YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Hi everyone.

Fair warning - I have been doing a lot of hard thinking, and I have a lot of stuff to vent. There are some long posts ahead. I am going to try to break down what I have to say into chunks. There is going to be a lot, I'm afraid. I think I mainly need to get it out of my head. If it can be of help to anyone else struggling, great. If any of you have time time/patience to wade through it and have the urge to offer any comments/questions/criticism/support, I would be glad to hear it, but I expect it to be a chore to slog through. Sorry in advance for having emotional keyboard diarrhea. Sorry also if it's repetitive with things that I have posted before. I am just trying to wrap my head around my life.

REALIZATIONS
I feel like I am making progress and gaining insight into my life but it is scary and ugly. I am coming to terms with serious issues involving self-esteem and the choices I've made in my life. I realize that I deserve to have the thoughts and feelings that I have without shame and I have the right to express them to others, but this is a very hard thing for me to accept and even harder to do. I realize that I have the right to set boundaries, even (especially) with the people that I care about. I realize that I am an OK, smart, successful, likable, lovable person with a lot of intrinsic worth to offer as a friend or romantic partner. That means my meaning/purpose is not just tied up in what I can do to take care of someone else and ease someone else's pain. I realize that it's OK to take care of myself (and in fact it's critical) and it's also OK to ask other people for things. I realize all of these things on a logical/cognitive level but don't really fully "feel" or accept them all of the time, and I don't know how to do them very well.

I realize that I have wants and needs that have gone unfulfilled (and even unacknowledged and unspoken in many cases) for a long time. I don't have a lot of people close to me who know me well and whom I can trust to even talk about them, let alone help me get them met. I realize that my wife and I have a very entangled codependent relationship. As much as she is dependent on me for many practical everyday things as well as for emotional support, I know that I have enabled that dependence, and I have become dependent on her in certain ways as well. I have become isolated from friends and family, so that she is the only person that I can really be close to and be myself around and she is my only potential source of emotional support (which is why it has been so painful when she has been unable to give it or I have felt unable to ask for it, because I have had no one else to turn to for so long).

Things may be improving a little bit on that front. I have a good therapist, but I can only get an individual appointment with him every 2-3 weeks. I see him for group therapy weekly, and I have made friends with a lot of the members of my group, and I am feeling closer to a few of them, but there are some awkward issues with communicating with them too often outside of group, so I am still stuck mainly in my head 99% of the time with nobody to vent to. Of course, I have you guys too. All of the other people that I know locally at the moment are work friends/acquaintances that I don't feel comfortable opening up to about all of the parts of me and my life that feel so fucked up.

I realize I have been a prisoner of my low self-esteem and putting other people's wants/needs/feelings ahead of my own, and my problems combined with my wife's insecurity have gotten us locked into a really bad spiral of dependence and stagnation. We are both trying to own our respective shit and break the cycle in our own ways, but it is sometimes really hard to occupy the same space. I realize that I am a good person and I have the right and the ability to be happy and fulfilled, and sometimes I even get brief glimmers of those things. I wish I could hang onto them. I wish I could stop worrying about and obsessing about the things I can't control and being afraid of the things that I can control.

Sounds like you're really trying! Yay for you!

Can't remember if you've mentioned this before, but are you and the wife in therapy together? Is that a possibility?

Hey weary. I relate to always being in my head and also the codependency in my relationship. I am also in a men's weekly therapy group, but don't contact any of them outside of group although I have been wanting to. I have been distancing myself the past few years from my friends that have been a part of my past life where going to therapy and getting help for my issues did not exist.

I realized reading your post and reflecting on my life, that I have been isolating. I use my girlfriend as an emotionally crutch, as well as my men's therapy group, and support groups, but outside of that I do not have male friendships where I can share my truth and be myself. I think for me that is what is lacking in my life. I don't trust men though because of some sexual abuse I endeared by a male neighbor who I looked up to when I was around 10 or 11 years old. This mistrust has led me to a life of inability to be close to male friends. I have friends where we tease each other, talk sports, but no friendships where I can tell them about the real things going on in me. It's not their fault as I shut them out. This also creates a burden for my girlfriend since a lot of times I dump my emotional needs on her because I do not have anybody else I can trust.

I don't know if you relate to this at all, but this is what came up for me when reading your sharing. I appreciate your honesty to share what is going on with you and wish you well.

Hi Weary...

You said before that we are both going through the same issues and the more I read of your posts, the more I agree with you. One huge difference in my marriage is that my wife isn't dealing with her issues - both from her family and the issues between us. She has this attitude that I'm going to take my meds and go to therapy and I'll be all well and the man she believes she deserves. She has no conception that I'm on the meds and in therapy to deal with my issues and my broken brain.

Anyway.. vent on. We're all in this mess together. And we all do deserve to be heard.

Thanks for the words of support.
@Herself
We spent about ~9 months in counseling together after my frustration led me to a series of bad decisions that led to an emotional affair and being on the cusp of a physical affair. The general consensus among the counselor and our individual therapists was that we needed to fix our individual shit before we could really work out the problems with "us". We may need to re-evaluate that at some point.
@mentalsamurai
I've had trouble with friendships my whole life- my parents were very controlling in that regard, and there were a lot of negative messages about who could be trusted and how authentic you could be in front of other people. I had a relatively few friends in high school, more close friends of both genders in college, and things steadily contracted since then. My support group is actually mostly women, and I feel a better connection with the women in the group than the men for whatever reason probably because it does feel somehow safer or more acceptable to open up to them because guys don't really talk about their feelings with each other. My wife always needs emotional support and validation, and for years I have felt like that was mostly a one-way street - I needed to give her support but I wasn't allowed to ask for any in return. I know now that was as much my fault as hers - we each brought our own shit and our own expectations and assumptions to things. Now it's even harder to talk to her sometimes because a lot of the anger and sadness I have is about her and our marriage.
@meh
Thanks for the support. Every time I get some new insight into what I can control and what I can't, and what I deserve, it's fucking scary. It's nice to get reality checks as often as possible.

Next "chapter" is coming soon.

Hey Weary,

It is a bitch trying to accept and really feel the things you know are true but being aware that you're a good person who's a little fucked up is better than not having that initial awareness. It's so easy to only see the bad and the dark about oneself, i often forget the reasons why people like me. I ask them, they don't always know but when things are going well and I never stop and think about everything that's going on and that I'm a good person. i just think I'm a bad person when I'm depressed, seeing the other side then is difficult. I hope you can work things out with your wife so things are better on all fronts.