Informally separated from WAW, but DBing my best

[AlwaysTrying]

I put Five Love Languages in my Amazon shopping cart. I'm concerned this book might not be really helpful in a relationship where we're not able to express love most of the time. But I've heard it suggested so often, that I'll happily give it a go.

Co-dependent no more... I don't know how well this applies to me. I have a daughter that struggles with self harm and other self-destructive behaviors, so I have a taste of that. I think that my wife is the one who identifies as co-dependent. I struggle with depression and a handful of other issues - bipolar disorder, ADHD (maybe), inappropriate boundaries, etc.

My wife has taken the advice of people escaping relationships with narcissist types and said things (to herself, as I were not there) like "I don't have to engage." when we were having arguments early on. She was making everyone in her life miserable, and trying to talk her out of it wasn't working real well. I was in cry, beg, plead mode and it wasn't pretty.

I'd consider giving her codependent no more to read, but I'd really rather have her in a mode of thinking of ways to improve our relationship, not escape it.

I heard an interesting author on Science Friday last friday. Mark Williams wrote Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. According to the author and his studies, doing the meditative exercises described in the book daily is as effective as medication in preventing recurring depression. That's something we can both use.

[edited by dbmod, outside links not allowed]

This last week with W has been as hot and cold as ever. I told W one morning that I asked my IC for a reference for an IC for my W. I didn't tell her that D15 said that W told her that she thinks she's depressed. I've known W is depressed for a long time. That wasn't news. Selfishly, and compassionately, I'd like for W to have a therapist that doesn't take an attitude like, "H is bad for you, D will make your life better."

Anyway, W's eyes went black (they do that when she's angry for some reason) and she started ranting about how I was trying to prove that she was the crazy one so I could take the kids from her. "Just leave me alone."

Later that, she was warm and pleasant.

One of our challenges right now is that we have to dig our way out of around $20K in debt incurred during the last 6 months when I was unable to work at full speed due to depression. It will take me most of this year to undo the damage.