How Incarceration Has Surprisingly Changed My Relationships for the Better

At the time of my arrest, my life was filled with dysfunctional relationships. In some, I’d be easily dominated, selling out my wants and needs cheaply in the hopes of earning love and acceptance. In others, I kept the relationships at a superficial level so I wouldn’t get hurt if they ended. As you can imagine, I didn’t really enjoy these relationships. But now, a lot has changed, and that change has come about surprisingly because I have been incarcerated. 

Before my arrest and imprisonment, I was just trying to get by, and I was unconscious in my relationships, just coasting and doing the minimum to keep them going while avoiding the messy, scary “intimacy thing.” After extensive counseling, I came to see why and how I developed these dysfunctional ways of relating in childhood. I could see that instead of reaching out and enjoying connecting to people, I was trying to protect myself while still hoping to somehow get some of what I needed. I doubt that this strategy worked in childhood, but I am sure that in my adult life, this way of relating to others made me feel lonely, isolated and depressed and was certainly a major contributing factor to the behavior that led to my arrest. As a result of that behavior, I am currently serving a 15-year sentence in a federal low-security institution for possessing child pornography, and I have been given the label of “sex offender.” 

Clearly, maintaining these dysfunctional patterns was not a win for me, and I realized after my arrest, and particularly since my incarceration, that I had to change my way of relating to others if I was ever to have the happy, joyful, and loving life I desired. Without going into the truths and falsehoods of my conviction, I would like to talk about how my arrest and subsequent incarceration were the catalysts for improving the ways I relate to others in all areas of my life. And I look forward to continuing to expand into more and happier relationships in the future.

In this blog, I’d like to talk about how I used to relate and how my incarceration has shifted my ways of relating in the areas of friendships, birth family, marriage and other intimate relationships, and my son. And in writing all this, I hope to be relating to you, too, in an honest, open and supportive way.

Friendships

I am naturally a shy person, so making new friends has never come easy for me, although when I get to know people better, I can open up and be more humorous and outgoing. Prior to my marriage, I always managed to find a group of friends to hang out with, but I would never let anyone get too close. I was an expert at using humor or avoidance to push away anyone who tried to get too close, and I would rarely open up and share intimate details about myself, nor would I want to hear such details from others. It’s not that I didn’t care so much as I didn’t know how to deal with or process people’s intense emotions as I had never learned to process my own. Friendship was mostly about getting together in a group and having fun. Conversation was kept at a superficial level.

After getting married, friendships grew even more distant. My wife would get angry if I spent time with my friends without her, and she wanted us to hang out only with certain people, mainly her buddies from high school and a few mutual friends. Not only did this eliminate a lot of my former friends, it limited my ability to make new friends. Deep down, I craved more intimate friendships, but didn’t know how to make that happen. As a result of my lack of true friends, I had no one to support me through my struggles, particularly with my same-sex attraction and the deterioration of my marriage. I was lonely and suicidal, and I tried to use pornography as a substitute for intimacy, which just made me feel worse and more pathetic. After my arrest, all of my so-called friends cut me off without a word, and really, who can blame them? Our relationships had no roots to weather the difficult storms and they never knew the “real” me, so there was nothing worth holding on to.

I’ve read that tragedy is a major catalyst for change in our lives, either positive or negative, based on how we respond. After my arrest and incarceration, I was determined to have the kind of friendships I’ve always longed for. I’d like to say that I was wildly successful right away, but unfortunately old habits are hard to break. However, as they say in 12-step programs, it’s about progress and not perfection, and I have made significant strides in improving my relationships during these 8 years of imprisonment. Most people would probably think that prison would not be a good place to develop close relationships, but in my experience, since you live with and see the same people every day, it is actually easier than on the outside, where people are busy with their jobs and families and don’t have the time or opportunity to develop new friendships.

