Codependent spouses are exhausting...
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Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 2,066
Codependent spouses are exhausting...
My husband is doing really well in his sobriety stuff. The actions are speaking loud and clear (granted its still a VERY, VERY short period of time and nothing is guaranteed) he doesn't smell at all, he looks amazing, he's fun to spend time with and so courteous and thoughtful (that's a brand spanking new trait of his!!), and when he does something that is jerky he is quick to apologize in a sincere and appropriate manner and I feel really comfortable spending time as a family. It's just nice. The best part, I'm learning so much about myself and he is too and it's really interesting to share with him and go back and forth.
Downside: my husband sometimes goes codie freak out mode on me.
He's still upset that we're separated (I could spend the rest of my life separated, I don't care. This is such a marked improvement that I'm just trying to enjoy what is happening right now. We have fun every weekend as a family, I want more eventually too but I have faith that eventually we'll get there naturally as we grow healthier and healthier.) He has a case of "if only I had XYZ, things would be better" and he still struggles with trying to guess my emotions. He is so damn codie and it is exhausting when he's like that! I keep telling him "progress, not perfection" but he sometimes feels like a failure without our nuclear, Leave It To Beaver, picture perfect family. At this point, I could give a crap about what our family looks like from the outside. This, my friends, is progress. I effing love it. Sometimes it feels so incredibly foreign and awkward but the majority of the time I feel empowered. I want my kids to see me this way and take cues from a mom that is comfortable in her own skin and in her own life. I hope they have a dad who eventually feels similarly too, but he has much greater hurdles to overcome than I do, and so much more to learn, especially about his own emotions and how to deal with them.
Downside: my husband sometimes goes codie freak out mode on me.
He's still upset that we're separated (I could spend the rest of my life separated, I don't care. This is such a marked improvement that I'm just trying to enjoy what is happening right now. We have fun every weekend as a family, I want more eventually too but I have faith that eventually we'll get there naturally as we grow healthier and healthier.) He has a case of "if only I had XYZ, things would be better" and he still struggles with trying to guess my emotions. He is so damn codie and it is exhausting when he's like that! I keep telling him "progress, not perfection" but he sometimes feels like a failure without our nuclear, Leave It To Beaver, picture perfect family. At this point, I could give a crap about what our family looks like from the outside. This, my friends, is progress. I effing love it. Sometimes it feels so incredibly foreign and awkward but the majority of the time I feel empowered. I want my kids to see me this way and take cues from a mom that is comfortable in her own skin and in her own life. I hope they have a dad who eventually feels similarly too, but he has much greater hurdles to overcome than I do, and so much more to learn, especially about his own emotions and how to deal with them.
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Posts: 2,066
Ha!!! He just texted this to me. Maybe now he'll think more about that "if I only had XYZ" stuff he's been doing.
“Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.
I was a pro, I realized, at avoiding the present. A ringer. This had been true my whole life. My mom always described me as an impatient kid, rushing through everything. In eighth grade, an ex-girlfriend told me, “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you **** on the present.” Now, as a grown-up in the deadline-dominated world of news, I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion instead of calmly and carefully enjoying the process. The unspoken assumption behind most of my “forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better. Only when I reached that ineffable...whatever...would I be totally satisfied. Some of the only times I could recall being fully present were when I was in a war zone or on drugs. No wonder one begat the other.
It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life—swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained”
Excerpt From: Harris, Dan. “10% Happier.” iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.
I was a pro, I realized, at avoiding the present. A ringer. This had been true my whole life. My mom always described me as an impatient kid, rushing through everything. In eighth grade, an ex-girlfriend told me, “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you **** on the present.” Now, as a grown-up in the deadline-dominated world of news, I was always hurtling headlong through the day, checking things off my to-do list, constantly picturing completion instead of calmly and carefully enjoying the process. The unspoken assumption behind most of my “forward momentum was that whatever was coming next would definitely be better. Only when I reached that ineffable...whatever...would I be totally satisfied. Some of the only times I could recall being fully present were when I was in a war zone or on drugs. No wonder one begat the other.
It finally hit me that I’d been sleepwalking through much of my life—swept along on a tide of automatic, habitual behavior. All of the things I was most ashamed of in recent years could be explained”
Excerpt From: Harris, Dan. “10% Happier.” iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Last edited by Seren; 03-31-2014 at 04:42 AM. Reason: Removed advertising link - Rule 1
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