Reflections on Mental Health

I must start by thanking everyone whom has contacted me. Being able to talk to someone who is willing to listen has been a most precious gift. I really don’t know what else to say, I am back to weeping like a babe while I write this. Everyone’s support has been just so comforting.

These conversations have given me time to reflect and really try to explain some of the factors that I feel lead up to a lot of this, and I really want to try to do this with as much compassion, and as little finger-pointing as possible.

My spouse has had a few behavioral quirks that have been with them since we first met. Top among them was that they regularly would just fall asleep. We could sit down to watch a TV show, read a book, anything, and within a few minutes my spouse would be asleep. For a number of years we suspect that they were narcoleptic, and eventually my spouse went in for a sleep study to see about receiving a diagnosis. To our surprise the sleep study came back as negative for narcolepsy. We were advised that other conditions could produce similar symptoms with the chief two being depression and anxiety. Still, my spouse was pretty much convinced that the answer was narcolepsy, and insisted that they had had this problem for quite a long time and that they where comfortable confirming a self-diagnosis of narcolepsy. Curiously, this ability to confirm the self-diagnosis was part of a conversation we had at the sleep center with the doctors. We got to this point because they told us that they cold not 100% rule out narcolepsy, and that it isn’t necessarily always detected in a single test. So they gave my spouse the option to confirm the diagnosis in the face of a failed test, and my spouse agreed. Years later they would take the test again at another sleep center, and once again it would fail, only this time the sleep center refused to give my spouse the option to self-diagnose.

During all of this time my spouse has regularly suffered from sever procrastination. They will procrastinate things until they are litterately emergencies, and not just interpersonal or relationship things. My spouse put off paying the IRS, insising that everything was fine. I only found out things were not fine when the IRS started garnishing my wages. Apparently we got into that situation because my spouse had procrastinated even doing the taxes. The process apparently intimidated them and so they just put it off. Three years of unpaid taxes. One year of getting onto a payment plan to deal with the unpaid taxes and then never paying them. Nothing was too important that it couldn’t be put off…

I would be told that bills were paid only to have power or internet disconnected. They would put off doing chores, communication, getting our children to do chores, paying bills, coming up with a budget, starting dinner. Nearly all these responsibilties ended up falling to me, because if I didn’t do them, then no one would. This also created a weird imbalance in the relationship between myself and our children.

I was the one regularly nagging about chores, about home work, and rinsing out dishes or taking shoes off before tracking mud through the house. So here I was, the naggy parent, and my spouse would simply allow anything to slide. From the view of my children, I was a nag because their other parent didn’t seem to think these things were a problem. Regularly I was the rule enforcer, and as such, I was basically the bad parent.

Some of the more common rules were:

• No computer on school nights
• Chores before homework. That is, home work is not an excuse to skip chores.
• No computers on non-school nights if there were any missing assignments. I don’t care if they finally turned it in that morning and it was “the teacher’s fault” for not marking it as turned in. It shouldn’t have been late in the first place. That is the price one pays for putting that sort of thing off.

There were of course others, but these 3 seemed to be the largest points of friction in our home, and I was the only one enforcing it. When I would confront my spouse about this, they would reply that they felt guilt, if not hypocritical, to scold the children for not doing something when they weren’t doing it either. This is a weird idea to me as my thinking would be that the solution is to stop procrastinating as opposed to using procrastination as a justification for more procrastination.

So yah, my spouse procrastinated anything and everything.

And maybe if it was just the procrastination then that would be a single battle that could be tackled and worked on, but my spouse had another issue that took us years to even start to understand how to deal with. At the heart of it all is that my spouse as an almost neurotic obsession with how other’s see them. Similar to how my spouse was willing to put all of us into financial jeapordy, our children included, via their procrastination, my spouse would also put us into financial jeapordy in order to maintain, and maybe manipulate, how others perceived them. Okay, so maybe not almost neurotic.

At one point in time we owned a home. First time home buyers, no credit, more or less fibbed our loan application, but whatever, we were certain we could make it work. Alas, due difficulties in the job market where we were at, I was unable to locate viable work that could make the mortgage payments. Ultiamtely I got a good job offer some 300 miles north, and we took it. We ended up moving in with my spouse’s parents, and I would drive 63 miles, each way, to go to work; 126 miles round trip, every day.

While I was working, my spouse had allowed some friends of ours to stay in our home and pay rent. 14 months later I got an even better job offer in the valley. After some consideration my spouse and I decided it was a good idea and so we moved, across country, but our finances never really improved. It always seemed like the more I made, the more our financial situation stayed the same.

And then the bomb landed. We received a foreclosure notice on the property we owned. It turned out that my spouse had allowed our friends to move into our home basicaly rent free. My spouse had wanted to seem like a good friend after all. So in the end, we had been paying rent payments for someone else, when we could afford to pay for them. More curious, our friends weren’t even there anymore, our friend’s mother had moved in instead. This resulted in a messy eviction process in which we finally got back control of our home.

