Question for the CDs who had a hard time

[MissTara (SO)]

Ok so this is all new to me. I found out not too long ago about my husband's CD desires and activities. The problem I am having is with how to best proceed. He seems to have a lot of shame surrounding this and I want to make it as easy for him to open up to me as possible. I don't want to push him of course before he is ready but I still find myself wondering how to best support him.

So my questions are for those of you who had a hard time accepting this part of who you were:

Was there something your SO could have said or done to help you feel more comfortable opening up?

Did how much you shared with your SO depend greatly on how worried you were about thier reactions? If so how could they have helped you to feel better about it all?

I want to go on record somehow to show him I am accepting of him and love him no matter what comes of this but at the same time I don't want to push him. He has been very open with me about answering my questions so there is a level of trust there already, I just want to do everything I can to help him feel comfortable and I afraid I am not doing so good at that right now.

[Hope]

Oh my.....difficult questions!

I told my current Wife long before we were married. I had told my first wife also of course, before we were married. But....there were a lot of issues in that marriage (but only in looking back over so many years could I finally see it wasn't the CD'ing part) That's where I start I guess.

Males of the species are indeed weird folks. I admit it! There is something missing in our XY programming I guess. But anyway, from the ripe old age of about 1 day it seems, we are somehow aware of the idea that men are men! We don't cry, we don't do laundry, we don't share verbally (???), and we sure as (&_)%$ don't do frilly! Now...why that is I don't think any of us know for sure...it just is! And that's the crux of the problem! Our mind concocts the notion that if we even show a hint of liking anything feminine, we are the scum of the known universe. And that's a hard notion to ignore with males. Heaven knows, I felt that way far more so in the past than I do now. But even now, like most CD'ers, I take significant precautions to avoid anyone knowing! (sick....)

My wife knows all about it, and initially had lots of questions like...are you gay... do you want a sex change....etc. (come on now, you asked too didn't you? and rightfully so I think.) Her attitude was simply 'it just is!'
Nothing judgemental, nothing negative, just....it is? That was a difficult concept for me to grasp. Didn't she understand what a scum-bag pervert I was after all? And yes, I felt extreme shame, extreme self loathing, wanting to somehow just stop! But we all finally learn over time....ya can't just stop. So...the only alternative is to start accepting it I guess.

It's difficult for you, and believe me from what you've indicated so far, not nearly as difficult as the whole situation is for him. I don't know what to suggest actually. For me, after my first marriage broke up (well....I broke it up) I saw a professional for counseling. By that point, I guess I just didn't give a hoot anymore (I left her with everything and thought it well worth it) having nothing left, disposing of 23 years of my life, and believing in my mind it was all my fault because I was a stinking transvestite! And that's just what I told the pro. I assumed he would really have a ball with that admission, but....never blinked an eyelid?

It helped....a bit.

My wife keeps working on me all the time. We often talk, joke, laugh, and....shop! LOL.

The point is, he hates himself (probably) and what he feels is such a weakness (wanting feminine experiences) and wold love to just quit and 'be a man!' It's a hard thing.

It sounds like you are confident in your own being but imagine if you can, what it would be like to know what society feels you should be, and one part of you is NOT. I guess the best thought is somehow to get into a council (one or both) in such a way that he understands it's not because you think he's crazy or something. That's probably a good start. But in the long run, it's going to take some time for him to adjust to the idea he ain't the only one! He isn't a pervert for wanting to put on a petticoat, and it just is!

Wish I could be with you two.....sure brings back memories.

Good luck.....I wish you both so much of the very best in all of this. Stick with him kiddo....I'll bet he's worth the worry.

[CharLee]

Tara,
For what it's worth I'll tell you how I feel. If you are truly accepting of his crossdressing and want to make him feel at ease and open up to you DO NOT, EVER throw it up in his face. Never belittle him about this, never make him feel ashamed or guilty. Don't ever give mixed signals to him, accepting one minute and condeming the next.
If you have trouble with his dressing, sit down and have a heart to heart talk with him. Be brutily honest with your feelings towards this, let him know just how you feel. Then listen to his reasons for needing to dress, and try to work out a compromise that you both can live with.
He may be embarassed to share his true feelings with you for fear that they might hurt you or cause you pain. I know that's how I felt telling my wife I want to live as a woman. Let him know you love him no matter what, that his choice of clothing doesn't really matter, it's the man you love.
Be supportive, help him in choosing what to wear, with make-up tips, what goes with what. Buy him some jewelry ( not expensive ones though ) to show him you want him to be happy. If he is inclined to go out in public, go shopping with him when he is en femme ( if you feel comfortable doing that ), make it easier for him to express his true feelings about wanting to dress.
In any event, always keep the lines of communication open and honest. Never hold back anything you may feel against his dressing and DON'T let him hold back anything from you. Even if it hurts your feelings, being honest with each other will make the road ahead a smoother one.

