutes, and then shared. I have been reading about my relationship with my ex-husband Dana in my journal for the summer of 1996, and posted quite a bit about it. \u00a0See … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-story","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}