My therapist replaced my husband. Is that so bad?

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Dear Care and Feeding,

A few years ago, I realized that my husband is too self-involved to be a true partner to me. He has main character syndrome—the kids and I are no more than supporting actors in his life.

My problems, to him, are “drama that will go away.” If I try to talk to him about my feelings, his response is, “I don’t know what you want me to say.” I found a great therapist who, I have to admit, fulfills the role I so wanted from my husband. Seeing this therapist has made me happier overall, and while my husband doesn’t know that I’m in therapy, he seems to be relieved I’ve stopped initiating emotional intimacy.

During the first two years of therapy, my therapist encouraged me to try different ways to improve my marriage, but none worked. Now my therapist and I are going over my eventual exit strategy (when my youngest child is out of the house), commiserating over how the flaws in our spouses are alike, and exploring how I can work through my issues without the support of a spouse. I feel better than I did before I started therapy, and I couldn’t get through what remains of my marriage right now without my therapist, who gives me what my husband cannot, and is everything to me that my husband isn’t. But is it somehow wrong to have all these sessions making plans that will affect my spouse, without him knowing anything about them? I know he will be shocked when I leave. But it’s not as if I haven’t tried to make the marriage better!

—Emotional Affair or Just Good Mental Health?

Dear Emotional Affair,

I think you know the answer, or you wouldn’t have thought to ask the question. It is wholly inappropriate for your therapist to be “commiserating” with you about your spouses’ flaws. And in a successful, ethical therapist-patient relationship, the therapist isn’t everything to the patient that her husband is not.

Talk to your husband. Tell him you’re unhappy in this marriage; tell him you want a divorce. Planning an “exit strategy” (years in the making?) while pretending that the status quo is fine, is doing no one any favors. Your youngest child will not benefit from living with two parents in a sham marriage, from a mother who is lying by omission every day—and whose emotional life is taking place elsewhere—and a father who sees both his wife and kids as insignificant (if your characterization of him is accurate). I’ll admit to being curious about what your therapist’s encouragement of “different ways to improve” your marriage, during the first two years of seeing them, entailed, but from what you have said, I wonder whether the focus of your efforts was on “getting” your husband to respond to you in the way you wanted him to; whether the marriage itself—as opposed to only your experience of it—was ever addressed; and what role your therapist’s enmeshment with you played over time.

In short: Seeing this therapist has made you “happier overall” not because they’ve been a good therapist, and what you are experiencing now is not “good mental health”; it’s likely the euphoria of what feels like love. They should have referred you elsewhere long ago.

—Michelle

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