Good luck in your endeavor.

[Hope]

Oh thank you CharLee....forgive me Tara....I did forget the hardest part. He is more than likely really afraid of hurting you in all this. Good comment CharLee.....

[Virginia]

What did I say Tara, my sisters here are so smart, and most of us have "been there, done that." In all its many and varied forms. You have obviously gotten past the first three questions that 99.9% of GG's ask when confronted by this "new woman in their lives."
1 Are you gay?
2. Are you going to transistion?
3. Why did you not tell me sooner?

As was stated above it can be difficult to get over the embarrassment of not only getting caught but thinking the "manly image" is now destroyed.

We have a motto here, "baby steps, just baby steps." So as was eluded to above also, look to yourself and just how you feel about this new discovery. It is important that you know exactly how you feel about "her" now being in your life.

Most of us will accept limitations as long as they are not extreme because we understand that it is difficult for you as well. Things like how often she can dress, whether or not she can go out with or without you. What she can wear to bed. Who if anyone she or you can tell. We have a couple of girls here who's SO's are very restrictive in how they dress (if they are going to dress, do it right or not at all!) Most SO's that are accepting will help with proper make-up and presentation. Like how to sit, stand, walk, etc. Danae Doyle tapes and CD's are a great source for that as well and believe it or not the tapes can help GG's be even more feminine, but I digress.

Baby steps and try and get her to perhaps read some of the posts here.

My two cents worth, as for counselling, I would not go running to a counselor unless your SO seems to not have a clue on how to handle this "gift" that has been thrust into your relationship. If you do decide to go PLEASE MAKE SURE IT IS SOMEONE WHO CAN SPELL "CROSSDRESSER." You don't want to go to someone who has never dealt with us or thinks, (God Forbid) that they can cure your SO!!!

Let us know what we can do help!

Love,

Virginia

[Carly]

Tara,
Sticking with Virginia's first comments remember baby steps. I agree with the other advice but until your husband accepts that he is not weird the other activities (ie talking about going out in public) may seem like pushing him.
As long as you truly can accept his crossdressing tell him so and see if doing some research on this site you can come up with posting he can read that would let him know that what ever level he wants to become involved he is not alone and for your relationship to flourish you should not be excluded.

[DanteCarrie (FTM)]

a few years ago my partner got upset about it as I was confused myself. I wasn't crossdressing but stuff i said made him think I was transexual and being straight that upset him as he didn't want to be with a boy. he said stuff that upset me because i wasn't going to change and his paranoia made me feel I had to act different than who i am.

years later he knows i love being female and being femme sometimes is fine i just have a side that wishes i could be more masculine too.

he still irritates me at times calling me super girly as if he saying wel you are girly so why are you pretending you aren't he doesn't get the fact that just cas you are something doesn't mean you like those traits. but on the whole he often really accepts me. hes also said stuff i find supportive too like hes not embarrassed that i dress androgynous he even tells people about it and jokes with me about it.

I guess it just takes loads of conversations, reassurance and well a couple of years for us both to mature.

[Wendae]

All good advice. I agree! I wish my SO would do these things.I know she never will. I'm still in limbo.I do take a dim view of counselors.

[MissTara (SO)]

Hope- such a wonderfully insightful post. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer me so thoughtfully! am really hoping to help him with this, and your answers gave me a nice snapshot of what he may be thinking. I appreciate it more than I can say.

ChaeLee- Thanks for reminding me not to waiver. I am drafting a letter to him now to let him know the extent of my acceptance. Hopefully that will help him. It is my goal not to waiver back and forth on any of it. I do find myself feeling wierd at times, but upon closer inspection that is all usually related to my own self esteem things....so I try to keep that to myself. This is so obviously harder for him than me and the last thing he needs is to deal with my manure too

Virginia- You're awesome! Thanks again for your valued input. This in particular was something I hadn't thought about " As was stated above it can be difficult to get over the embarrassment of not only getting caught but thinking the "manly image" is now destroyed. " Definatley something foer me to keep in mind. It's reminding me to not only baby step this new thing but also remember to (please excuse the pharse) keep stroking his male ego too. very important, thanks!

