Trusting my husband to help me as the Savior would

A couple of nights ago, my husband and I were getting ready to go to bed. We’d just made it through most of a Shakespeare movie (Henri IV part 1), had read scriptures with my daughter, prayed, and put the TV remote in the couch’s cup holder where it lives. And then my husband and I started talking for a minute.

As we do almost every day, he was sharing some ups and downs, some feelings, and some self-analysis. Tonight he shared some thoughts he’d had about work and money and his attitude about those things. I listened. This ritual is something we both love.

But as he shared some of his introspection, I felt hurt by something he said. It reminded me of things I had felt in my past marriage that had been quite traumatizing. Although my husband wasn’t doing any harm to me or even meaning anything but good things by what he said, it touched an old nerve.

I’ve been feeling particularly raw emotionally anyway since I’m back in therapy to help me prepare to re-write and share my memoir. The therapist has been suggesting I work on self-compassion in the stories of my past marriage as an exercise that will help me heal. So I’ve been journaling to that end, and trust me, it's hard. And it leaves me feeling sad with a gray feeling on my day. So I’m carrying this emotional load around.

Anyway, back to the story. When my husband started realizing that I was particularly quiet and sad looking, he asked me what was going on. I told him what I was struggling with, and how I was feeling, and why. I looked calm-ish on the outside, but inside I felt panic. The feelings of abandonment, judgment, and voicelessness from my past marriage had come up powerfully. What my husband had just said about his day literally was the most harmless thing, but anyone who has been traumatized knows that the harmless aircraft flying overhead still sends you under the kitchen table to hide when you used to live in a war zone and airplanes always meant bombs.

My dear husband offered me comfort and reassurance in the form of reminding me that how I could have interpreted his words was not accurate, that he was safe with me, that he was totally devoted, that he wanted to be there for me. I appreciated this reassurance very much, but the sadness and terror were still strong from a sort of flashback to feeling worthless from the old days. I needed him to listen to my feelings without fixing them for a few minutes. I asked him to listen to my feelings. He gladly did. But while he listened, he put his head in my lap and closed his eyes to listen. I started to feel very alone for some reason. I realized I needed his eye contact and some emotional mirroring. So I asked him to sit up and look me in the eye and mirror my concern. He, again, gladly did this for me too. (Bless his heart, he knows I have trauma and he wants very much to help me when I’m going down the rabbit hole. Thank heavens I have enough self-knowledge that often I know what to ask for that will actually help – that’s taken some serious work to get there though!)

As my dear husband sat with me and listened to my feelings, I started to calm down. I could see very clearly that everything was OK. But nonetheless, a remnant of panic persisted.

For almost an hour as we had talked, I had felt like I’d been thrown back emotionally to a place where trust was in short supply. Like once again, I had to be watching my back. Like nobody was going to be there to help me. Like I could scream and scream in a room made of soundproof glass and nobody would hear. But I tried to stay willing, and open to his comfort, yet honest with where I was at emotionally. When I was finally calm enough to go to bed, we went to our bedroom.

I wish it weren’t so, but even with the comfort and reassurance and total tuning in that my husband provided, I still felt wary. To his eternal credit, he has such a self-honest, open, and willing person, that we can be totally open with one another. It is a safe space, him and I. So I was able to say, when he asked again how I was doing, “I’m feeling much better. But only feeling 80% trust. Not of you, but just feeling thrown back like I can’t trust. Its hard to explain.”

This was a bit risky to say. After all, hadn’t he just given me an hour of his time when he was tired? Hadn’t he just done everything he could to validate, reassure, and be there for me? And yet this woman still can’t be satisfied? She only trusts 80%? Anyway, that’s what my fears are. That I should “perform” better because he had given so much. But I know that is also a sick voice, so I push past. So then I told him the true feeling, that I was still feeling an edge of non-trust. To his credit, he sweetly and with faith said, “I will help you get it to 100% in time.”

And he is right. And HE is not on trial. And I am not on trial. Its just time, and love, and healing, and the atonement, and patience, and effort. I will get there. And I will have him to thank as being the heavenly hands on earth that are helping me.

I sighed in gratitude and hugged him. But then he said something amazing to me. Something that I’ve been thinking about ever since. He asked me:

“If you’d been telling your problems to the Savior, how would you have felt?”

I thought about that for a couple of minutes, carefully, then came up with my answer.

“I would have no trust problems at all. That is because I know without any doubt that the Savior does not expect me to be perfect. All he expects is for me to come to him with my problems. I also know that the Savior glories in helping me. He sees that as His mission. He also understands me perfectly and knows the agony that I’ve been through. He really feels it. And doesn’t judge my emotional struggles. He knows how they came to be and feels nothing but compassion for me. He also knows that I am doing my best. He wouldn’t resent the time it took, either. He would give me all the time it needed for me to work through my feelings.”

After I said that to my husband, he paused, and said, “I want you to see me that way.”

I just sat there, taking that in. I hadn’t thought about that before.

Could I learn to trust my husband like that, in a way? He said he recognized that he was imperfect and couldn’t do everything flawlessly like the Savior, but that he wanted to be that safe for me.

And I’ve been thinking about that ever since. I know mortals make mistakes, and only God is perfect. But nobody has come close, in my home life, to being pure in their motives towards me until my dear husband now. He WANTS to be the Savior’s hands in my life. This is really something to think about. It feels very good.

I think we learn to trust God better when there are people around us that exemplify him. And we can also learn to trust people better when we can see clearly that their greatest desire is to serve God. True healing is Christ’s territory. To help anyone heal, reflecting Christ is the fastest, purest path. How grateful I am that someone in my life wants to be like that for me.