Dysfunction, distortion, lack of vision and broken relationships

There are some decisions that everyone finds difficult. Where to go on holiday, whether to move jobs, if they should change cars, that sort of thing. These are often difficult decisions, because there is no clear cut or single answer to the question. Unless your car is broken beyond economical repair, then any decision on whether to change it is going to be based around rather more wooly questions such as whether you can afford to change it, and ultimately whether you want to.

But every day stuff is usually easy to answer. Most people just know the right decision without really thinking about it, and questions are answered without getting in the way of what needs to get done.

Imagine for a moment that those everyday decisions caused you the same problems as the holiday-sized ones. Imagine what it might be like if you had little in-built concept of what the right answer was to the trivial every day issues.

Well, that’s the position I find myself in a lot of time. This problem with executive function is, I believe a part of the spectrum of issues that my Asperger’s causes me. It was flagged up in my diagnostic report, and indeed it was something that I’d already explored in some depth before I every thought of getting diagnosed.

My executive disfunction works hand in hand with my inability to see the big picture in things, and also frequently with cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions serve to prop-up the decisions that I have found it very difficult to make. They provide a support network of theories and thoughts that tell me that my decision was right, and that I shouldn’t change my mind. When the decisions I’ve made a good ones, then cognitive distortions are useful, but when I’ve got something wrong they make things far far worse. Cognitive distortions are invisible to me – I do not know when I am relying on them. The ultimate outcome of my trying to take decisions – even seemingly easy ones – is stress and confusion when I am coping well with life, and hideous anxiety and bad decisions that I can’t back out of when I am not coping so well.

I’d like, if I may, to illustrate all of the above with what has just happened to me in my life. It is not pleasant, but by talking about it here I hope to help untangle it a little myself too.

Rewind to November. I attended two relationship counselling sessions with my wife. Our relationship was in trouble, and she wanted to get it back on track. The sessions had a profoundly different affect on me, however. Suddenly, I had pulled my head out of the sand, and could see clearly just how broken our relationship was.

And it really was broken, from ten years of dysfunction from both sides. My wife has had anger issues, and I spent the first seven years oblivious to my autism, and the last four years burying my head in the sand because I’d prefer the status quo of a broken and mostly loveless relationship to the change associated with splitting up. We’ve both also suffered with depression, and in my case considerable anxiety. In ten years we have never learned to communicate in a way that works for both of us, what we’ve been best at is communicating in ways that work very badly for the other person. In short, the relationship started out without a strong foundation, and for a good many of the last ten years has at best limped along.

All of the above is looking at the past quite negatively, but it was worth illustrating, as that is exactly how I was seeing things after our first two counselling sessions. We then hit another problem – my wife’s nearly two year wait for individual counselling for her depression suddenly bore immediate fruit. We both decided that after that long wait she had to attend those sessions, and with those in full swing our relationship counsellor would not see us. So our Relate sessions finished, and my wife went to individual counselling instead.

I was thinking hard about where my life was, and where it should be going. I perseverated over the situation a lot, and what I saw was this:

The relationship was broken. It had been for somewhere between four or five years. Over that period we had worked well together most of the time as a team, towards raising our kids. There had been little love shown from either side in that time. I had steadfastly buried my head in sand, because as I said above, the status quo, however broken was more comfortable that contemplating a different situation. I need to make it clear here that the above really was reached after a huge amount of thought and sole searching, and that I truly felt it was a good representation of where I was, and how I felt about things. As we’ll see a little later, this proved not to be the case.

I set out my stall for my wife. She was devastated. I had decided, however, that now that I’d pulled my head out of the sand, I wasn’t about to put it back, so I gritted my teeth through the excruciating guilt and shame, and stood my ground.

Something odd had happened to my wife too. Her individual counselling had had an unexpected effect on her. Whilst she was happy to admit that she had felt little love for me over the last half decade, she insisted that the counselling had changed something in a way she couldn’t describe, and that she had fallen in love with me again. What she wanted to see was us returning to Relate (the relationship counselling) to talk through why we had got to where we were, and whether we could reach some reconciliation. I said I was happy to return to Relate, but I saw it as a conduit to help us figure out how we’d split amicably.

By this time that felt like the only solution to me. I didn’t feel love for my wife, and things had been broken for five years. I also, to my shame, thought it sounded a bit suspicious that my wife was suddenly claiming to feel in love with me as soon I decided that a split was the best option.

So, that is a snapshot of how we ended up back at Relate last Friday, with lots of angst and difficult conversations trimmed out for the sake of brevity.

It probably makes sense for me to say how I felt about going back to relate in a little more detail before I explain what happened. My use of ‘conduit’ above is a handy metaphor. Despite feeling like a split was now inevitable, I had spent no time thinking about how that might work. My wife thinks that sounds crazy, and you may do too. But it is the truth. The emotions were tricky enough to deal with, without moving on to outcomes. I felt that perhaps our Relate counsellor would help steer this side of things when we saw her. I was having trouble confronting a situation that I knew I wouldn’t be able to find an answer for. I have enough trouble with the everyday decisions – what chance would I have about how to approach splitting up a ten year relationship?