One would think that would have been lesson enough, but lo and behold, my spouse allowed a different friend to move into that same home for dramatically less than the cost of the mortgage. Because that is what wealthy friends do right? They just let other people stay places rent free, that is after all how they acquired their wealth. And of course, a real friend will totally allow you to do that. They would never ask you to put yourself into financial debt just to be all buddy buddy. Sorry, maybe that was too much sarcasm…

In the end we lost the home.

I later found out that my spouse had done something very similar regarding collecting rent at a place many of us know as “the crack house”, though it wasn’t ever a “crack house” of any sort. Before my spouse and I ever got together we had sort of co-habitated with a large number of other people. The number of people living in the house would vary from time to time with I believe 9 being the max that had been there at any single time. My not yet spouse was 17 at the time, and their mother have more or less left my spouse and their sibling to stay in their home while mother-figure drove 300 miles north to live with father-figure. So it was sort of a hyper-teenager, irresponsible, communal living .. thing. Anyway, for the sake of brevity. During some period in which I was not living in the house, rent was due, and not everyone could afford rent. In fact, according to the story, as told to me by my spouse, only three people in the house at the time even had a job. So my spouse did the natural thing, they divided the mortgage payment by 3 and asked for rent from only those 3 people whom had jobs. Anyone else whom didn’t have a job didn’t need to pay rent. This sort of decision allowed my eventually to be spouse to avoid having to be a “bad person” and ask people to leave whom couldn’t afford rent.

These types of situations happened with unrelenting regularity. Two different times letting people live for less than mortgage. Helping people out when we couldn’t financially help ourselves. Cooking for large crowds, buying toys and games for the kids that we couldn’t afford, though apparently if you just don’t pay bills for 2 months in a row then you can afford some really impressive Christmas presents for the children; yes that really happened. And again, no matter how much my pay increased, my spouse would continue to spend at their “comfort” level, which seemed to be “well, there haven’t been any bill collectors or disconnect notices yet, I must be doing fine”. The more I made, the more freely they spent, only the fear of disconnects keeping the spending semi in-check.

This behavior combined with the procrastination and the one sided parenting/house-keeping resulted in a very stressful environment. Which brings us to the third behavioral quirk about my spouse. Not only are they willing to financially jeapordize the whole family in order to maintain their self image, but they are willing to manipulate facts. Not to say my spouse ever made up a story, not that I am really aware of at least. What my spouse would do was much more frustrating. They would simply leave out relivant details that would dramatically alter the story they were telling, and again, it did not matter whom they hurt, or who’s lives it might jeapordize. Regularly my spouse would seek the company of others, perhaps as a way to get a momentary feel good, to escape their anxiety, to spin a new tale to someone whom hadn’t already heard it all before or whom wasn’t aware of my spouse’s behavior and their tells.

A number of these situations resulted in various affairs by my spouse, some of them physical, some of them emotional. One of the most amazing situations for me was when I had realized they were pursuing yet another fling, and when I went to confront them about it they scoffed. I insisted they come clean, they got mad, I persisted, they cried, they begged, they pleaded. “Why won’t you believe me?” they asked through tears. This would be the most animated conversation I ever had with my spouse. This outflow of emotion, this begging for me to trust them, to believe them. Them acting hurt and betrayed, as if it was odd that I should distrust them at all. Their expression changed when I turned on the computer monitor to show the email that they themselves had written to the person they were attempting to have a fling with. All those words, all those tears, the anguish on their face, was just part of the act they had spun up to try to manipulate me in that moment. All that out pouring of emotion was just part of their deception. And like a switch they turned it off, and they just stared in silence.

This is the norm for my spouse, their jokes, their remarks, the stories they tell, whom they tell them to. It is all part of their coping mechanism, their protection mechanism, this is what makes them feel safe. But, if my spouse found themselves in a situation in which they did not know how others would react, did not have some guarantee as to how someone might see them, then my spouse would simply not talk. They would turn in, and just stare.

Early on I had assumed that my spouse reacted this way due to some prior traumatic relationship that that they often hinted at. Over the years, and many failed attempts to get any information about any supposed events, I found out it is called an emotionally unavailable personality. They would just stop responding, stop interacting. The more you begged, pleaded, cried, the more they would distance themselves, turned inwards, avoiding all the uncomfortability. Then I learned that if I screamed they would respond… but I hated myself for doing it. We developed a painfuly common cycle. I would spend ask how things where going, what was on their mind, how were bills, did the children have their homework done, were chores done. So long as I stayed calm and never checked anything, then my spouse felt everything was fine. Behind the scenes bills would not be paid, chores would not be done, and I never knew what was on their mind. Eventually I would become nervous, and I would poke and pry, maybe nag more.. or I would just flat out go to look at bills directly. If I did these things then my spouse resented me for not trusting them. If I didn’t do these things then it was like waiting for a bomb to go off. Waiting for the disconnect notice, a phone call from a bill collector, a report card claiming my child was failing a class.

