Rings around the moon.

It never ends. It isn't a storm. "Say what you see" says Mr Perls. "Mr Perls, I see nothing".  "Untrue!"  "Mr Perls I see myself.." "No, oh you see your hands your legs, your feet. You do not see you!"  "Mr Perls. I see the keyboard in front of me, the screen, my coffee. I hear my son downstairs practicing the drums. Nothing moves except my breathing, my fingers, sound. Nothing. Nothing moves. No direction, no compass, no star".  "Say what you see"... Mr Perls is right, and annoying. And if he were really here, he'd probably be trying to get me into bed, or so I heard. My source? My therapist, she was a Gestalt practitioner and had read his letters. Something about him being proud of leaving a smear of blood across the sheets as his hemorrhoids had popped in the night. He was probably in someone else's bed and enjoyed the prospect of the dismay his trail would cause. Yet despite all this, Mr Perls is a re...

Contained within each moment forever and at all times. There is Potential for one thousand wrongs.  Yet only one wrong is worthy of shame. To disconnect and to abandon awareness born of reflection.  Thereby avoiding repair and restitution.  Thereby refusing the draft of wisdom distilled through honouring consequential pain's cruel embrace.

He phoned. Asked me to look for paperwork.  He's moved into his dad's house.  Wanted me to find the papers  As I lay still  Phone hugged close to my ear Unable to speak  Black void instead of mind  Below me, advancing...  The flesh-grinding gears ripping through my heart and lungs. No breath.  No life  Point zero. His plan  Do the house up Sell it "then we will see"  My silance perplexing him.  Did he really think I'd be ok Willing to help him move out  Overjoyed at being offered a glimmer of hope Having my powerlessness shown to me one more time?  I swollowed my tears and wished him well.  Told him to take the time he needs.  Freinds angry  On my behalf.... 

I wake to grey skies with a bone crushing sense of weight and sadness. Tiny fracture lines reaching back our full twenty-five years of marriage, start to join and shatter . I feel my whole life shift, as memories blacken and fall. I don't have the strength for this today. I woke with Courtney Love singing louder than sleep in my mind... 

I don't honestly know what happened. It was so sudden, and it escalated so quickly. As words, impressions, memory, fear and grief slowed down, I felt a growing conviction that it was a set-up. That almost anything would have triggered it. What happened? One week of kindness, compassion, my beloved was back, followed by three weeks of a slow descent; I was hearing some of last years phrases, and my increasing sense of unease feeding into the nightmare that brings me up each day into the morning light. The evening before I had been offered my place back on my degree course, and that I think, is what put the final piece in place. All that was needed was for me to be upset and then the thing that was set to happen three years ago...was triggered. I hear Fanita English say, "could it have been an an epi-script "?  An epi-script is the psychological equivalent of a family curse. A set of attitudes, reasons and behavior that have been passed down in a family as a pathological wa...

I woke up crying. He said he'd had enough. He took off his wedding ring. He packed his things into the car and has left. 

Intrusive thoughts to the point of vomiting.  They were at an all time high as I drove to the garage so he could get his car. Who would have expected that! The next day it was something else... Suberbicon.  And each time is a walk through Hell for me. In the end I came up with this, I throw stones at the image in my mind. I imagine myself in the car with them, or back in her kitchen looking at her Suberbicon glasses. I know I'm powerless, but I can express my pain and rage by smashing the picture. The pile of stones is by my right hand, and I throw and watch the picture shatter as if that is all it is.  Suberbicon glasses? Yeah, the dad in the film, she had the same glasses... I watched the film partitioning my mind. One half had a grip on the present, the other half was there suddenly I see the colouring in paper from our home, in her kitchen. An expression of their love, she loves him so much this paper is precious... My blood is boiling but I rationalise. Never a good ...

If intrusive thoughts are an attempt to defrag memory, burning my journal wasn't a good move. Fact helps weave wobbly recollection and shrapnel sharp feelings together into a time line. But on the other hand, I felt unable to open the pages. My thoughts just went round and round, punctuated with episodes of myself giving myself a good talking to. Today, I crashed again. The reality, that it happened and I could not tell, is a reoccurring theme. There is true horror in there for me. How can something that is so catastrophic to my life, potentially my physical health, absolutely threatening to my mental health, how can it happen and it not be accompanied by sirens and screaming...  Except the unconscious mind does know. Then things get an aura, there is knowledge of changes and there are the lies.  It's a mess. 

I was lucky. Her husband recited the content of my husband's and his wife's chats and photos. I knew enough details to justify the depth and agony of betrayal I was feeling. I do not believe my husband would have told me enough, nor do I believe he would have taken responsibility.  So getting that knowledge, riding the waves of nausea with the only other person in this world who really understood, was very important to me.  And it means my 'flashbacks' the sudden, overwhelming visual image of them together, or of moments when my husband was particularly cold and cruel are pretty accurate. I am assuming they occur because my brain is trying to defrag. I'm seeing an automatic process that should run in the background suddenly brought up to the status of emergency because of the content. Each image is a severe threat to my emotional well-being, and over and over again I try to walk through it, push it down, or simply hide away to sit by myself out of fear. Fear that if...

My husband came home half an hour ago. First thing he asked me was about the sim card. Her husband smashed her phone, and the sim was in the bin...Her husband wanted the information off it and I said I'd help him.  He gave me the sim. As my husband speaks I am suddenly back there. 24th May, looking at some paper on her table that had come from my house...brown packaging decorated so it could be used for colouring in. I ripped it up and dropped it in the bin... One more betrayal, to find anything at all from my home, there.  My husband wants to know about the sim. He also tells me me a colleague has visited her to see how she is "OK, not great" and the dagger slides into my heart once more.  She is 'off sick'.  When he returned to work it took me three days to get him to understand how serious I am about no-contact. Whilst listening to Heilung on repeat, I wrote a contract called 'continuation of marriage'.  No sign = no marriage. He did not see why no-cont...

In April he got a text. It was late. I shattered. We were in bed - so it must have been late because he used to sit up until midnight, 1 am.  I said, "Sorry, but in all honesty how would I know it was over? I can't know. You wont talk to me, you dismiss every fear I've expressed. How would I know?"  He snapped back. "It's over". May 24 th at 4 am. His phone rang, he missed answering it. He got a text. He said it was a friend and he would text me later. 45 minuets later I get the text. a simple message. "I've been beaten up, going to hospital". I phoned him and heard him say, "I've been lying to you...." My sons were angry with me, and told me not to go to the hospital. I went. I'm still processing: *my sons were angry with me*. Ok, this post is low on detail, enough for you to know that my life flipped from Bohemian Middle-class, Guardian reader to the worst of Eastenders in seconds. And it continued. I purposefully turned...

Redirection! This blog was my account of living with psychosis in the family. The next episode is my account of living with betrayal. Is betrayal a common thing? Probably? But not for me. Not in my life.  OK, I will write more soon. Until then, all you need to know is - every time I wrote about how I had anxiety?  No, I wasn't anxious. I was living with someone who was lying to me. All my worst fears were true, and what actually happened was worse than I'd imagined.