It really IS all about me!!

I lost my footing in my quest for balance this week. I'd been to a family session at the hospital, where my partner expressed her anxiety about feeling like she couldn't control her behavior and then I'd put her out. I'd asked about being supportive without being enabling, and the therapist threw it back to my partner. The therapist said something about it never being helpful to be punitive, and I found myself running to MY therapist to ask her to desensitize me so that I could live with cutting.

Luckily, I realized how crazy I was being before I even got to my therapist. Here's the insight I want to try to hang on to. If I decide that I want to get desensitized so that I can feel better, that's fine. If I want to get desensitized so that I can make it more comfortable for my partner to continue to engage in unacceptable behavior, that's NOT fine!! It truly is ALL about ME!!

Pound Puppy

So, my partner is now on involuntary psychiatric hospitalization number 2, along with 2 partial hospitalizations- 1 "successfully" completed and one not, all since mid November. When I can separate myself and my feelings from all this, it's interesting to see her fight with herself. She wants help and she doesn't. She wants somebody to take care of her and she resents being controlled. She wants someone to keep her safe, and she wants to push limits of the people whom she's asked to do so. When I can look at the behavior from a place of healthy detachment, some of her behavior is really funny. She actually told the nurse last night not to put a needle in her hand because that would hurt and not to put a bandage on her arm after they took blood there because it would leave a bruise. That might make sense if it weren't for the fact that she was there because she couldn't contract to keep herself safe from significantly more pain and resulting in significantly more physical evidence.

That's what's going on with her.

As for me, I'm pretty pleased with my committment to myself to maintain my balance. I left her at the emergency room and went to my naranon meeting. Before I went back to the ER, I treated myself to a nice dinner and coffee. I'm enjoying having space. I'm doing my work without too many intrusive thoughts.

I'm stressing about the financial ramifications of her going from facility to facility NOT feeling her feelings, engaging in the behavior that put her there WHILE she's there. The bills are racking up and she appears to be unwilling or unable to do anything to bring in any money to pay them. My naranon friends tell me that that's NOT mine. I dunno what to do with that. It is getting clearer to me that I can't live with this particular manifestation of active addiction in my house. I don't know what that's gonna mean for the future. She's been pretty successful so far at treatment hopping without actually having to work on the issues that brought her to any of them. Guess that's not mine either. I'm frustrated and angry that my need to keep myself safe is being interpreted in her story as my not being supportive. My sponsor tells me that what other people think of me is none of my business, but it's painful when I'm trying so hard to figure out a way that I can manage my own feelings around her behaviors without putting her completely out of my life, and her interpretation of that is that she gets no support at home.

I have absolutely no power over whether she chooses to actually use the help that she seems to be pursuing or over how she interprets MY actions. What I can do is use my uncomfortable feelings to help identify what I need to do to take better care of myself. I don't have answers yet, but at least the questions are getting a bit clearer.

This morning, I woke up with the first phrase of IF, by Rudyard Kipling, running through my head. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you..." For the most part, I'm managing. Guess I'm becoming a man, my son. Who'da thunk???

"Take that behavior somewhere else!!"

That's a big new thing for me. I actually told my partner that if she has to engage in self mutilation, she needs to go do that somewhere else. Ok, so I only asked for 2 days, but it's a start. And I'm realizing that finally, I'm really enjoying the peace of not having her in the midst of her latest addiction in MY midst. I'm not even torturing myself over where she is and whether she's safe. I'm not being quite so successful at keeping my head where my feet are, but I'm certainly maintaining my balance a lot more easily when her scars are not in my face.

I probably need to look at why the behavior is so triggering for me. But, just for today, I'm feeling good about taking care of myself, the only way I could- by giving me the gift of space.

My Word for 2010

I do love this tradition I stole from MPJ 2 years ago of choosing a word as a theme for the year. My first word was self care. I was pretty new (again) in recovery, and I worked on self care with a vengeance.

Last year, my word was recovery. I had just started a second on-line step group for compulsive overeating, and we'd planned to do a step a month, so I was scheduled to have completed it last month.

Well, things didn't go exactly as planned. The online step group had some false starts and stalls and didn't quite make it to step 4. But, I got myself an OA sponsor, and started working the steps in a new way. I'm still on 4, but I'm still working it. So, here I am, doing what I said I was gonna do, albeit perfectly imperfectly.

I'm loving that concept- perfectly imperfectly. It's leading me to my new word, BALANCE. The last couple of months of 2009 were pretty rocky for me. My sister gave me a rock she'd gotten for herself, with the word, "balance," on it, and I've been clinging to that rock and trying to hang on to my balance. It seems to be getting a little easier, but I do think it's a good focus for 2010. So, that's my goal for the year. Balance. I'll let ya know how it goes.

struggle for balance

Last night, I tried to give my partner a "restitution gift." It's a tool our therapist taught us to clear up messes. The concept is that when someone in the relationship does something that hurts the other one, we can offer a restitution gift. It has to be something that the giver would LOVE to give and the receiver would LOVE to get.

Here's the background. It's complicated. Stay with me. (Or don't. I'm really just trying to sort it out for myself.) I had shared that I was really hurt by my partner saying "fuck you" to me during an intentional dialogue. He suggested that we talk about it, and that she offer me a restitution gift. She got upset and said that I owed her one. She said she didn't remember why but that she's sure I didn't give her one a couple of months ago. Actually, from my memory, even that incident was about me trying to own my part of a problem without her being willing to own hers. I had owned my piece of an issue and offered a restitution gift. She refused the gift, didn't own her piece, and left mad. Then about a week later, she comes back and says she's changed her mind and wants a restitution gift. I don't remember whether I gave it to her or not. It was a long time ago. But I agreed to give her one this week. And she agreed to process with me about my feelings about her saying "fuck you" to me during an intentional dialogue. (If you're trying to keep up, that's what brought up the restitution gift in the first place.)

So, last night I tried to give my restitution gift, a body massage. First, she told me that I wasn't really massaging, I was just touching. Then, she told me I was rubbing too hard. I told her I needed to stop. I was trying to give her a gift, and all I kept hearing was that I wasn't doing it right. One of my biggest triggers is that I'm not good enough, and it was getting majorly activated. Then, she got triggered by my being triggered. I'm not going to go into her stuff, but I acknowledged her feelings, and held her and she went to sleep.

OK, here's some of what's bothering me. I tried to take care of her by giving her the restitution gift. She has yet to bring up the dialogue about the "fuck you." Maybe she will before Wednesday, but I doubt it. Ok, I know, that's having an expectation, which is a premeditated resentment.

But things feel way out of balance for me. It feels like I take care of her, and she takes care of her. Last night, what went better for me was that I took care of me too by stopping when I needed to and by sharing my feelings. She took care of her by sharing her feelings. I took care of her by acknowledging, reflecting, and then holding her. So what went better is that I took care of me and I took care of her and she took care of her. At least I was in the equation, since I tried taking car of me. But something's still missing here.