The session went in a surprising way for both me and my wife. Following a quick check of what we were both thinking about the relationship, the counsellor decided to take the route of outlining possible outcomes so that we could choose where things needed to go. This very quickly left us firmly in the trial separation camp, much to my surprise – trial separation had not even been on my radar. My wife was very upset that the counsellor had not chosen to take us down the route of looking at the relationship itself. She kept quiet about this for the whole of the session, and then erupted in anger about it when we were leaving the room. The counsellor explained that if one person in the relationship clearly wanted out, then there was no point in discussing the back story and looking at the issues – it would be a waste of our time and money.

That Friday evening, my wife dropped the ultimate bombshell. We should get on with the trial separation. She’d ideally like me out of the house by Sunday. Wow! I was not expecting this. I did a little more sole searching, and found that I still believed in my stance. Her request in this circumstance was not unreasonable. This lead to a hastily written email to my parents who were holidaying on the other side of the world to ask if I could move into their second home short term, whilst we sorted the situation out.

And then, just before bed time something changed. I can’t pin-point what it was exactly, but it was something about the combination of words my wife used. She was repeating for the millionth time how she couldn’t quite believe that I wasn’t prepared to even try what she wanted – to look at what had gone wrong, and then see if we could fix things. Perhaps it was when she said that if we couldn’t fix things after looking at them that it would then be fair to separate. Perhaps it was how she said that I just wanting to throw things away without even looking at that. Maybe it was everything. Whatever it was, I could suddenly see the flip side of the coin. Literally. My stand point was a picture in my head, and suddenly there was a line drawn next to it, and on the other side of the line was a subtly different view point.

I took a deep breath and explained this. Suddenly things changed. Within an hour I was no longer looking for somewhere else to live. Instead I’d hacked into my parents email and removed the message we’d sent before they had a chance to see it (I run their email system, so that isn’t quite as bad as it sounds), and we’d both agreed to go back to Relate and discuss the situation like adults – exactly what my wife had wanted to do all along.

The emotion of that evening hit me in chunks over the weekend. Some hit on Saturday morning, and on Sunday morning I woke up extremely anxious. I needed to write this, but the home environment wasn’t conducive. The emotional fallout is slow to hit me, but it does hit, and it hits hard.

–

What I’m hoping is that the above illustrates how executive dysfunction, cognitive distortions and the inability to see the bigger picture can all conspire together to wreak unintentional havoc.

In looking at how I felt about my relationship with my wife, I saw the bad from the last ten years, and not the good. I saw the lack of love, and the suddenly very obvious fact that I’d pretended for a long time that nothing was wrong. Despite me feeling that I had devoted a huge amount of time an energy into reaching the right conclusion, I hadn’t, because I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. My wife was telling me this over and over again since November, and I failed to see it. It isn’t that I failed to see the bigger picture – I wasn’t even aware it was missing. This is the cognitive distortion.

My failure to look at what the outcomes of going back to Relate might be were, interestingly, part burying-of-head-in-sand again (oh great – and I thought I wasn’t doing that), and part executive dysfunction. It is perhaps amazing that I reached the conclusion that separation was the only way forward – that was a hugely difficult decision to reach. But I did reach it, and once I had, I then had to stick to that. The prospect of moving on from there to figure out the decision to make about what happened next was just too much for me. I knew I couldn’t reach a decision, so I didn’t think about it. Instead I decided that Relate would help show the right direction.

I really could not see that I owed it to my wife to go back to relate and talk about why we were in the mess we were in. I’m sure some people would read this and say ‘typical man’ or think that I would simply do it out of malice or because I don’t care. But that isn’t the truth. The way my brain processes feelings and makes decisions worked against me over the course of the last few months, and pushed my relationship with my wife not just to breaking point, but to the very edge of the cliffe. We got minutes away from the end – the email asking for somewhere to stay temporarily was sent, and we were talking about when I would go.

My autism means that I naturally internalise my thoughts and don’t share them freely. But it also means that I don’t have a good view of everything that is going on, I have considerable trouble making decisions, and that once I’ve made them, cognitive distortions tend to make me blindly hold on to those decisions even when others are shouting at me about how I’m getting it wrong.

And do you know what? I can say now that I know that I love my wife – something that she knew all along, but that I really genuinely could not see, because my thoughts were that badly distorted.

I’ve used words like guilt and shame through all of this writing, and they do accurately describe how I have been feeling as this has played out over the last few months. It is like my brain knows that somewhere in there there are feelings of love and that my course of action was wrong, and yet I could not consciously reach those conclusions or attach those feelings to their ultimate cause.

I’m not intentionally a bad person – I think (hope) that even my wife would concede that. But I’ve caused an untold amount of hurt over the last few months, and I feel very ashamed about that.

What do I want now? Please do not ask, because I don’t really know, and I have no clue as to whether there are still cognitive distortions at play. I never do. I will go back to Relate with my wife, and will talk openly and honestly about how we got into this mess, and whether we can reconcile and move forward. Maybe then I’ll know the way forward.

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