Maria didn’t care much that her husband was away on business for a month in Arizona. She didn’t even miss him much; when Tom was gone, there was one less person to take care of. When did it get like that?
Maria and Tom came in to see a Marriage and Family Therapist at the Carson Center. Maria described returning home one evening from a day out all together with the family. She helped the children off with their coats and shoes and began to prepare for bath time. She asked Tom to begin the supper.
An hour later, after the three children were bathed and dressed, Maria brought the hungry and tired children into the kitchen to find that Tom had not begun any kind of supper. Instead, he had decided to fix a lamp that he’s been meaning to fix. Maria felt desperate and abandoned.
But Tom felt desperate and alone, too. He had hidden from Maria the growing requirements he faced in order to get through each day. He needed to check every drawer in each room, several times a day. He needed to open and close the refrigerator four times in a row, at least twelve times a day. He checked the pantry, the closets and the lock on the front door hourly. Once he remembered the lamp was broken, he did everything in his power to tell himself to attend to it, later, but this he could not manage to do. He soothed his feelings of failure by playing video games.
All Maria saw was a man more interested in himself and his games than his wife and family, so she had begun to live as if he weren’t there. On weekends she went out with friends and didn’t think to invite him.
Tom got his own Carson therapist to deal with his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In Marriage and Family Therapy, they were asked to tell the original love story that brought them together. From there, they identified their fears and misunderstandings and loss of connection that had gotten in the way of their relationship. They saw how OCD had undermined their connection. They hired a babysitter to help them spend time alone together. Tom kept going to therapy.
In six month’s time, they could sit, holding hands while they told their Carson therapist that they’d found their way back to one another. When they celebrate their wedding anniversary now, they buy one another a small token, and spend an evening out together. And they send a card to Carson too.
By JAC Patrissi
