BH and I had our first weekly meeting with one another last night, at the recommendation of our MC. It was... rough.
My mental health has been atrocious, and when that happens, the condition of the house also gets atrocious and I get backlogged on tasks for work, and then when the house gets atrocious, it upsets my H, and then when he gets upset about it my mental health gets worse, and I feel even more overwhelmed about everything and paralyzed with regards to starting to dig myself back out of the hole...
Sometimes I try to stay up late to catch up, or I'll sleep on the couch because I will set like 6 alarms for me to wake up early and I'm trying not to disturb H. My thought process is that if I take hours from the night to add more to "my day," start getting caught up, and then H will be less displeased, and my mental/emotional health will improve, and then I can be a generally more functional person. It's the point in the cycle that I try to break it.
This cycle happened periodically prior to the affair. This staying up to try to break the cycle happened prior to the affair. But post DDay, BH has said that the house being a mess triggers him because when I was checking out to fantasy land with AP, the house became a mess. I also was staying up late and not coming to bed during the A, so now that's a trigger for him too... So you can see how I'm kind of stuck, right?
We tried talking about this last night at the end of the meeting, after I asked him if he would rather I stay up to try to knock out some dishes or go to bed with him. I acknowledged that me not coming to bed was a trigger for him... Possibly I forgot to apologize-- gotta make sure to do that later-- but I received that's what's happening for him emotionally. I also tried to explain that my mental health is bad right now and I'm trying to break the cycle and make him happy, that the cycle happened frequently prior to the affair, and that I often tried to stay up late to get caught up prior to the A.
I wanted him to cognitively recognize that there's not a strong correlation between whether I'm staying up late and whether I'm having an affair, because that's not the Reality of the data. I said that when one is traumatized, the brain looks for patterns to protect you, and they're not always accurate patterns. It then triggers when it perceives a variable that it thinks means there is imminent danger... I told him I understand why he's triggered, and I'm not asking him not to be triggered, because we're still only a year out. I just thought that possibly consciously understanding that the correlation isn't high and updating his mental model would help him work through the emotional side of things.
I wanted him to understand the rock and the hard place I've managed to put myself in, and the route I was trying to take out of it. Since he selected "stay up and do the dishes" over "come to bed," I sort of wanted reassurance that come tomorrow, he wouldn't be unhappy that I hadn't come to bed, since that's what he chose. Like I just want to stop being punished for trying to make him feel better, no matter what I do, so I can stop feeling like shit and be a functional person. I just don't think he was understanding that's what I wanted. He just kept going back to, "Yeah but when you don't come to bed, I am emotionally triggered..." Which brought me back to the whole bad-correlation and at least trying to logick oneself out of the trigger....
(And I recognize that the obvious solution is just to catch up during normal waking hours. But I've been trying for like, 15 years to figure out how to successfully make myself do that, and I still haven't found the answer. What I think I really need is proper ADHD medication, but to get that I need to get a very expensive evaluation, and right now H is stressed about money already...)
Anyway. The point of this post is, I would like to hear about ways other BS are working through or have worked through their triggers, to see if there's something that might help my H as I try to navigate this issue.
[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 3:02 PM, Friday, July 31st]
