Therapy-Shmerapy

It's happened. My family has officially driven me crazy... or crazy enough to go out therapist shopping. Insurance only covers twenty visits per year, so I figure I'd interview potential mental health counselors before letting them charge me and my insurance for actual therapy.

Just how I got to the point of seeking professional help shouldn't be any surprise. Take one Asperger's kid, take one husband recovering surgery and stir in two sisters, each with their own complex set of issues. Once that's simmering, add in the last sister dying of brain cancer. Let that simmer for three months, stirring constantly. Finally, top with crazy and abusive ex-husband vying for attention, and bake in a well lawyered casserole dish for the next year. Serve with thousands upon thousands of dollars.

With your feet, during this process, get some hamsters, some fish and some cats... try to keep them alive. Forget about them liking you because you don't sit still long enough for them, but you will pretend they understand you when you ask "Did I feed you today?".

There are maybe four people in this world I'd trust to do therapy... except two aren't taking clients anymore, one is a complete conflict of interest considering our going for adoption and one isn't technically a therapist (but should be). That leaves the other 30 candidates in the provider handbook.

I feel like a puddle of goo on the floor these days, when I'm not trying to be therapist-mom to the kid, nurse-wife to the hubby and social worker-sister to my sisters. Everyone is so darn negative or obstinate lately that it's actually becoming contagious. I'm normally positive, chipper and "half full, baby" (as my husband always says). Not so much lately. Not when everyone is all "OMFG, it is the end of the world that [insert trivial thing here]!!!" Life is awful. There's not enough. We're out of something. Something broke. You haven't... [insert non-priority action here]. Things were better when... life sucks now because... I could go on and on.

When that's added in with the general stress of daily life, Chiari Man, Aspie Boy, my sister's constant urge to add extra caffeine my coffee, and the trigger of dealing with the ex-husband (even if its second-hand), I find myself having the beginnings of panic attacks. Thankfully, I have the skill set and the support to help keep those at bay. My hubby knows panic attacks. He knows if I say I feel it coming on, I'm serious. And he's afraid that if I break down, he'll be left alone with the whole house and all it's responsibilities.

My parents and in-laws have been excellent supports, too. Both set of parents seem to have this sixth sense when I need to hear something positive. My mom-in-law has the uncanny ability to read me like a book, even over the phone. I have the strange feeling that if I ever did go into full-fledged panic attack mode, she'd call or show up or something. And she'd probably have ice cream, too. I could write an entire post, novel even, about her awesome mom-ness. My mom is great, too, but she's a thousand miles removed from it all. Even still, my parents sent me "tell us if you need us to come down there and take over for a weekend" email the other day. I told them I have to learn to cope on my own, but if I have too much trouble, I send for them.

Yet, there are times like these when we need perspective from the outside. When you are in the trenches, you need to communicate with someone removed from the battlefield so you don't end up digging your way right to the enemy. Someone who can load you up with skills and tools to keep heading in the right direction so you can win war, even if you lose some battles.

When talking about this to my family doctor, she nearly fell of her little doctor's stool while holding back tears of joy when I said, "We are just not born equipped to deal with so much stress and I feel I need extra help". I gathered that she doesn't have many patients ask about emotional and mental health care. I imagine she does a lot of referring, but no one really volunteers for a list of counselors because she was just about speechless.

I need help redefining my boundaries, dealing with a stressful life and re-learning how to react to certain people in certain situations. My skills are rusty, to put it bluntly. And by-god, I need to dedicate some time just for me, all about me, for the sake of me and my family. After all, what good am I to anyone if I'm not getting my needs met? I'm no martyr and I'm no Scarlett O'Hara. I'm just a girl... who wants to keep thriving under pressure and model the behavior appropriate for our current circumstance.

And dammit. I want to stay positive and cheerful. Even if I have to create an army of ninja hamsters to reinforce my personal boundaries.     

The Dark Side

The Dark Side is not nearly as fun or interesting as The Far Side, a comic which my father read to me faithfully every Sunday until I old enough to understand it without explanation. The Dark Side is more defined, somewhat fascinating (it must be or Discovery ID wouldn't exist), something we all have experienced at some point in our lives, but something that a lot of people don't want to talk about. It's a place within myself that I visited recently (and have already talked about, but here comes more).