Everything was fine so long as I ignored that it wasn’t fine… when it wasn’t fine my spouse would turn inwards and stop responding. If I yelled they would make an effort to talk. It was a horrible and unhealthy cycle.

Fast forward to the last couple of years, and many many many arguments later…

My spouse had started therapy for anxiety, complete with medication. We were slowly working through this whole process, finally making sense of some of it. Slowly coming to this realization that all of my spouse’s quirks were sort of manifestations of their anxiety. It turns out that my spouse has real problems dealing with seemingly complex tasks. Large messes, piles of anything, taxes, spreadsheets full of numbers to do budget plans. My spouse sufers from sever anxiety when faced with these things, and their response will either be to hide from it, or to try to find some sort of short-cut that does not require organization, planning, or work. Just jump to the desired goal… if only that was how life worked.

This same anxiety was what drove my spouse to allow people to stay in our home for nearly no rent and eventually resulted in us losing the home, it was a mechanism to influence how others perceived them.

This same anxiety is what has lead my spouse to produce lie after lie after lie of omission. The stories they tell technically have valid data in it, but are always missing the relivant parts that might paint them in a bad light in the eyes of their friends. After all these years, we felt we were finally on the path to understanding and working through these problems.

After my father-in-law passed away I spent some time with my uncle-in-law. It was here that I learned that many of these traits found in my spouse were also found in my father-in-law. Even going back to when he was a little child, he used to tell the children at school about how him and his brother were out fighting Indians, becoming quite upset at the other children whom refused to believe him.

When I first met my father-in-law, I thought him a very powerful presence. He had a beautifully deep and husky voice that could command an audience, and he often did. He would happily tell various stories about working on this, or doing that. Over the years I started to notice that there was a pattern to his stories, that they were always about being better, or smarter, or wiser, or craftier, than someone else. He had such incredible and vivid stories, but today I am not certain how many, if any, are true. He told stories about being in the Reserves (not true), about being a big-brother/big-sister type of person to a girl whom had been previous part of some human traffic ring in the Bandidos (not true), of having written portions of the IBM AIX operating system (turns out he really only knew shell and awk scripting). In his later years he even insisted he had served as a Marine, put the Semper-Fi stickers on his vehicle, carried his “coin” (I have no idea where he bought it), and used to start up conversations talkin about having served here or there (he simply never served anywhere).

My father-in-law had a phrase he would proudly state, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Today I feel like he was admitting what he was doing while simultaneously pretending he was mocking others.

During my time with my uncle-in-law I also learned that my father-in-law had incredible depressive moments, in which he would hide away for days, not coming out to see anyone, claiming he wasn’t well. He would lay there, in his bedroom, or a travel trailer, or office, for days. He would not come out, he would not engage in the world, he didn’t want to be around anyone.

In the last couple of years my spouse and I had talked quite a bit about their up-bringing. According to my spouse, their father wasn’t really around for his children, he was often off doing other things working other places. When he came home it was a special holiday for his children. They admired him dearly and wanted to be everything that he was.

Unfortunately, my spouse’s up bringing also seemed to be devoid of any heart-to-heart conversations, no one was called out for fibbing, nothing was ever serious, everyone left everyone else alone. In the end, they were never taught the basic social skills of interpersonal communication, honesty, integrity, accountability, or responsibility. In fact, early on in our relationship my spouse was insistent that a healthy relationship doesn’t need communication, not for people whom are meant to be together, and that was why they didn’t talk…

So that is my spouse. A person with no interpersonal skill, with no social foundations of honesty or integrity, and with an anxiety disorder that will steer them towards making choices and taking actions that can, and will, jeapordize the lives and lifestyles of all those around them, including our children. Yet one does not blame someone for the damage done by the cancer in their bodies. I generally feel that my spouse is very much a victim in all of this. A victim of their up bringing, a victim of their anxiety, a victim of their own insecurities. I simple can not bring myself to blame them for how their condition makes them feel and the actions they take to avoid the anxiety.

To me the only thing my spouse is really guilty of is deciding to give up on therapy. To pretend that it will just get better, to deny it is a real problem. How many fall into that same trap? Cancer? Diabetes? Any of it? How many convince themselves it isn’t really a problem that needs all this fuss, that they can manage it on their own. Everything else seems to just be a natural consequence of that choice.

But it must be a horrible cycle, needing maintain the image they present so much that they can not bring themselves to discuss their situation with their friends, scared of the stigma, uncertain how people will react. Not being able to open up and trust ones self in the hands of others. To need to have guarantees, conditions, controls in place to protect themselves. To live with a world view in which they can not bring themselves to believe that there is such a thing as real friends who will accept them, faults and all. They don’t believe that there are people who would support them, who would be willing to talk about their condition.

Honestly, more than anything else, I just want them to go back to therapy…