So I came out to my wife this past week. We had a session with the marriage counselor on Tuesday, and this was "Truth Time", because she had busted me a couple of weeks ago for smoking (I've been a closet smoker for years, among other things, lol), and had then asked "Are there any other things you've been hiding from me?" Bingo. So we had agreed that we would wait until we were in our next counseling session to deal with these things.
I began the session saying that when we got married, there were a number of things I was hiding about myself, specifically the gender dysphoria and also thoughts of suicide that had been with me since high school. When we had been married only a year and a half, I had attempted suicide, which brought the dysphoria to light, and we did talk about it some at the time, but I ended up minimizing it and burying it, then going into denial for the next several decades. But I said that I had recently been on a journey of self-examination and rediscovery related to our marital problems - I simply HAD to understand why we've been having such problems all along, and one of the things I had discovered was that these gender issues, which we had both assumed were long since dealt with, ancient history, were actually still very much an issue with me.
So we talked about it for the hour, and the counselor was asking her what her feelings were, and she said it wasn't such a big surprise to her, as she has had her suspicions for some time that things weren't quite "right" between us, but didn't want to look too closely at things. She was avoiding the issues also.
Later in the week, we had another talk, she had done some research on the Internet into mental health professionals, and was saying that perhaps a psychotherapist could help me, because she's thinking that maybe this is something ELSE - I've always had massive self-esteem issues, and there has always been a parent/child dynamic between us. But I told her also that this is something that's been with me for a very long time, that when I was too young to have heard about transgender, I was feeling this way, and that when I was young, and in my teen years, I did a number of things to try to SEE myself as the girl I felt like (cross-dressing, etc.).
One interesting thing is that she is apparently exploring the idea of wanting to stay married, in the event I should decide to transition. She has asked several times if we could still live together. She's afraid I will leave her. She works part-time now, but she said she will be going back full-time in the fall, and she says it's to take some of the financial pressure off me, but I also think she may be positioning herself to deal with a possible separation. But in the meantime, she wants us to continue as "normal" as possible, and she seems pretty stable emotionally. More so than me, to tell the truth - I keep feeling like crying, but I think that's the dysphoria that I'm now allowing myself to experience fully, having kept it "in check" for so many years.
So I will be seeing my family doctor on Tuesday, and blowing his mind by asking for a referral to a gender identity clinic for assessment. After that, we'll have to see how things go. For the moment, I'm trying to stay positive, and keep an open mind, as is my wife. We'll take it one day at a time. Glad this is finally out in the open.