Charlie - Thats a good suggestion too. I will try to find posts to send him. Maybe that will get him to the site to look around a bit. Also I agree that "for your relationship to flourish you should not be excluded." but I think he does not agree yet, but hopefully I can help him with his own views on this subject.

Everyone else thanks so much for responding. This place is great.

[Carly]

check out the chat area sometime and you can get questions answered quickly

[Absaroka]

Tara I put a lot of my thoughts in another thread. But here goes

I told my wife what little there was to tell over 20 years ago. She was not terribly comfortable about it.

Fast forward to about 6 years ago. I was working at home alone, with lots of opportunities, and suddenly it took off and I started wearing girl clothes when I was home alone. Remembering her discomfort before, and being aware of all that can go wrong, I didn't tell her. Since then there have been hints. Talking casually about what happened when I was younger. Wearing her dress on Halloween. Borrowing her panties when I had no clean underwear. (BTW the most important thing about this to her is that they are too small and don't fit me well) She has a lot of gay friends in the theater who like to do drag. It's fine for them, but then she didn't marry them. But she liked my little facebook thing of me in drag I sent them.

Here is what has not gone well for me. Your husband may be different, so take this with a whole shaker of salt.

My wife doesn't like to talk about heavy stuff much. At the end of a day of teaching jr high she's just too tired. She'd rather not discuss much of anything difficult. So rule number one for me is to prioritize. Like if we need to talk about something concerning the kids that comes first. Somehow CDing is always a distant last. She's made it clear I share my feelings about EVERYTHING more than she feels neccesary. She likes to joke that the women married to strong silent men not in touch with their emotions have no idea how lucky they are. And I have to admit I am high maintainence and that my teenage daughters like to point out that I am the drama queen of the family.

The point is this. Women are always saying they want men to be in touch with their feelings. But I think often what they mean is they want them to share the feelings that they as women imagine we have. But that may not be what we are feeling. Something to keep in mind.

My wife likes to laugh when she is happy. I suppose her laughing at me in her nightgown was her way of showing acceptance. But given how scary this was for me, it didn't work. Probably at least partly my fault for being too over sensitive. I bring it up to point out that you are walking into an emotional mine field with little idea where or what the mines are.

It's been a long happy marriage for us. At almost 25 years part of that has been accepting that each of us has a private side. There may be parts of this your husband just doesn't want to share, especially if it is sexual. After all a lot of married men, no matter how wonderful the sex is with their wife, still like to masturbate with their fantasy. It's just how we are.

Cding for me is no longer that sexual. It's loads of fun to weed the garden in a dress. But truthfully I don't think it would be much fun to do it with my wife there. This is after all my imaginary friend I have inside me, not hers.

I really applaud your efforts. You seem like a wonderful person, especially to be dealing with this with little kids running around. Which brings up something else, you will probably at some point want to agree on some ground rules, bearing in mind that kids are extremely good at finding things in their hiding places.

At some point your husband may need to know it is also okay not to talk about this. But that you are happy to discuss it when he is able.

Of course you also need to take care of yourself here. This whole thread is about supporting your husband. A good thing to do is let him know how he can support you. Which will have the added advantage of maybe helping him feel less guilty.

Most of all please remember that his CDing is not about you. It was likely there long before he met you, and if you died it would remain long after you were gone.

Good luck and as I said, I think you are handling this very well.

Zari

[CJ]

Hi all,

First, welcome to the forum, Tara. I've been derelict in my duties lately but winter has never sat too well with me, so I apologize for the late welcome.

About being crossdressers who've had a hard time accepting this part of themselves, well, yes, I think most of us may have gone through something like that. For some of us, the road to self-acceptance was peppered with potholes, setbacks, and various other obstacles (many of our own making, others not) and it all made for arduous plodding while, for others (admittedly few, it seems), the road was not so difficult to travel.

I think a lot of how we feel about ourselves, not merely as CDs but as individuals, period, has to do with how much people around us--especially those we love and admire--know us truly and well and yet have decided to stick around and not go running, screaming, into the night. It goes without saying that nobody wishes to be emotionally damaged, hurt, or browbeaten. But we risk exactly this when exposing our "true" self, our most vulnerable inner sanctum, to others. For many, that risk--the fear of being hurt--will condemn them to an existence that's even lonelier than the one that's our usual and common lot as participants in the human condition.