I have this really bad habit of being an open book. It drives my husband absolutely crazy-- he knows I blog about us, our life and junk, but I have to be careful to strike a balance between my big, open and his sealed shut mouths. It's the same with other social media, like Facebook. I have the urge to just let all hang out, but do my best to self-edit. Lately, I haven't been so great at that.

My son has no innate ability to socially filter his words thanks to Aspergers. He says what feels in the moment with no regard for how it might make someone else feel. He's brutally honest. When he goes to dark side, he can make Darth Vader look like a puppy with a silk bow around his neck in a basket with a naked baby. I've developed such a thick skin to that sorta behavior that I sometimes quietly marvel at his creativity or laugh on the inside at the sheer outlandishness of his words. Kid, where do you come up with stuff?

But me? I was blessed with an incredibly diplomatic and rational nature, or so I've been told. There are times when I have to remember that it was no blessing and not a trait I was born with.. Not at all, the ability to look at a situation from all sides, consider everyone's feelings and act accordingly was forged in many great fires. I was born with an Irish temper and a Viking lust for... life (?) or maybe just a good survival instinct.

I struggled with the point of this whole post all day long. Well, as much as a busy mom with a recovering husband (and cats that now hate her) can manage to struggle with a thought independent from caring for loved ones and making a big pot of stew. That basically means as I laid in bed desperately trying to not check my husband's vitals and flipping through late night television shows, when it came to me, I think. (And I make no promise that this will be sweet, short or easy)

That Dark Side is the part of we don't share with everyone we interact with--unless you have a neurological issue-- and a part we often try covering up, excusing, ignoring, delaying and/or putting on the back burner.

If there is one common thing about that darker part of ourselves, its that every single one of us has triggers-- those things that push you over that proverbial edge. What happens once we start that decent into madness varies as do the levels. Yet, it all starts with with a small spark or sudden fire or a bit of both that makes us virtual strangers to ourselves. Sometimes it is fast and hard, sometimes its a snowball, sometimes its trickle, sometimes a gush.

These triggers (or if you are lucky, its just one thing) are the pink elephants in our minds. (There's no particular reason they are pink, it just sounds cool). If you're proactive, aware, or if you are in the midst of therapy, you work on naming, describing, controlling and coping when the elephant poops so much in your head that the poop spills out of your head at the wrong moments.

You paint the elephant with something luminescent so that you can stop yourself from picking up that Sith Light Sabre and rule your world with tyranny.

Recently, when speaking with the supervised visitation therapist (like there wasn't enough going on already), I had stated that I felt I'd become complacent in keeping my ex-husband at bay. The threat he is to my family, to me, to my life and my son never stopped-- I'd just felt safer because the seas had remained calm for several years. Then I got served. Literally and figuratively in court because I was so complacent I was unprepared for my ex to even show up (and he did, I got caught unprepared which is why I got to talk to a therapist at the visitation center).

The lesson the Universe was given to me went unlearned. The painted elephants in my head needed a new coat, but I ignored them. While I was busy lecturing my husband on why he should listen to those subtle (or sometimes loud) messages the cosmic forces seem to deliver us little beings, I ignored my own. For years, I kept saying to myself "If we just get over this last hurdle, I'm going to allow myself to have a good cry". Must. Push. Through.

It's flawed logic. It's misogynistic, too, because so much is expected of women. It's why they don't make good Jedis and if they do make it to that most respected of places, they sacrificed something-- relationships, children, career, orgasms-- are b-words... but that's a post I'll leave for the young feminists to address.

If you dissect the mantra of pushing through the hurdles and crying later, if you flip it over, it reads like a question: "If I sacrifice my needs for the greater good until [insert events here], I'm bound to see a good result, right?"

Wrong.

This is where that whole Autism being test drives for future, better brain wiring-- evolution in progress-- theory comes into play. Where neuro-typical people fail, autistic people thrive. They deal with their issues in the moment, as they come. They see the elephant without even needing to paint it. Their Dark Side is always illuminated. Covering up the internal, emotional ickiness is simply illogical. Imagine that.

The Dark Side is part of us, all of us. It's part of how we are hard-wired and part of how we are forged in the sunshine and storms of life. It's not inherently bad, its just part of that balance positive and negative, ying-yang stuff. Its our job to maintain our own inner balance for the greater good, not to dismiss it. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, so speak.