When I first entered prison, I feared for my safety and mostly tried to stay to myself. However, to my surprise I discovered that most of the people in here aren’t much different from the people I’d known out “there.” I started to develop friendships where we shared our personal struggles and supported each other through difficult times, something I had never had before. I also learned to be more honest in my relationships and began the process of getting more healthy boundaries, which I’ll discuss later. Even though this is what I wanted, it was (and still is sometimes) a struggle to keep myself from pushing my friends away so I don’t have to deal with the messiness that also comes with close relationships, which drives the orderly, accountant part of my personality crazy. Despite some setbacks, I continue to improve in staying present in my friendships, I think mostly because I am better at recognizing when I start pulling away. When I do pull away, I make myself re-engage by reminding myself that the alternative, which is loneliness, is not what I want to experience. In fact, I’m hoping, one day, that engagement will become my default and relationships won’t be such a struggle for me. I’m not there yet, but it is getting easier. As it happens, I was just transferred to my third facility this past summer, and every move has forced me to start over with new relationships. While it’s still hard for me to do that, I can see each time it is a little easier and I make fewer mistakes, so I have hope that when I am finally released, I will be able to create much better, healthier relationships than I had prior to my incarceration.

Prison has also helped me deal with my sexual identity issues. Prior to my arrest, I could not admit to myself that I was bi-sexual, even though I was looking at male pornography and had engaged in a few one-time sexual encounters with other married men (yes, I know my same-sex attraction seems pretty obvious). Between my religious upbringing and society’s view of homosexuality when I was growing up, I felt that just feeling a same-sex attraction made me a bad, defective person and so I created all kinds of unlikely excuses in my own mind to explain my behavior. These excuses allowed me to still think of myself as “straight.” In prison, I made my first ever gay friends and, between them pulling and my counselor pushing, they finally dragged me out of the proverbial closet and helped me to admit my same-sex attraction. What a huge relief that has been!! I now have people I can talk to about my attractions and a group of people that support me. I can now feel that there is somewhere that I belong. On the downside, my decision to “come out” has also caused me to be the victim of verbal abuse and prejudice. Fortunately, thanks to the hate crime laws, most people will not risk the additional charges that would result from a physical attack, but the prejudice is sometimes hard to take. I had always greatly feared this kind of emotional abuse, but what I have discovered is that although I don’t like it, I am strong enough to handle it, and I have others who will help and support me as well. I have finally accepted the fact that I can be different from the “norm” and still be ok. 

The final benefit that prison has given me regarding friendships is that it has exposed me to a large variety of people from different races, religions, socio-economic backgrounds and locations. Up until my incarceration, I spent most of my time around people who appeared to be like me – white, well-educated, Christian, and upper middle class. It’s not that I had anything against people different from me, but our lives never crossed paths. This sheltered life gave me a very myopic view of the world and made it hard for me to relate to other points of view. It also made me very judgmental of people or ideas I didn’t understand. Now I live with undocumented immigrants, people from very rough neighborhoods, gang members, drug dealers, Muslims, pedophiles, transgenders, and pretty much any other group that society tends to vilify. Some of these people I have become friends with, and some I honestly don’t like very much, but the invaluable lessons I have learned from these associations are compassion, empathy, and understanding for people different from me and for their life struggles. It’s very easy to judge groups different from us from afar, but when you meet these people one-on-one, you realize that all people are basically the same. Everyone just wants to be loved and to be happy and they are doing the best they can to achieve this. But since, like all humans, they are flawed and broken, they don’t always choose what I consider to be the best ways to achieve these goals. Keeping this in mind allows me to be compassionate and empathetic, even when I am having reactions to certain behaviors, because I no longer take these actions personally. Compassion and empathy to me are life goals worth trying to attain, and prison definitely has given me lots of opportunities for practicing these skills. I’m not where I’d like to be yet, but I continue to improve. Understanding makes it easier for me to relate to others and, honestly, I like myself more when I am being compassionate and empathetic rather than judgmental.

Birth Family

Prior to my arrest, I was very unconscious in the way I related to my family and in many ways I took those relationships for granted. My relationship to my birth family started to get more distant after my marriage, as my wife never wanted to spend time with them nor did she want me to see them without her. I rarely called them and scheduling any holiday get together always seemed like a battle. When my son was born, things got even worse, as my then wife made it difficult for my family to see him other than in controlled circumstances. In my opinion, she was just trying to show them who was in control. My family could tell I was suffering but we had never really been in the practice of discussing difficult issues and they didn’t want to cause problems, so they didn’t say anything. I felt like I had sold out my family by always taking my wife’s side, even when I believed she was being unreasonable. And as a result, I felt even less comfortable going to them to ask for help and support when I really needed it.