This is what it looked like for me (and I've posted at length about this in my Beginnings thread some years ago): yes, I was deeply ashamed about my girly yearnings; yes, I'd toyed with the idea of killing myself many times before I was even out of my teens; yes, I believed I was the most awful monster that ever roamed the planet because of my desires (despite the essential harmlessness of these); and, yes, I was absolutely certain that I was totally, completely, utterly alone in my situation and in my distress.

This led to anger, bitterness, rage, despair, shame, and sorrow; in fact, these were my very first acquaintances, as far as feelings go. And this, from a very young age. So, I learned to bury my feelings and to build a massive wall around myself. So deeply were my feelings buried that even I no longer had access to myself. I became the ultimate "private soul." No one gets in, no one gets out. Not alive, at any rate. Looking back now, this, to me, is the greatest alienation a person can suffer, this alienation from self. I was no longer even a person. Just a thing, going through the motions. It amazes me, to this very day, that I never succumbed to drug or alcohol abuse nor to mental illness.

At some point, I just gave up. I've never been a religious person but I started fervently, desperately wishing that the universe would just take me away from here, take me somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but here. (Even as a child, lying down on the backyard lawn while staring up at the night sky, I'd fantasize that some alien ship would swoop down and transport me to some better place. How futile would that have been? I mean, I'd still have been living in my skin, in this bag of bones I so loathed.)

And then, a funny thing happened on the way to my first serious relationship. I got a reality check. Three or four months into our (seven-year) relationship, I told my SO about my crossdressing. I was 20; she was 17 (and, of course, had issues of her own). She didn't pretend to understand but neither did she flee. In fact, she was mildly curious, even willing to experiment. (Ah, youth!) And that, for me, was the reality check; whatever I imagined the consequences of revealing my true self to be, the actual consequences were far more benign and almost, shall we say, anti-climactic. She was puzzled over the fact that I would even consider this to be anything serious (or seriously disturbing).

And so it went with the rest of my life. I told friends, family, even acquaintances. Of course, I tried to use some common sense and not just go screaming from the rooftops that I liked to dress up as a woman, but you get the idea, Tara. As I realized that, okay, some people don't really want to have anything to do with this but will stand by me, come what may, or that they find the whole thing oddly intriguing, or, again, that they're simply indifferent to this aspect of me--all the while neither running away nor condemning me outright--my self-esteem began to grow. My fears and anxieties diminished. The person that I am--the person that so much wanted to not be who I am--began to grow, to flower, to thrive. I left the closet behind. I guess the part of me I loathed stayed behind, too.

I've been to (and through) emotional hell and back. Many here, on this forum, have. Many are still writhing in the flames of mental torture and emotional suffering. That's why we come here. To douse those flames. To nurture our wounds. To find healing. To help.

Now, about your DH's situation, Tara, many a good insight and great advice has already been offered in this thread. In order to come to terms with his own pain and shame, your hubby will, I think, have to start coming out of his shell. Unbuild the wall around his true self. He can set foot on this road by getting a reality check of his own; he's not alone in who he is, in what he's gone through, in what he's feeling, and in the hope he might come to find for his own future. But he needs to talk in order to do this. To talk to you. To talk to members of a community of "like-selved" souls. Above all, he needs to engage in a conversation with himself. What you can do, Tara, is to hold his hand while you listen to him as he discovers (or, more properly, "un-covers") himself and as you watch him grow; to remind him often that you love him (and I'm assuming you do or you wouldn't be here right now); and to always be as honest with him as you want him to be with you. (This last point is super important; respect your own rhythm and boundaries, too, in this dance, not just his.)

I wish you both all the very best, Tara. May you both blossom.

Love,
CJ

[MissTara (SO)]

Wow is all I can say. Thank you all so much for your kind supportive efforts. It's such a wonderful feeling to see so many take time out of thier lives to help me!! I'm really blown away

[Susan]

Tara

Good for you for having an open mind. I wish my wife had the same attitude as you. I am not out to hurt anyone but for better or worse (I think better) Susan is part of me and makes us a better person. I choose to look at what we are as a gift and I certainly understand women more because of this and other things in my life.

Cobblestones and high heels are not a good mix.

[MissTara (SO)]

Thanks Susan! You know I always sensed that there was something he was hiding from me. He was so secretive and emotionally closed that I knew something waqs up. I suspected other things of course so this cross dressing stuff was almost a relief of sorts. I look at this as my chance to grow closer and show him how great unconditional love feels....so I figure I better not screw it up LOL