WAW, Filing as Fast as Possible

[aeolianchaos]

Journaling..

I'm finding the mornings are always the worst - I tend to lie in bed and process a lot of what-ifs and could-haves. This is the exact stuff I was getting much better at stopping when I first was working with my therapist. Its the kind of 'painless' self-abuse that just eats up a ton of time and leaves me psychologically tired before I even get out of bed. I need to work on this - I don't know that any great insight is going to come from this behavior, and it starts to overwhelm me with doubt.

One thing - and its kind of mundane - is that I have been taking care of her cat since she left. I was also taking care of it when I asked her to leave in the beginning of April. At this point, my feeling is that as much as I love the cat, it is not my cat and the cat definitely views W as her 'mom.' W is strongly attached to this cat and seems to care more about the cat's well-being than mine. I am pretty sure that she is going to ask me to keep the cat and my inclination is to say no. Not because I don't like the cat, but because W always seems to take my contributions to our life for granted, and treats them as inadequate or unimportant because they aren't monetary (nevermind that I've liquidated stocks and used inheritance money to help pay the rent because I thought the plan was not to just get a job, but to seek success in our field and then settle down..). Strangely though, she never articulates this directly and thus, I had no idea that it was so important to her, or that she thought our plan should change to a different plan. My feeling is that taking the cat would just be another example of me being a doormat for someone who seems all too happy to step all over me on the way to her own success.

When I was away getting therapy, I noticed that typically it was W calling me with her problems and me being the one supportive of her - helping her to focus, or lose anxiety, or shrink down the perceived issue to a size where it became manageable. It seems like in hindsight, she reflects on that as "well you know me better than anyone else" and that thus my actions did not at all validate our marriage or my role in the relationship. At the time, I did them because I care about her and wanted to help, not because I thought it would help our marriage - but they are significant to me as I was able to help her feel okay when she was overwhelmed.

Had an interesting evening last night w/ my parents: I had no idea how much 'discomfort' they had around W. Esp. this past year - apparently the things she was saying and doing were pretty offensive, and she made comments about me to the extent of 'I'm going places, and if he's not.. well..'. Not a nice thing to say about your H, but I guess when you are experiencing all the coping mechanisms of hiding an EA and PA, you probably start to feel like those kinds of statements are acceptable or normal. Sister is pretty upset too, as W was a bridesmaid in her wedding last summer and she is in a ton of the photos from that event. They are very supportive of me but do maintain the perspective that as much as I'd like to, I cannot change what W is doing or who she has chosen to be. Much of her negative behavior were things I overlooked when we were together, either because I was naive, or just didn't see it as something that was destructive enough to offset what I believed her positives to be.

Still, I do wish things were working out differently - I feel like a little direct and honest communication would have made a world of difference between us. I suppose that is also my responsibility, and I do regret not being able to recognize that my own needs and wants were going unfulfilled for so long and thinking that what I was doing was okay. It was probably behavior that could have been categorized as co-dependent, or at least been similar in nature.

I wonder sometimes, what the intention of DB is in a case like this - would I still wish to be married to this person in the state they are in? I can't change them - what is their incentive to change? How much would they have to change in order for me to feel like I had a spouse that I could count on? I know its harsh, but what kind of mother could someone be if they can't hang in there when things got hard?