This is an episode within my memoir about families, resilience, and how we made our lives work—or not. It’s my contribution to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog prompt for this week. The prompt word is exchange.
Cecil’s wife had left him and he didn’t know how he’d get along without her and their baby daughter.
His mother, fearing for his sanity—and his life—insisted that he go to a psychiatrist for help dealing with his multiple losses and his combat fatigue.
Unable to figure out what to do, Cecil did what she demanded.
The shrink had a simple answer—find another wife, he said, handing Connor a lonely hearts newsletter.
Cecil took his advice, exchanging one woman for another who also left him.
Cecil was left, devastated and out of control, trying to save a marriage—either one of them.
It reminds me of an old uncle who was told by an astrologer that there was no ‘couple happiness’ in his life. He married thrice (one wife lost to death, and second one to divorce), and flaunted his wives in the face of the astrologer. Shortly after his third marriage, he died.
You bring yourself, and your troubles, to every relationship. He needs a better therapist.
Exactly. Cecil was a combat veteran struggling to overcome what we would now call PYSD. She had her own version of PTSD as a result of medical abuse. That’s the first wife. The shrink’s assumption that women are interchangeable was horribly inadequate. This all happened in 1947 or 1948 when little was known about mental health. Cecil and his first wife got back together and managed to make it stick, but it was a tenuous relationship.
Oh, my gosh. What bad advice. Cecil was definitely not being helped. Sometimes the “experts” don’t know what the heck their talking about.
The whole idea that the best way to deal with grief and/or a broken marriage is to begin another one just baffles me.
Oh oh. Pattern. Poor Cecil. I think he needs a better shrink.
A family member was given similar advice in the 70s and it did not work out well. Revealing six!