Sleeping on the Couch

Ever heard the phrase, “healing is not linear”?

I’ve never read that phrase at a time when I really felt like I needed to hear it. But the phrase has stuck with me so it’s been there when I needed it. If that makes sense. 

When my husband and I first got married I was pretty sure I was fine. My history with being sexually abused had no grasp on my intimate life. I was confident it didn’t. Until it did. I found myself often having flashbacks to childhood during intimate moments. I figured it was fine, I could ignore it and eventually it would go away. Which worked… and by worked I mean it kept happening but I kept ignoring it. Until it stopped working. 

One night I was 100% triggered. And I sort of snapped. I felt totally broken. It was like starting back at square one all over again. I had to figure out how to deal with loving my husband while also having him be the one that had triggered my feeling that way. One of the things that first led me to him when we started dating was that he never made me feel unsafe. And suddenly I didn’t feel safe. And I didn’t know how to reconcile that. That’s not to say that he did something really wrong. I was just susceptible to something going wrong.  And I hadn’t learned how to communicate what was happening in a way that helped him love me how I needed to be loved when I was feeling susceptible to those vulnerable triggering moments. 

COMMUNICATION, people! If ever there was a soapbox I could stand on…

Anyway. I won’t go into details here but it took a very long time for me to move past that feeling. Part of what helped was setting up boundaries. I needed to feel like I wasn’t stuck. I needed choices. If that meant sleeping on the couch, that’s what it meant. Because I had too much anxiety being in the same bed with someone else. I couldn’t fall asleep terrified of being touched—purposefully or accidentally. I needed to have control over whether or not it was a possibility that I might be touched. I needed to feel like that was my choice. And that my body was my own. I slept on the couch a lot. And I know it was hard for him that what his wife needed most was to be left alone. But I am still forever grateful that I had that when I needed it.

Eventually, my husband started sleeping on our other couch. That was a nice next step. He must have been inspired whether he knew it or not. Because we could be in the same room but not the same proximity as being in the same bed. I still had my safe space. And that helped. And it helped build up that feeling of feeling safe again. He was respecting my need for space while also expressing his desire to be close to me. And I felt loved. Eventually we started dragging the mattress into the living room, and having cute sort of sleepovers in the living room. And we eventually started sleeping in the same bed again. And it helped not being in the same room as the room where I had been triggered. Again, he must have been inspired because that was not my idea but it was a great idea. Although I think it may have been inspired by a dating bucket list we had made once upon a time that included the idea of watching Saturday morning cartoons in your pjs and eating cereal. That was probably why we did it that first night. We just kept doing it lol.

During the day the mattress just hung out in our hallway cuz why take it all the way to the bedroom when it was just going to get dragged back out again later that night? Eventually we put the bed back in our bedroom. I admit it kinda made me sad. I enjoyed our living room sleepovers. They were pretty cute. And I was nervous about being back in the room where it had started. It was kind of hard but okay, but I was very grateful to say goodbye to the memories attached to that apartment when we moved.

And still it’s taken years since then for me to get to a place where I could tell him in a nice way when I needed my personal bubble to be a bit bigger that night. And I love him for respecting my bubble when I need one. And I love him for forgiving my faults and failings again and again. And while I’m in a good place right now in this regard, I won’t claim to be 100% healed, or that it will never be an issue again. 

Because healing isn’t linear. I think maybe I need to remind myself that it’s okay to apply that to other things like how I feel about church or God too. It’s okay for my progress to not be linear.