Progress, not Perfection!!

[Jamesjohn]

Hey, MF, thanks for checking in! Doing mostly OK, ready to vent a little today!

W's been dealing with the death of an old family friend, close to her Dad's age, and it's brought out a lot of sad feelings in her. I've been listening to her, and she has seemed to have figured out most of the dynamics of why she's taking it so hard. Thinking about how her Dad and everyone else isn't gonna live forever.

She had bad dreams a couple of nights ago, woke up several times very terrified. We prayed together, and she slept well after that. Thanked me the next day, said there was something bad and dark in the house. Wanted to tell her, yeah, it's the ghost of your f***ing om still haunting us, but I refrained myself from that. Anybody out there know a good op excorsist?!

We're still having problems with D, but W and I are presenting more of a united front on this. S is still doing good, and he, W, and I are forming a closer family unit. This seems to bring out both happy and scared feelings in W. She still, at times, seems to be confused about the fate of our M, and doesn't want S to be hurt. He's finally figuring out that I AM a pretty nice guy, and not the jerk both he and his sister always thought I was! W mentioned in the C session yesterday how she sees me now "acting" instead of "reacting" when it comes to the family issues.

It seems at this point of "piecing", it's sometimes a struggle for me to on determine when to share my feelings (kind of a 180 from the past), and when to just let things go. My biggest issue right now is with om. I can strongly feel that he's out of W's heart, even though "I" may not be COMPLETELY back in. He keeps entering back into the picture, either coming over or calling. I guess my biggest problem is that my W is the type of person who tends to ignore problems, hoping they'll go away, instead of dealing with them. That's been the cause of most of the problems that happened after I left. I think she would rather pretend the A never happened, and just forget about it. She's never really told him the "final good-bye", she's hoping he'll just move on and not come back. When she apologized for his intrusions, and asked what she could do to make me feel better, I told her I would like for her to give this goodbye to him, let him know it's totally over. That from the impression I got, she never really did this, and it's something I felt needed to be done. She offered to do it that night, and I told her that it didn't need to be done right at this moment. (I want her to do it because it's her idea, not something I'm forcing.)

The C session yesterday wasn't very productive, in my opinion. She was rambling about a lot of stuff, mostly kid things. Probably would have been better as an individual session for her. Guess I wanted to talk about the om situation, and she didn't. I did bring up the fact that I appreciated her being honest with me about the contact with him, that it was easier for me to deal with when SHE tells me instead of me finding out any other way. She almost seemed bewildered by this, like she's always been honest with me about the situation. She just simply said she's not a good liar. (Well, hopefully she won't get anymore practice at it!) That was the extent of the om conversation, left me feeling rather unsatisfied.

We stopped and had a few drinks afterwards. In our conversations, something came up about a sitch with D, and she said "I know you hate to hear this, but one time om and I tried……" She lost me from there. I let her talk some more, but then had to tell her how much it sucked that she even said that. She apologized, and thanked me for letting her know. I'm trying to give her the benefit of the doubt that she doesn't do these things to hurt me, that she's ignorant of the pain it causes, but my tolerance and understanding is wearing very, very thin.

I was pretty distant after that, and was still kinda pissed when I first started writing this earlier today. Have calmed down a bit, and am trying to look at the progress so far. Venting here sure helps! Getting back into the "as if" mode about things before I get home. Seems like things are running their course, only not as fast as I want. I'm bringing her a present home, a hard to find old "happy-place-in-her-life" video that she loves.

Progress, not perfection. Hope everyone's doing well!

BTW - Michele's new book is GREAT, found a lot of help in the chapter on how to deal with a depressed spouse. Haven't read the whole book yet, but it looks like a must read for all of us here!