This, That and The Other

[labug]

Hi Labug just caught up on your thread and remain so impressed with your recovery.

Thanks. For the first time in my life I feel that I'm becoming the person I'm meant to be. I'm no longer caught up in being the "good girl" or the person I thought every other person in my life wanted me to be. I once told my IC I had lived my life like a chameleon, constantly changing based on what signals I was getting from the person I was interacting with at that moment.

I can imagine how much more difficult it is to be recovered when you are restarting a relationship. So many of the old triggers must appear.

Yes. I think one of the blessings of my sitch is that it did take so long. This weekend marked 3 years since he left the house. Of course the year before that had been crappy.

Right now I'm sitting in a hospital cafeteria as H is having surgery. He doesn't do medical stuff well(my judgment)he gets very quiet, nervous and a bit snippy. He's fearful although he doesn't like to admit it. I work in healthcare so I can be very blase about it all. In the past I belittled his very real fears, not in an overt way but by not listening and validating, by expecting him to just grin and bear it. I wanted to control his feelings because his fear and uncertainty made me uncomfortable.

This time I've gone with the flow, let him say whatever he needed to say but didn't try to force him to share his feelings. When he's been short with me, I've taken it in context of the situation, didn't try to defend myself or respond in kind. I've upped the ILUs and hugs.

we'll both be happy to have this day behind us.

You talk on these boards a lot about your disease of depression, was your H going through any type of crisis or depression when he left or was it really only a response to your difficult behavior

I can't say for sure, he has his share of "stuff" but he was living with a woman with progressive depression and it's pretty evident that marriages where one spouse is depressed, especially if untreated the rates of depression in the other spouse increase as does the rate of D. A lot of what was going on was in response to my depression, we both played our parts.

If you had asked friends and co-workers about me during that time, I doubt that many would have used the word depressed. Funny, sarcastic, angry, unhappy, diligent, hard-working, maybe but depressed wouldn't have been at the top of the list. Depression has many faces and often doesn't look like we think it should look.

I talk about it here because I think it's good to know it has a name, it can be destructive, it is in most cases very treatable but first we have to admit that it's there.

...and once he saw that you were "cured" he felt safe to return?

I think that pretty much sums things up but he had to do some work, too.

Have you and your H spoken to your sons about what happened? Do they feel secure in your relationship as a family?

I think our sons have a pretty good idea of what happened, they were living it, too. I've been very frank about my depression and treatment.

I don't know how secure they feel.