Rays of hope - thaw approaching?

[Dawn of Hope]

Hey Mac,
Always trying to help! Will be interested to hear your response. Good for you, spreading the joy with your music!

Something I meant to add to my post regarding the stages of MLC...an illustration of the pervasiveness and persistence of the symptoms of MLC, and how the stages all bleed together. Do you know about the "walking on eggshells" which is so familiar to LBS's of MLCers? HB describes it as part of stage 2 of MLC: anger. Well, I started seeing it intermittently, and to a mild degree, in my H about 9 or 10 years ago. It was a particular shock because we had been together for 15 years at that point, and until then he had been the most patient, easygoing person I knew, so this was _totally_ out of character for him.

Within a few years the eggshell tendencies were pretty much constant, and it was so bad that I finally struck all questions beginning with "why" from my vocabulary when talking to him, since that word seemed particularly prone to setting him off on a rant (he had his first [admitted] EA in 2001, so that wasn't the only sign of MLC). I was still seeing this anger through last year, although by that time he really had to work to find something I was doing to get mad about.

Okay, I'm pretty tired so I'm not sure how much sense I'm making, but I'm trying to illustrate that MLC stages are not at all cut-and-dried; they are totally mishmashed sometimes, and some of them hang on for a really really long time, regardless of which stage you might otherwise think is happening. So try not to get too hung up on the stages! Use it to help you see what sorts of things might happen, but don't worry too much about where you are in the process. Remember that you are not in control of this...and move on to what you _can_ control!

Okay, now I'm going to quit before I embarrass myself from brain fog of exhaustion!

Hang in there!

Peace,
Dawn