If you play your cards right, you find people with whom you can share those really negative things, sometimes without even speaking about them. I have that with my husband. There is a lot unsaid between us. There's that Hallmark card connection where we know our lives parallel in some odd way, so that it doesn't need to be said, but we'll hand each other the proverbial brush or lantern to keep up with the elephants.

Want to know my trigger? The thought that got me out of bed to finish this puzzling post? Holding a shell of a person in my arms. No pulse. No breaths. Fading warmth. Doing it twice. I'm not exactly sure how one puts words to having your arms wrapped around a body when the life has gone out of it. A fast, sudden loss, or not. I'm not sure how you quantify a "sudden" when it comes to death. Is it days? Hours? Minutes? For me, it felt like forver, but it couldn't have been more than 24 hours that I knew the end was coming.

The time after burying two stillborn children was the darkest of my life. Nothing could compare and no one deals with these matters well. We simply are never, ever prepared. All we can do is talk, process and grieve and accept. Time heals for most, never for some, but you are forever changed by death. It is the one Dark Side experience we will eventually have in common. It's the one topic we all cover up. It is the human pink elephant.

It's why I check on my son every night before I go to sleep. It's why I wake my cats when they are sleeping deeply. It's why every night, I lay my arm across my husband's chest. It's why I spent the last two months waking up every two hours to make sure he's still breathing. It's why I couldn't sleep tonight. He had a bad day. He wasn't himself. So when he wasn't snoring, I was prodding the poor guy. (It's no wonder neither of us sleep well!)

I feel like I have been walking through the Dark Side even still, only its not quite so dark anymore and feels more manageable and less suicidy (at least for me). I don't think there's a defining anything about our whole experience as family, both inside and outside our four walls. It's just healing, all around.

In conclusion, here are things I've learned in the past 7 days:

1. My husband's parents have a lot of umbrellas (or they did because one is sitting next to my computer).
2. If you are going to lash out, be a little specific. Or rather, when you are lashing out, chances are you will have really crappy aim.
3. You only lash out at people with which you feel safe.
4. Vomiting sucks.
5. When you tell your semi-conscious husband that he can leave the hospital when he get out of bed and walk laps around the ICU, it'll be the first time he actually listens to you.
6. Even though he's home and healing, it scares me to death when my husband has a bad day.
7. When my husband is having a bad day, so is my kid.
8. We need more cowbell. 

Now for something...

...completely different.


I like Dr. Phil because he has a decent, practical approach to life. Nothing is ever rocket science, its all down to earth and my husband is known as the "Dr. Phil" of his company (he's not a doctor, but a therapist). I imagine they subscribe to same school of psychology. The husband doesn't care for the format in which Dr. Phil conducts his therapy, but he respects the underlying philosophy.

Today, while browsing my facebook news feed, I came across this:

It really made me think. Ongoing feud? Why? Why on earth would you let your marriage have an ongoing feud? In fourty-one minutes, the questioned garnered almost 400 answers, most them of stating the particular feud in their marriage. Thank goodness some people answer that life is simply too short to get your knickers in a twist over hair in the sink, the toothpaste cap and not putting the toilet seat down. I agree with the minority.

I think that when you are truly in love, in real love, you find those idiosyncrasies endearing. You understand that your spouses sole purpose on earth is not to annoy you with a barrage of disgusting or different habits. You love their flaws because its what makes them different from you, what makes them uniquely human. My husband's hair in the sink doesn't bother me in the least. Sometimes I wonder how he does it, but instead of getting intensely frustrated that 6 years into our relationship we can't overcome that problem (because it clogs the sink), I actually think about him, the person, with warm, fuzzy thoughts.

I wonder about sink design-- why hasn't anyone developed a man-proof sink yet? That makes me think about how impractical men are when designing the nuts and bolts of household appliances and fixtures. If they don't clean it and unclog it, how do they know its a design flaw?

That's the thing about these feuds. What happens is that you think your partner is purposely doing something to annoy you. Then the offending partner gets caught off guard with you unloading this rather small, but intimate complaint in a big way. The offending partner feels bad for offending and what's worse is the culprit is an ingrained habit of which a second thought is never given. The offending partner feels personally attacked for being themselves (which no one likes!). They find themselves arguing that the behavior wasn't to punish you for X, Y and Z or because they wanted to stick it to you for the sake of mean-ness. Then it gets ugly, quickly.

