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It is associated with Anne Sheffield and her web site
www.depressionfallout.com
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returning after nine years
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Re: returning after nine years
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Sully
thank you every one!
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Jan 17 15 7:58 PM
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Thanks to all for the advice, and Hi Ange! (I'm so impressed and grateful that you are still giving out such excellent advice).
I think we are in a better place today. All of your advice is excellent. We are figuring out boundaries for this situation and have also added a new rule to our list of agreements. For now on, anytime he has an obsessive thought during an MDE, he can run it by me to see if it is "fact or crap" without me mentioning divorce (so long as it won't impact any one's safety). I think that should help ease the tensions here.
He is willing to see a therapist and take meds, but he needs a better med combo and a different therapist. He has a therapy appt Monday, pdoc Thursday morning, and couples counseling with me thursday night. On saturday I have my own therapy appointment. So we are handling this aggressively. I think after participating in a year-long CBT study and still feeling unwell, he needed a bit of a break, but that let his thoughts get out of control again. It's hard to monitor everything when life is so busy. . .
I guess this time the episode was predominantly the OCD and the GAD, rather than depression, so I was able to ignore it more--perhaps my boundaries were too good, certainly my empathy is not what it was last time. I don't have it in me to let him consume my life over this again, and now we have a child so I really cannot let that happen. He has spent the last week telling me how sorry he is for his words, how he cannot believe he said such things, but I didn't think he quite got how insecure they made me. So last night I made him listen to exactly what it's like to live with someone for a year who isn't in love with you. He remembers so little of that period. He spent most of the night crying, but I think he really needed to see everything from my perspective. I know that's hard when he is so stuck in his own thoughts.
I regret that we didn't go for couples counseling after he was all better last time. Lesson learned. I'll be sure to do that this time. I don't know if he is at the point of needing in-patient therapy. We did have to do that in the past, but it was a brief period to adjust a bad med combo when he was still young enough to become suicidal from the wrong drugs. This obsession is there and has taken over the obsessions he had earlier in this MDE, but it's also not as strong as the others were. It's not related to some existential crisis as his issues usually art. It is something that can permanently destroy his life though, and he is able to recognize that.
My biggest concern right now, aside from moving past this period with a lot of therapy and higher drugs, is that the sight of him crying, huddled on the couch, etc., does not affect me as it once did. Maybe I am just no longer a naive 25-year old. I guess we just get used to these things. I'm going to insist that he remains in therapy for now on, though. There were years and years when he saw the pdoc once a year and had no therapy at all. I guess we may need to move toward basic therapy and then cbt when it is bad.
I'll go back to reading Anne's books. Thanks for that reminder, Ange. I'm sure they are in the attic somewhere. ate0z thanks so much for the reminder that if he was well for so long, we can probably get back there. I needed to hear that. He's still a great father, has a good job, and is trying to learn from his mistakes and handle this aggressively. I just need to be very patient--and get my own therapist again.
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