I Was Ready…Until I Wasn't

This has been a week of up, down and around. A week of tears, yelling, tears, shame, tears, drama, tears and pain. It's also been a week of peace, tears, healing, tears, humility, tears, accountability, tears, hope and tears. In case you didn't catch on there has been a lot of crying happening around here this week. Most of it by me, but some by B as well.

This might come out a bit disjointed and it might be a long post but I really want to be able to look back at this week later and learn from it and remember the positives of it.

Let me preface this by saying that for weeks B has been working with his therapist to prepare his disclosure to me. This is a formal written accountability and timeline of his addiction. Including time, durations and frequency as best as he can remember them. He will then present it to me in a session with his therapist (I chose his therapist, because he has worked with both of us, and honestly to me my therapist is my safe place and I didn't want disclosure to happen in her office). He has either not been adequately prepared for this or he has been in denial about what  huge impact this is going to have for me. As you read the story that follows you will understand why I say that.

B let me know at the end of the week last week that he was ready to give disclosure and we scheduled it for next Wednesday afternoon. I was ready, until I wasn't. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I didn't want disclosure the day before Thanksgiving. I didn't want to be an emotional mess for my kids that weekend and I didn't want every Thanksgiving to be tainted by the reminder of disclosure. I moved the appointment to the next Thursday. He started to worry when he found out that disclosure was going to happen in his therapists office because he thought that he'd just be able to give it to me at home. Then when I moved the appointment he was even more worried because he didn't understand why I thought it wasn't a great idea to have it around Thanksgiving.

When I saw my therapist early this week and let her know disclosure was scheduled she and I talked about my safety plan. I had already taken that day off work and was planning to bring separate cars to the appointment. She told me that it is standard to have the husband find somewhere else (that is a safe place for me to have him be) to stay until I invite him back home. She said I should also probably have a support person or two meet me at the therapists office to be my support afterwards. She also wanted to make sure I had my "first aid kit" ready for use and a couple of different plans depending on whether I wanted to be alone or whether I wanted support around me. She advised that I should have a plan for my kids as well. This all surprised me a bit and made me reconsider whether I could be ready by the week after Thanksgiving. I decided that because of personal and work commitments that I couldn't get out of for that week I would put it off one more week. I rescheduled it for the afternoon of December 12th and it is currently still scheduled for then.

After my appointment I called to tell B about what my therapist had told me and I gave him a couple of suggestions as to where he could stay. I could tell he was starting to withdraw and shut down when he told me we would talk about it later, I could just hear it in his voice. I started to get a bit worried as well, it seemed logistically like it was going to take a lot of work.

When I got home I could tell he was upset and we started to talk about what we were going to do. He went into victim mode and started talking about how hard it was going to be for him to share all this with me and how he is going to need support and how he wasn't going to be able to take care of the kids. This set me off because he just wasn't "getting" how he has known about these behaviors for thirty years and he has been working for weeks on getting them written which has given him time to process them some. For me though, it's going to be thirty years of addiction condensed down to an hour and while I'm not expecting any huge surprises, some of it is going to be very painful to hear. I was given the chance to ask any questions I wanted and I gave him some hard questions to answer. They will be hard for him to answer if the answers are yes and they are going to be hard for me to hear if the answers are yes as well. The other element that I am really struggling with is wondering if this is truly a full disclosure because of his own confessions to me last week. When I confronted him about his lying last week, I asked him if he had talked to his therapist about the behaviors and the lying, he said he hadn't. Then I asked him if he had planned to include it in his disclosure and he admitted that he hadn't planned to do that either. When I asked him how I was supposed to trust that it was a full disclosure when I knew already he had planned to withhold information from it, he didn't have any good answer other than that I just am. My worry was further antagonized by the fact that he reacted so poorly when confronted with the facts of how difficult this is going to be for me. I realize that honesty is hard for him because he has lied for so long. I realize that it is shame based. Just because I understand those things doesn't make it hurt any less.

We didn't get much resolved other than more hurt. I was walking out of the room and he quietly and humbly admitted that he was scared. I was so upset that I responded in one of the worst ways I could to his sincere admission. I said "Maybe you should be scared. Maybe if you had been more scared the last seventeen years we wouldn't be here now." I promptly left the room as we had to get ready to go to Pack Meeting for my son.

I took some deep breaths and decided I needed to distance myself emotionally or I was just going to keep being hurt and trying to hurt him back. He texted me at pack meeting emphasizing how hard disclosure is going to be for him and how hurt he was…something like that. I don't want to go back and read them because it is still painful. I texted him back an explanation I had given him and sent him a link to this post on A Wife Redeemed. That night I honestly don't remember if we talked anymore at all, I don't think we did more than what was absolutely necessary of two people living in the same space.

The next morning he got out of the shower and came back to bed because he wanted to snuggle me so he could be reassured and be loved. I barely woke up, but I was awake enough to realize that that was probably what he wanted. I was still in self protection mode and just went back to sleep. I was getting up just as he was leaving and I got a text from him saying how hurt he was. He was still in victim mode and wanting to find his validation of self worth from me. 

 Rejection is a huge trigger for him and he really has no idea how to deal with it. He feels that when I distance myself from him and enforce my boundaries that I am rejecting him. In actuality I am protecting myself from his addict behaviors and not from him. It's going to be a struggle to find ways to work through that. I digress.

Throughout the morning we had a text conversation because we were both at work. I didn't want to reread these texts because some of them were so hurtful, but I did for the sake of accuracy (remember I want to learn and grow from this, so it needs to be truthful). He basically said that he was hurting and that he wanted a date with me that night so we could talk. I told him okay but he needed to plan it because he hadn't liked the idea I had come up with (which was to see The 100 Foot Journey). The conversation kept on in that vein of me enforcing my boundary and speaking plainly and him heaping blame on me for him not feeling loved. The following was the pinnacle of the conversation on both sides:

B - "I'm not sure how I am going to make it through the rest of the day. You are being so cold to me. I just need a little love. Stop being so mean."

T - "I am really trying. I have no more fight left in me for this conversation. You will need to reach out to someone else. I have given you options for when I will be able to talk to you, but I have a lot of work to do if I ever want to come home tonight and I can't keep having this conversation if I'm going to get that done. Right now I'm sitting on a rock looking at the river crying. I need to be able to focus so I can get back to work and get done so we can talk. I won't be responding to anymore texts for now. Please don't miss our son's parent teacher conference because if you do it's not me you will be hurting it is him."

B - "I didn't mean to hurt you."

I will admit this text absolutely baffled me. Really!?! How did you think I would react. Of course I was hurt and upset. It took me until about 11:00 in the morning to finally be able to focus on work and get something done.

I extended an olive branch in the hopes of getting some actually meaningful conversation happening. I made arrangements for our son to go to a movie with a friend and his mom. Our daughter was going to hang out at a friend's house. I stopped and picked up what he wanted for dinner. I felt like I was the one being left hung out to dry and yet I consciously chose to try and reach out to him. It was very difficult and I questioned whether I was just enabling his broken brain behavior (ha! BBB - broken brain behavior). In the end, I am very glad I did.

This next part deserves it's own post…so this story is to be continued...