Words fly, feelings get hurt, and one day you may even find yourself with irreconcilable differences because he's got to trim the beard he grew in order to minimize the hair clogs in the sink. Or maybe he never altered the behavior and the offended partner feels like she isn't important enough to accommodate. In whatever case, its easy to let facial hair, a tube of toothpaste, a toilet seat, or household duty sharing spiral out of control.

Yet, nobody gets divorced because of toothpaste. They get divorced because they feel unloved, they feel their needs weren't being met and the marriage became a very negative circumstance with hurt feelings.  You get divorced because these feuds have the underlying message that "He doesn't love me enough to consider how his actions make me feel". Or "She didn't love me enough to consider how her judgment feels to me".

We have this idea that we should just *know* how to have a relationship, how to exist in a marriage, how to navigate all the rocky seas of coupling instinctively. The problem is we don't have these instincts. As mom of an autistic kid, let me say that no one has a freaking clue. These things are learned and not all relationship education is created equal. We have this funny habit of assuming the other half of our marital unit should know how we feel, how to make us feel better or worse, and how fix their irritating habits for us to feel better. Rarely do we take the time to educate ourselves on how this actually works. Let me tell you, your partner doesn't know-- sometimes they just make good guesses based on history. Sometimes not. And changing habits? In marriage, it doesn't work so well solo. Marriage is about a team effort.

Part of the problem is our inability to choose the correct partners. We settle, we rush into relationships, we think we change our mates after the wedding, we don't realize that what our deal-breakers are, we are too lazy to work at it and think a healthy, happy relationship just happens.

We fail to realize that we have the super-power in our lives that has been known to save marriages: We get to choose how act and re-act. Should our partners change their annoying habits or should we change our reaction to those habits? I think the answer is somewhere in between. Combining appropriate action with appropriate re-action is freaking awesome.

Duh-da-da-duh: Super Wife and Super Husband with their uncanny abilities to put things in perspective!! A dynamic duo, indeed!

If there is something that really irritates me, I discuss it with my husband. I make it a point to make sure he knows that I know it is not something he intentionally does to hurt me. I make sure he knows that I love him. I explain rationally, calmly and without judgment (no way it ever helpful to say "you are nasty human being because you left the toilet seat up!) the problem *I* am having. After all, it is my issue and its something I need his help to resolve. In turn, he is willing to make me feel more comfortable by either obliging, working to a reasonable compromise, or allowing me to sort through why it bothers me in a supportive way. This is a great strategy for the big things-- parenting, money, work, intimacy, family-- not just the little. We communicate our needs pretty well so that there is no feuding.

Sometimes, I will exclaim something completely random when I am frazzled and encounter all my pre-rinsed, dishwasher ready dishes  covered in ranch dressing. I normally throw up my hands, saying "Argh! You people drive me crazy!" in an exaggerated tone. Just doing that makes me laugh out loud, but if it doesn't, my husband's deer in the headlight look does. I can't help but love the fact that he doesn't want to test my sanity with ranch dressing or other condiments. So, I apologize, explain that I'm just frazzled (or have PMS) and melt into his arms. I also make it a point to follow up my post-hug apology with a stunning compliment and a "I love you more than anything". He has his own ritual for changing asshole behavior to loving husband behavior. It works.

There isn't much that bothers me and it isn't often. I can't help but marvel at our capacity to love when I am unclogging a drain. It's is marvelously amazing that as his wife, I am the only person who knows his most intimate habits and flaws. He knows my strange habits and accept them as part of what makes me, me. On top of all this, we love each other. I think he's funny, brilliant, a great father and husband and sexy ass man (and vice-versa). I still get butterflies when walks in the room, despite the knowledge of those intimate habits (that many people find annoying).

I think about how sad it would be if those little, pesky facial hairs no longer graced my sink. How awful it would be if I didn't find empty protein bar containers in cupboard. If his cups no longer needed my assistance getting to the dishwasher. If he never, ever picked up a new toy instead of paying a bill. That would mean he was not with me. That is a very real possibility for us, so I cannot fathom why anyone would choose to argue and feud over such trivial things that when approached in a positive manner could actually further your martial bond.