Finding Words

Ashley, my therapist, sat across from me. Her voice was quiet yet firm. She seemed to hear my thoughts before I spoke them, lowering her head and leaning toward me.

“Tara, this has been a long time coming,” she said with a kind authority. “But remember, you alone can’t fix your marriage. There are two of you in your marriage, and without Sam’s willingness to try, this toxic cycle and generational curse will only continue.”

Deep down, I knew she was right, but her words left me fearful, prompting me to wonder how I had reached this point. A deep sadness settled over me after our session. Sam, at fifty-eight, was still caught in the endless cycle of duty and unresolved family issues, with no way out. Tethered to expectations, he couldn’t escape. Sam struggled to find the words he needed to speak up. He hadn’t been taught to have an opinion, only to endure.

Ashley’s words replayed in my mind: “Sam has to meet you in the middle.” But with each passing day, it felt like he was drifting further away. A lifetime of keeping the peace and putting others first had drained him, leaving him too exhausted or unwilling to fight for us.

The muggy August air hit me as I left Ashley’s office; a gray cloud overhead looked like it could unleash rain. I started my Jeep and headed north toward the lake, toward home. I thought about the years of our marriage when the children were babies. They are grown men now. Who would Sam and I become, and would we ever have a healthy, functioning relationship?

I pulled into the driveway, dreading going into the quiet with Sam in the house; I felt alone, even with him there, especially with him there. I wanted to ask him, “You see me, right? And if you do, are you hearing me?”

I walked into the living room, where the book “Emotionally Dumb” sat on the ottoman, another book in my pile about family dysfunction playing out in a person’s personality. I sank onto a cushion of one of the loveseats. The navy walls surrounding me felt suffocating tonight, cold in a way. I picked up the book filled with revelations I wasn’t sure I was ready to face. It felt heavy, and I couldn’t focus on the words. They blurred together as my mind spiraled, each realization about Sam crashing against me, as relentless as the eroding dune of our Lake Ontario beach. The blank stares, the emotional detachment—suddenly, they all made sense. But understanding didn’t make it any easier to take. The more I read about mental health and personality disorders, the more Sam’s behavior—and that of his family—felt like a jigsaw puzzle clicking into place.

Lost in the book, I didn’t hear Sam enter the room until his voice cut through the haze.

“Tara, are you okay?” he asked, concern lacing his tone as he sat beside me.

I hesitated, then sighed deeply, slowly placing the book on the coffee table, face down. I didn’t know if I wanted Sam to see the cover.

“I don’t know, Sam,” I admitted, my voice thick with what I was about to say. “I’ve been reading about alexithymia today. Ashley suggested I look into its meaning. It describes you perfectly.”

Sam frowned, confusion across his face. “Alexi-what?”

“Alexithymia,” I repeated, the word sitting between us like a stone. “It means struggling to recognize or talk about your feelings. It’s why you’ve always seemed distant. It’s not that you don’t feel, Sam. You can’t access it, at least not in the way most people do. It’s not that you don’t care. You avoid the difficult conversations because you don’t know how to have them. You don’t have the tools. You never learned them.”

I thought back to the times when our children were little, I was struggling with postpartum depression, and Sam was working twelve to fourteen hours a day. When he would come home, he thought that if he just took the kids out and played for a bit, I’d feel better.

He looked at me, furrowing his brow as he tried to grasp the concept.

“So, you’re saying I have some sort of disease?”

I shook my head slightly, trying to find the right words.

“I’m not a psychologist, but what you’ve been dealing with might be more than just avoidance or indifference. It could be deeper—a result of what you learned, or didn’t learn, about managing your emotions in childhood.”

Sam’s expression softened, but I saw the discomfort in his eyes, the fear of confronting what he’d never fully acknowledged.

“But… what does that mean for us?”

I took a deep breath.

“It means you might not fully understand the pain you’ve caused, no matter how hard you try. And that’s what scares me, Sam. I don’t know if I can help you if you can’t connect with your emotions—or mine.”

Sam shifted in his seat, his fingers twitching against his knee. I watched as he rubbed his temples, a nervous habit I recognized too well—the only physical sign of the turmoil inside him. “So, what do we do now?”

I paused, gathering my thoughts.

“It’s devastating to think about the fallout on your family because your mother never took the time to fix herself. I’ve been so angry at your dad for so long for allowing her to abuse us all that I forgot he was the first one she broke. He’s become who he is today because of her.”

I reached for my phone and flipped to a screenshot I had taken earlier from Maria Consiglio, MSW and Relationship Expert.

“Listen to this post; it’s written by someone who lived through a marriage with someone who had a personality like your mother’s,” I said, and read aloud.

“‘I was a strong, independent man, and I fell for a narcissist. She broke me. She made me question everything about myself. She made me weak. She made me think I was crazy. I became an enabler. I tried to stand up for myself, but it only made the arguments worse and more confusing. I stopped fighting for myself. I gave in. I became a shell of myself. Soul-crushing and destructive is how a narcissist acts toward anyone in their path. They gain their strength by siphoning all the energy, love, compassion, and strength out of their spouse.”

I closed my phone and turned to face Sam, the words hanging like a fire smoldering in the distance.

“There you have it, Sam. That’s how your dad allows your mom to act the way she does—because he’s broken. All of your family members have messed-up personalities because she failed to recognize and heal her shortcomings, which, sadly, she most likely inherited from her parents. It’s horrifying how one person can wreak so much pain on their own family, and the dysfunction keeps going. Until someone puts a stop to it.”

Sam stared at me, his expression full of disbelief. His eyes looked at the stack of books beside me, then back at my face. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it, shaking his head as though struggling to process the words I had just said. Sam finally stood, pacing to the window, staring out as if the answers might be there—somewhere beyond the glass.

“I never thought of it that way,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, rubbing his neck. “But… what am I supposed to do with this? But it all makes sense: her addiction to money, my grandparents’ strange relationship. How do I change something so ingrained?”

I wanted to say, ‘Yes, you can change,’ but from what I’d been reading, I wasn’t convinced he could. I had filled the emotional gaps in our marriage for years, and I didn’t think I could do much more.

What if he couldn’t change, and I spent another part of my life waiting for it to happen?

But I knew the answer, even as the question raced through me: I couldn’t keep waiting. My resentment had become too deep. As much as I wanted to believe he could change, I didn’t think I could survive more of Sam returning to his shell.

I joined him at the window, resting a hand on his arm, bracing myself.

“By acknowledging it first. You can’t change what you won’t confront. You can start seeing its impact on you, too. Staying away, keeping quiet isn’t keeping the peace; it’s just avoidance.”

He turned to me, his eyes filled with fear and something else—perhaps an awakening? But I had gotten my hopes up before.

“I don’t want to be like them, Tara,” he said, his voice earnest. “I don’t want to be that broken.”

“Then let’s make sure you’re not; you need to confront what you are avoiding,” I said, gently squeezing his arm, trying to infuse my words with all the strength and love I could muster. “We’re in this together, Sam. However, it must begin with you. It has to start with you wanting to break free.”

He nodded slowly, the gravity of my words sinking in, a reality he hadn’t faced for far too long.

“I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll start going to counseling again, beginning with you and me together.”

“Good,” I replied, feeling the room fill with ease. But how often had Sam said, ‘I’ll try’? For now, though, that will suffice.

“That’s all I ask,” I said, staring at the fading daylight.

What I didn’t say was that I needed action, or I would be out.