Problems relating to my family weren’t just about my ex-wife though. I always felt like I had to conform to our family “norms,” so I didn’t feel comfortable sharing with my them the parts of myself that didn’t conform, including my struggles with same-sex attraction, the fact that my marriage was making me miserable, or my pornography addiction. I was afraid of their possible rejection. I was still trying to project the image of the good, successful son rather than being honest with them about the mess I was making with my life and that I needed help.

Being incarcerated helped me change all this. Obviously, my arrest proved that I was far from perfect so there was no need to keep up that facade. But beyond that, I vowed to be more honest in my relationship with my family, starting with my sharing all of the details related to my arrest and an openness to discussing it with them and answering their questions. I lived with my parents for 15 months between my arrest and incarceration, and in that time I built a stronger, more adult relationship with them. I now talk to at least one of my family members by phone every day, something that would never have happened if I were not incarcerated. Sometimes we talk about superficial topics, but we also engage in honest talks about life struggles and getting and receiving support. Since being in prison, I have practiced being honest and my real self while maintaining healthy boundaries, and I’m now applying those practices to my family as well. I came out to my family regarding my same-sex attraction and I have been amazed that they have expressed their love for me regardless of my sexual preference. And what I find most fascinating is that their increased openness and honesty with me has spread to the way my family interacts with each other. I would never have imagined that my being incarcerated away from my family could actually create such positive changes even among them. 

Marriage and Other Intimate Relationships

I’d never been comfortable in intimate relationships prior to my incarceration. When I was dating someone, I’d try to plan a lot of group activities, so I didn’t have to deal with too much one-on-one time. High levels of intimacy made me want to crawl out of my skin. I think I was afraid if I really opened up to someone, they wouldn’t like what they saw, that I would be judged as not good enough, and that my fragile ego couldn’t deal with that. Also, by keeping my distance, if the other person broke up with me, it was ok, because they never knew the “real” me, so in my mind it wasn’t a true rejection. Most of the time I ended up breaking up with the person I was dating because I couldn’t handle them trying to get too close. While this may sound pretty painful and foolish, it was an old unconscious reaction to my fear of not being enough. I’m sure my same-sex attraction also factored into my distancing as well. I thought if I just ignored this part of me, maybe the feelings would just go away, but of course they didn’t. But distancing kept me safe not only from men, but I was safe from deep involvement with a woman as well.

Despite all my inner conflicts about intimacy and sexual identity, I really wanted to meet a woman, fall in love and marry. I convinced myself that if this happened, I would no longer be lonely, I would no longer be attracted to men, and I could then live a normal, respectable, and happy life. When I met my now ex-wife, I thought I had finally met the person to achieve all this. I seemed to love spending time with her, and we also seemed to share the same interests. I couldn’t wait to marry her and we both rushed into marriage before we had really gotten to know each other. Ironically, it turns out I did find my perfect match, but not in the way I had hoped. She was my match because she was also someone who wanted to get married, hoping it would solve all her problems and make her happy, someone who also preferred to avoid talking about important, intimate issues. 

I don’t want to further describe our relationship because my ex-wife is not here to present her point of view.  But I can honestly say that throughout my marriage, I acted out my tendency to “buy” love by acquiescing to others, and so I spent most of the early years of our marriage doing everything I could to earn her “love.” I also checked out, in order to avoid facing my own feelings and their possible consequences. 

Neither one of us was happy but we avoided the tough, honest discussions we needed to have and tried to pretend that everything was fine. Our sex life, which was never great, dried up completely. My pornography viewing was reaching increasingly unhealthy levels, and what made it more shameful to me was that the pornography was of males. Then, what’s worse, I began meeting up with other married men for sexual encounters. I felt guilty for cheating on my wife and shamed that it was with men. I felt trapped in an unhappy marriage, my life felt out of control, and I contemplated suicide.

So how did incarceration change or improve my marriage? When I got arrested, my wife refused to even talk to me and a few months later she filed for divorce. After 17 years of dysfunctional unhappiness, that was definitely what we both needed and for me it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I vowed to try not to make the same mistake again. So, ironically, in this case, prison did for me what I couldn’t do for myself – got me out of the relationship I couldn’t seem to leave.

