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I have Asperger’s/Alexithymia
(I discovered this latter word on your website) and my husband blames this condition for his
mental health breakdown in 2016. He says it/they caused him (back then) and continue
daily to cause him soft traumas, or Cassandra Syndrome as it’s called on a website he found
regarding being married to an Asperger’s person. It makes statements such as: “When your
life-partner has alexithymia, you can experience a profound loneliness. Empathy is the bedrock
of a happy marriage This lack of intimacy and empathy may lead to low marital satisfaction.”
It’s all a bit final and dispiriting. My husband says his sleep it fitful
and troubled and he often talks as if he wished he had never married me.
I love my husband but have to admit that the Asperger’s/Alexithymia (which is
it?) makes it difficult to discern his meaning / emotional cues. I’ve grown in self awareness
over time especially since we converted from Evangelicalism to Catholicism in 2006. Catholic
theology has helped me enormously to face my fears and my faults with less hiding; your website
even more so.
However, I don’t know what to do about my Asperger’s/Alexithymia (I self-diagnosed
3 months before my husband’s breakdown). Is it a symptom of childhood psychological defenses? Is
it a personality disorder? Is it an insurmountable, fixed disability/deficiency. I think my husband
wants to leave me as he says his mental health is deteriorating again and it fills him with terror
to have to face another breakdown (panic attacks) again. He wrote in his recent email to me at work:
“there is a dynamic related to your particular modus-operandi and it has a distinct disquieting affect
as detailed in a number of links I have sent.... It really doesn’t matter to me whether you accept
this or not as I am the person suffering it and I am the one who ends up having to bear some very
uncomfortable disquiet... this whole thing can lead me to some very difficult places and
thinking.”
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 et’s begin with definitions of the
terms.
Alexithymia
refers to a difficulty in understanding and processing one’s own
emotions. It can have a variety of causes, including being an
only child, experiencing family emotional conflicts in childhood, witnessing
family violence
in childhood, being traumatized by bullying or
other emotional injuries in childhood, and brain injuries as a child or as an
adult.
Asperger’s Syndrome
refers to a developmental disorder similar to, but less intense than, autism and that is
characterized by a deficit of emotional awareness and an awkwardness in communicating with
and interacting with others. Being a developmental disorder, it functions as a psychological
defense against emotional pain in infancy or childhood. It will continue into adulthood unless
psychological treatment can resolve the deep unconscious emotional pain of its origin. The
causes are unclear, but it can derive from traumatic pre-natal experiences (such as being conceived
outside of marriage, being conceived “accidentally,” being threatened with abortion, being hated or
cursed by a parent; suffering maternal emotional disturbances; suffering from the effects
of maternal drug use; etc.) and traumatic infantile experiences (such as emotional deprivation by
a mother; family tension or violence; and
abuse or neglect).
The Real Bedrock
It’s true that the bedrock of any
relationship is empathy. Empathy can be defined in simple terms as the ability to feel within
yourself what someone other than yourself is feeling. This can include not only other persons, but
also animals, plants, or (in a childlike imaginative way) even objects. Empathy involves a full range
of emotions, from painful experiences to pleasant experiences.
A sacramental marriage, however, requires even more
than empathy because a sacramental marriage has multiple purposes requiring specific actions: the
spouses must assist each other to grow in faith, to overcome deficiencies in
development and experience, to fight temptations, to renounce
evil, and to raise children to love and
serve God. With all of these purposes and holy obligations, a sacramental marriage is far more than
just a “relationship” between sex partners, and so empathy alone is insufficient for carrying out the
obligations of marital success.
Consequently, in regard to your husband’s
“breakdown,” he is wrong to blame you for the matter. His
breakdown is a matter of his own personal psychology, with roots in his own
childhood emotional wounds. By blaming you for his problems, he has
failed in his Christian obligation to bear with you and to assist you in overcoming your emotional
deficiencies. By blaming you for his problems, he has failed to take personal
responsibility for his own thoughts and actions. Your husband’s failures
as a Christian and as a husband not only defile empathy but also amount to the grave
sin of shirking his marital obligation to bear with you in your
attempts to overcome your deficiencies.
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Put on then, as God’s
chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion,
kindness, humility,
gentleness,
and patience: bearing with one another and
forgiving one another if one has a grievance against another; for as the Lord has forgiven
you, so must you also do. |
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—Colossians 3:12–13 |
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Essentially, your husband has chosen, of
his own free will, to have a breakdown. That may
sound odd, but the hard truth is that the sin of his blaming you has excluded him from the life of
blessedness, and, in that exclusion, he will find only psychological dysfunction and
meaningless suffering.
Marriage Trouble
Hence, if your marriage is troubled, it is not
because of your fault alone, since both you and your husband have deficiencies in love. But
your marriage is in danger because of your husband’s blindness to his responsibility for his
own emotional distress.
Your husband needs to face his own emotional pain,
which derives from his own emotional wounds that have gone untreated
and unhealed. His blaming you for his problems is like a curse he has placed on himself that
can easily lead to his own doom.
So what can you do about all this? Well, if you
seek your own healing from your developmental deficiencies (e.g.,
through professional guidance) you can now acquire
through education and experience the emotional skills that most persons acquire in childhood
naturally. Furthermore, in all of this, pray that your husband receive the grace of
enlightenment, and forgive him for his failures, even if he refuses to forgive you
for your deficiencies.
Healing
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Though
Demons
Gloat
|
Anger
&
Forgiveness
|
Falling
Families,
Fallen Children
|
Emotional
Trauma
|
Psychology
from the
Heart
|
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 |
 |
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 |
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Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic tradition |
True Christian
Identity
In Confronting
Evil |
How to Turn the
Emotional Wounds
of Daily Life Into
Psychological Growth. |
The Psychological
and
Spiritual Remedy
For Our Cultural
Disintegration |
And its
Psychological
and Spiritual
Nature |
Collected Texts
About the Spiritual Depth of
Clinical Psychology |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
Desire
and
Distraction
|
Fear
|
Stopping
Smoking
|
Borderline
Personality
Disorder
|
Catholic
Compassion
|
Reverence
for the
Holy Eucharist
|
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 |
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A Catholic Perspective
On Behavioral Change
and Its Subversion |
A Catholic Explanation
Of a Universal
Problem |
Through
Faith
and
Prayer |
Healing
the
Rage |
When They Tell You
That the Moral
Teachings of the
Catholic Church
are Wrong |
Reverent and
Proper Conduct in
a Catholic Church |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
More information |
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