How the painting “healed” our toxic relationships

Our reader felt that her husband was trying to completely control her life, she found an outlet in painting. And in an unexpected way, spontaneous art therapy helped a woman see the situation in a different light and establish relations in the family. How exactly – we learn from her letter.

I loved to draw from early childhood, but I did not study this. Parents reacted to my hobby without enthusiasm. The installation of the elders was quite traditional: you need to get a good, most popular profession. So I began to study the economy that was not at all interesting to me.

I think that my early (at 19) and the hasty (after six months of meetings) was partly due to the unbearable boredom that I experienced, studying economic models and crises. The chosen one was smart, passionate about his own business, he had goals, the meaning of life. And it seemed to me that next to him I would also gain all this.

The husband was ten years older, he earned quite well so that we existed comfortably at these funds. His life installation was opposite to the one that dominated in my parental family: a woman should decorate life, create an atmosphere in the house, and she can do something else to maintain life tone.

With naive carelessness, I joyfully plunged into the version of life proposed to me, in which I saw freedom after the parental dictate.

In the third year of family life, we had a son. And here I fully felt that with marriage I, as they say, hit the fire in the fire. There were many bells before the birth of a child: it seemed to my husband that I was inattentively listening to him, then I had a sour expression on my face. “You watch the wrong films, you read the wrong books, you learn the language by

the wrong technique, running is harmful, here is a bicycle for you. »I hate bicycles from childhood and told him about it. But he considered this to be excessive details that are not related to the case.

However, I was grunting to close her eyes. It was not so difficult, because the husband was most of the time at work. When a child was born, my respectable husband began to work at home. This did not affect his income: he is a qualified programmer with an impeccable professional reputation. But my life has turned into hell.

It was total control with constant peremptory instructions. What is there, what to drink and in what quantities, what linen to buy, how to take a child in his arms, how to talk to him when to go to bed. Books and films should have corresponded to my husband’s ideas about the beautiful, since I am a nursing mother and my emotional state are transmitted to the child.

I did not even belong to myself in a dream: “You sleep unhealthy, it is unhealthy, you need to establish the reasons”. The husband always went with us for walks. The dream of many women, true? Those rare cases when he could not leave the house because of his work were holidays for me.