Guest Post – The Other Side of the Glass: What are relationships like without emotions?

The next instalment from our mystery blogger:

PTSD Nation (Photo credit: Truthout.org)

This is the third posts in the series The Other Side of the Glass, where I explain in detail what it feels like to live with PTSD. I’m writing this series to give Beth, and anyone else that has a loved one with PTSD, an understanding of what it is like to live without emotions or to be emotionally numb. Each person suffering from PTSD has their own trauma, their own symptoms, and their own circumstances, but I’m just trying to give you a glimpse of what it is like to live with this horrible disorder.

What does it feel like? is the first in the series. If you have not already read that post, it would be best to start at the beginning.

Now that you can see what daily life is like without emotions, now we will examine what it like to try and have relationships without emotions.

What are relationships like without emotions?

Naturally,the relationships with your family and friends no longer make sense.Why do you want to be around anyone if you cannot feel the love or bond of friendship that you feel for them?

I lost contact with a lot of my friends during this period in my life. I started to isolate myself more as I had little in common with anyone. I didn’t want to discuss my situation and I knew no one would be able to relate anyway. After all, none of my other friends talked about waking up a zombie. No one else was telling me how they felt The Void. No one had that blank stare in their eyes.

That reminds me, I once met a man who had just come back from Iraq. The same emptiness he had in his eyes is the emptiness that I had in mine when I looked in the mirror.

The eyes truly are the periscope to the heart. When a person’s heart is in the glass box, the eyes go blank. They are empty and cold. I wonder if Beth knows that look.

Since Beth is dealing with her husband, I will try to focus on that type of relationship.

Here enters the cycle of insanity – You should love the person you are with,but you do not have the ability to love, or feel anything for that matter. The person you are with desperately wants you to feel something
so they do not feel so hurt and alone, but your heart is in that glass box on the shelf.

I think this dynamic becomes more intense when the husband is the one with PTSD. A man thinks things through, but a woman is more prone to her feelings.

Since Beth’s husband cannot feel, Beth is hurt by it. Beth wants the security that her husband loves her and that their relationship is solid. Her husband is a blank man, a zombie, bringing insecurity and fear into the
relationship. Beth then gets angry because her feeling have been hurt by his lack of love. Beth’s husband can see the hurt he is causing and he logically reasons that he wants to fix it so that his wife will not be hurt as he know this causing tension in the home. Unfortunately, the one thing that Beth wants more than anything, his love, he cannot give even though he desperately wants to.

Welcome to hell on earth…

As one that was in the glass box, this is the most frustrating situation to be in. You see the cycle happening but you feel as if there is nothing you can do to stop it. My purgatory was waking up each day
knowing it was going to be like the last. It was going to be a fight from morning until night to make sense of the world and everything in it. It was going to be a struggle to find myself and to feel anything. I
would have to dodge the demon and try my best to not to fight her every night.

Thankfully,Beth’s husband has a wife that loves him and wants to help him in any way possible. This will definitely help in his recovery.

But what about all the things that he is doing to upset her? The porn and the masturbation. The sneaking around to masturbate?

When I read what her husband was doing, my only thought was, ”Well…that sounds familiar.”

Have you ever watched a man try to fix something around the house? We ste back and stare at it. We aren’t stupid or dumbfounded, we are thinking.We are running solution after solution through our minds to see what
will fix the problem.

When we have relationship or emotional problems, we do not discuss it with our guy friends, our parents, or our coworkers, we go into our man caves and we do our best to process it all, seeking out solutions to fix the
problem. We seek out isolation and try to work it out in our heads.

The only problem is that a person with PTSD cannot stop thinking.

I wanted to stop thinking and I wanted to feel something..anything. I did the only things that helped me to escape and feel. I watched porn. I played video games. I lied.

Sound familiar?

My next post will deal with The Cave.

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