A Beauty

Came across this today while on our way out to the park.  Plans for tomorrow are to go back with the Canon, a telephoto lens and the tripod.

As Promised – the Counselling

Yesterday’s appointment with the marriage counsellor was timely…

My mood has been really low following some less than happy encounters with hubby.  His comment about wanting to die started a mood spiral that has left me feeling emotionally exhausted and reluctant to engage with others – friends, family, the outside world as a whole.  Yesterday, just as I was thinking I might feel like trying to go out again, I had accepted an invitation from my girlfriend to go to the lake.  My plan was to go to the lake and be back in time for the counselling appointment.  An outing would have been a good way to keep me distracted from obsessing about the appointment and thus working myself up into a panic frenzy.  Unfortunately things didn’t work out quite that way.  Shortly after getting off the phone with my friend, hubby announced that he was going to mow the lawn.

This announcement in and of itself would not have been much of a big deal, but what was was his intent in announcing it when he did, how he did.  I had been trying to mow the lawn for the past week .. the back lawn that is… but had not yet gotten to it.  Too tired, too sore, too depressed.  Any number of reasons.  And when he put on his attitude and did what he did, he knew (and he admitted later that it was true) that I would not feel at all like going out and would end up feeling upset.  This is what happened.  I cancelled with my friend.

When we showed at the counsellor’s office, the counsellor as always, asked how things were going.  Hubby, true to form and it’s only because that’s what he is used to doing, told the counsellor things were going well – in fact what he actually said was “Things are going good.  They’re not getting any worse.”  I had a different take on the events of the last week and stated such – that things had been really rough.   When I brought up the “I want to die” comment, hubby explained it away as just something he says and laughed a bit about it.  I said I didn’t find it funny at all, and in fact, I find it frustrating and hurtful.  I explained that I try really hard to understand how tired he is, how much he hurts, but I have a difficult time reconciling that with how I often feel the same way, but keep on plugging away.

We also talked about the lawn thing, seemingly getting nowhere – in fact, to me, things were building to a point where we were destined to have a big disagreement in the counsellor’s office.  At this point, bless the counsellor’s heart, he decided it was time to start learning some communication skills.  Big sigh of relief from me.  Finally.. what I have really wanted and needed to make things work between hubby and I for up until now it is as though we have been speaking the same language but our dialects are so much different that we aren’t understanding each other.

Given the basics of how to communicate – listening and speaking we set out to practice it a bit.  Open body posture, open ended questions, show interest, ask questions, be curious.  We tackled something simple first – just an every day event and got into the swing of things.  Then we undertook to try to talk out the lawn thing.  It was not easy.  In fact, it was really damn difficult.  The counsellor stepped in at several points to provide feedback – how to not attack, how to listen to the message that was being given.  At the end of discussing what happened, we were challenged to come up with a solution.  We almost went off the rails there because as I suggested solutions, hubby was discarding them as quickly as I put them out and I felt myself falling back into the “argue” – the counsellor again intervened and said we were to be finding a solution.

I think we came up with a solution and it wasn’t just about the lawn, it was about things in general – sometimes I get distracted and because I feel down, I either forget about something I’ve promised to do or I just don’t feel motivated.  A gentle reminder and a hug is a great way to make me feel good about doing something.  The counsellor though – he came up with something that was just as important, if not more important, that we start doing things together – chores, cooking dinner… whatever.  This is something I have missed and I hope that hubby embraces it.

There were a few other tidbits that came about as a result of the session.  Some I agree with, some I don’t.  The one thing the counsellor suggested was that hubby and I were losing respect for each other and without respect a relationship cannot exist.  The one thing the counsellor asked about that I wasn’t very happy with was how my medications were doing – whether I had had them looked at recently.  I guess I wasn’t happy about the questions about whether they were working or not .. I hate it when if I’m feeling low is being questioned because of my Bipolar.  I explained that my meds were fine and that discussions with the doctors, we had agreed that much of my low mood is because of external factors and that medications won’t do much for that.  Even so, it is ironic in that I have an appointment with the psychiatrist next week and want to discuss whether antidepressants might help me out some.

All in all, the session was a good one even if it did leave me feeling even more exhausted that I had been feeling from the emotional turmoil going on in the house.  The difference between this exhaustion and that which I had been feeling, was I felt that something good had come out at the end of the day.

We had been thinking of not going to see the counsellor any more as our previous sessions were not meeting our needs.  After this session, hubby and I have talked and will be commiting to attending more sessions with the counsellor.

Bye for now