How has incarceration changed my intimate relationships since then? In some respects, prison is a challenging place to have intimate relationships as dating other inmates is frowned upon at best. However, it has provided me with plenty of opportunities to work on the relationship skills that will directly help me to have more successful intimate relationships in the future. Setting healthy boundaries has always been a challenge for me, particularly in intimate relationships, both not letting people walk all over me and also knowing when to give people the space they need to deal with their own issues without internalizing them as mine. So I had to grow in that area. In prison, there are always people trying to take advantage of you and test your boundaries either through intimidation or manipulation. This can range from trying to get free commissary to trying to get favors (sexual and other). For people who cannot say no, prison can be a very expensive, uncomfortable experience, a lesson I learned quickly from watching others. Prison has taught me to be firm, to say no and stick to the no if there is something I don’t want to do. I don’t always have to give in to please others and if a situation occurs beyond what I feel I can handle, I get help to resolve it. I am no longer the whipping boy I feel I was in my marriage, and I feel much better about myself for it. I trust I will be able to use these skills to have healthier intimate relationships in the future.

Being in prison has also taught me that I can be supportive of others in dealing with their problems without internalizing those problems as my own. It is not my job to solve other people’s challenges, and in most cases they don’t even want me to, only to lend a sympathetic ear. In my marriage, I was terrible at lending that sympathetic ear and it was extremely uncomfortable and stressful for me to try to do so. I’m sure it was also frustrating for my wife. In addition, in my marriage I had been an enabler and allowed my wife to avoid taking responsibility for her own issues, which didn’t force her to get the help she needed. I didn’t get help for mine either. When I entered prison, I knew I needed to work on all this, and there have been lots of people here with lots of problems that I have been able to practice on. Over time, I have gotten much better at listening and not trying to jump in with solutions. I am also better at being more direct and challenging people as to how they might be contributing to their problems. I am also much more aware of my own part in my difficulties. Although I’m getting better, I still don’t always get it right, but there are always plenty of opportunities (whether I want them or not) to try again and do better, and that’s a good thing for a person as avoidant as I have been.

I have also had some opportunities to try out more intimate relationships in prison (to clarify, I’m referring to emotional intimacy). I’d never had an intimate same-sex relationship and the prospect of being in one was very daunting and something to which I had a lot of resistance. Intimate relationships had always proved very difficult for me, and after my marriage debacle, I was hesitant to trust anyone with my heart. When I would meet a potential intimate partner, I got scared and focused on their negative attributes as an excuse to push them away. The one person I actually let get closest to me couldn’t seem to reconcile his same-sex attraction and his Christian guilt over the supposed sinfulness of such a relationship, which made it difficult for us to really progress into something meaningful. I ended up getting moved to a new prison and didn’t have to deal with the difficulty of me having to end these relationships. While on the surface, it may seem like I failed in these relationships, in actuality these were great learning opportunities for me. I had gotten my first experiences with same-sex relationships and I hope to learn from the mistakes I made. More importantly, I learned that even though it scares me, that I really want another intimate relationship, even at the risk of being hurt. Without being in prison, where it is easier to meet people and see them on a regular basis, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to put myself out there to allow a chance for an intimate relationship to form.

My Son

This one is tough to talk about, because my incarceration has had a devastating effect on my relationship with my son; but I have also learned a lot as well, which is a comfort to me. One blessing of my otherwise difficult marriage was the birth of my son. Prior to my arrest, I tried hard to take an active role in his life. I never wanted to be an absentee father. I helped with his activities, went to all his sports games, attended his school events, and most importantly spent quality time with him including riding bikes, building Legos, playing video games, and reading him stories before bedtime. He always told me I was his best friend and not a day went by that I didn’t tell him that I loved him. I thought I was a good father but there were also problems that I didn’t recognize or understand at the time.

