Letting go or giving up?

I am feeling sad today. It’s hard to write about, or even think about…I feel confused by my emotions.

Thursday was my complaint-free day. It went great – C and I had a good morning and after she got off to school I had some much-needed quiet time. Work was fine, and the not-complaining thing made my therapy session uber productive. But, all that reflecting and meditating and quiet-time stirred some stuff up and since I can’t numb it away, here it is.

Thursday afternoon, driving to therapy this thought floated into counsciousness: I am afraid that if I continue to get well, my relationship with J will not survive. I remember having that same thought over a year ago, when I first started therapy for my depression and before my use of painkillers had really gotten out of hand. Then, I shoved the thought to the deep, dark recesses of my mind but here it is again, making its presence known.

I don’t know what to do with this thought. Engage it? Argue with it? Just sit with it? Analzye? Deny? Rationalize it away? For now, I’m just trying to recognize that I have this thought, and this fear, and to just be with that. It is a possibility that if I keep growing and changing, but my relationship doesn’t, that the relationship will end. It is also a possibility that something else will happen. What I do know is that right now, I am no longer at a place where I can allow that fear to stop me from taking care of myself.

It is hard to know how to go about healing this brokenness. My therapist suggested that we go to couples counseling, but I don’t know if I am ready for that. I have so much that I’m dealing with just trying to take care of myself right now, and my instinct is to just disengage as much as possible. Maybe I don’t hold out a lot of hope for counseling helping us either, because I don’t see that J has a lot of motivation to change. What I see happening is the counseling becoming a thing that I have to make happen, keep track of, and put a ton of effort into. And I don’t want to take my focus off of myself right now when I’m doing so well.

J has been really depressed. Communication has basically broken down between us. I got so tired of trying to talk to him about something, only to be accused of  “giving him shit,” or “going off on him” or “freaking out” or whatever, so tired of his defensiveness, so tired of everything turning into a fight that ended with me crying and him storming out of the house that I’ve just given up. He can do what he wants, I guess, and I will do my best to take care of me and C. I’m not going to try to get him out of bed in the morning, I’ll just take care of it. I’m not going to try to get him to go to the doctor, to do physical therapy, to clean up anything…

When I woke up this morning, there was a huge mess in the bathroom, where he is using the bath tub for a “project,” which has resulted in the tub being clogged up and unusable. I said nothing. I will go to the gym and shower there in the morning before work, I guess. I folded all the laundry that’s been piling up, and did a bunch of the dirty dishes. He did play video games with C for a while so I could nap today, since I didn’t sleep well and was feeling pretty badly this afternoon. I’m grateful for that.

For whatever reason, the path he has chosen right now is one that I don’t understand. The things he’s doing don’t seem to be helping him, or helping us, but he’s not open to discussing that. Having experienced the mind-warping effects of serious depression more than a few times in my own life, I’ve been inclined to wait and see how this spins out, to hope that the fog will lift from his mind and he’ll realize that this isn’t how he wants to live. And do something about it.

But I also know that I am not ok with the way things are. I can live with it, for now, but not forever. I hate not being able to reach him, and I hate even worse that some small part of me is starting to not care. At least I’ve finally realized that being angry about it accomplishes nothing, that expressing my anger about it changes nothing, it’s just destructive and makes me feel ugly and hateful. So, like I said, I will just try to be with it, to accept that it is what it is, and to take care of what I can. And I will try to know that I am strong enough to work through this pain and sadness, and try to have faith that what I find on the other side will be what’s right for me.

Tone Deaf

It’s something in my tone. Something defensive. Something angry. It’s the mad-bitch tone. Apparently, it gives me away every time.

Ever since I’ve been making this concerted effort not to yell, really really trying not to yell, MrB has been calling me out on the tone of my voice.

I have been trying, so hard, to say what I need to say, ask for what I need, state my feelings, whatever, in the most calm and even tone. I have actively worked toward bleaching all the anger and aggression out of my voice. And not just that. I’ve been working hard on letting that anger go, on understanding where it comes from and learning what to do with it. I’ve been literally practicing in therapy how to say things, how to articulate my boundaries, to state my bottom line.

Strangely, the calmer I get, the more he reacts to me. I feel like I can say the most innocent thing, and he’ll blow up at me, and when I ask why he’s yelling at me he’s saying Well You Were Just Going Off On Me, and I’m like what the fuck?

It’s all in the tone of my voice. He can tell how I’m feeling, and he knows that I’m angry, secretly seething with resentment inside, even as I continue to calmly say what I really mean he argues that I’m lying. He says he doesn’t know what it is, but I just can’t hide the anger that I’m feeling, and it’s really pissing him off that I’m not addressing the thing that’s pissing me off.

It’s weird, to see him losing his temper so often like he is, because that was always my part in the dynamic between us. I was the hot-headed one, he was so maddeningly calm. It’s almost scary, because he’s the one who is so obviously angry, but he keeps insisting that it’s really me who is mad. He’s accusing me of jumping all over his case, or whatever, when he’s the one yelling at me.

Could it be that there is something in the way I’m speaking, some cue that I’m giving? I suppose it’s possible. Maybe I’m emotionally detatched, or just out of touch with my feelings, because of the suboxone. Maybe there’s something there that I don’t even realize and it comes out in the subtext of whatever I think I’m really trying to say.

That’s a scary thought too though, the possiblity that I’m that deeply out of touch with my own feelings, because some of the times that he’s accused me of having an angry tone have been times when I was pretty sure that I wasn’t feeling angry and I had practiced and really intentionally tried to bring up and state whatever I had to say in the most neutral/non-judgemental/non-emotionally-loaded way.

But even in those instances, he heard something totally different from what I was saying. I’d say something like: When you tell me you’ll take care of something and then you don’t, I feel disappointed and angry. And he’d say: Well you just said I was an irresponsible asshole.

I take some responsibility here too. This is a new skill for me, and I’m sure I’m not expressing myself perfectly. I’m sure I say some things out of habit in a way that could be construed as grumpy. But I don’t know how to deal with his continued insistence that I am angry, even after I try to assure him that I’m not.

This is so frustrating. I miss the time when the only hidden meanings in our words were fun and flirtatious ones. I miss being able to talk to him without everything being so loaded and painful. Fuck, I just miss him. He’s far away in his own misery these days, and I am certainly not the one who brings him any relief from that. Most of the time I just feel like I’m another annoying burden to him, one of the things that holds him down, keeps him back…

Maybe if I wasn’t all screwed up sexually, we would have a better communication. I don’t have the energy to write that post tonight though. Meh.