In relation to my wife, I have had a tendency to paint myself as a victim. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that my good relationship with my son was a source of strain in my marriage, as my wife often complained she felt like a “third wheel.” She was a stay-at-home mom (her choice), so most days, by the time I got home, she desperately needed a break. However, if she was having a bad day and he and I seemed to be having too much fun, she would blow up and start screaming about not being appreciated, slam doors, or go silent. It was upsetting to me but even more so to my son who didn’t understand what was happening. This was an ongoing pattern but, rather than courageously addressing her behavior, I ignored it, hoping it would somehow fix itself, even knowing this extreme behavior was harmful for my son. At the same time, I was ignoring my part. In looking back, I can see that both of us were unconsciously (mostly) competing for our son’s attention, primarily to make up for the lack of our own marital relationship. This pattern was not good for our marriage and absolutely not healthy for our son.

When my son was ten, I got arrested and my wife used that as an opportunity to split us apart completely and get “her” son back. She used the courts to prevent me from having any contact with him and she followed that by gradually cutting the rest of my family out of his life as well. Now, she finally could have him all to herself. Ten years later, he doesn’t want any contact with me or my family, and I believe that is because of her indoctrination.

How could my being incarcerated possibly improve my relationship with my son? First off, it’s given me plenty of time for reflection. I realize in looking back that I was not the great father I thought I was. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned about using my son as a pawn in our marriage struggles, I could be impatient and sometimes say hurtful things in anger, and while I would usually apologize later, the damage was done. I think that I also verbally took out on my son some of my anger at my own powerlessness in life and in my marriage. By being angry, I believe I was trying to make myself look less weak. I set a terrible example of what it meant to be a man and a husband by letting my wife dominate me, and I did not always protect him when her mental health issues caused her to treat him in inappropriate ways. I did not model healthy ways to deal with relationship conflicts by avoiding rather than addressing them. And I was also emotionally inconsistent, loving and attentive one time, moody and distant another, which probably left him confused and uncertain.

Then there is the issue of my pornography usage. I was very careful to hide the pornography from my son (and everyone else for that matter), but the late nights I spent feeding my addiction made me tired, irritable, and unable to be fully present for him when we were together. I was also fighting depression to the point that I was having thoughts of suicide. While I also tried to hide this from my son, I’m sure he could sense something was wrong and perhaps even blamed himself for my unhappiness. If I’d talked to my son about those struggles, it could have actually brought us closer and helped him to deal with the difficulties he was about to face, but communicating about it to anyone, much less him, was not something I was able to do at the time.

I spent many of the early years of my incarceration blaming my ex-wife and my arrest for the current alienation from my son and this blaming has only left me feeling helpless and bitter. Now that I see that my own shortcomings as a father also contributed to the current situation, I can let these negative feelings go most of the time and focus on improving myself. Without this time of incarceration, of being separated from my old life, time for reflection and new awareness, I don’t think I could have come to this realization.

This time for reflection has also helped me to see that my relationship with my son made me feel more loved than any other relationship I’ve ever had, and I was crushed when I lost it. In fact, I still haven’t completely recovered from this loss. But what I didn’t realize until recently is that this loss has negatively impacted all of my relationships since that time. I got stuck in the belief that no one else would ever give me such unconditional love again, and I have been afraid to open myself to that much hurt. Now that I realize how the loss of him has impacted me, I am recognizing and starting to remove some of the barriers I’ve erected as a result of this loss as I continue to work on all of my relationships.

Finally, incarceration has forced me to accept the fact that I may never get back some of the relationships I had prior to my arrest and that includes the one with my son. I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t still hurt at times, but I haven’t given up hope of someday being reunited with my son again. In the meantime, I will continue to work on improving myself so if that opportunity does come to me, I will be capable of having a much healthier and supportive relationship with him going forward.

Conclusion

When I got arrested, I thought my life was over and that I would spend the rest of my life lonely and alone. Instead, incarceration has helped me to break from unhealthy, stagnant relationships and to recognize and work on the negative patterns in my relationships that have plagued me throughout my life. I’ve discovered that I don’t have to be someone I’m not in order to be seen as loveable and that it’s ok and necessary to set healthy boundaries. I’m developing much closer, healthier, and more intimate relationships and I’ve only just begun. I know I’ll continue to make mistakes and I’ll get hurt and that’s alright too. I look towards the future with excitement rather than fear and look forward to all the great new relationships I’ll have in my life. Who would have thought all of this positive progress could come from being incarcerated? Thanks so much for taking the time to read my message and I welcome any feedback.