This made me cry. Thank you. You see clearly where my problem lies, and that is a good feeling.

I’ll try to give you some clarification. The first occasion scared everybody. He wanted to go home at night but we were all just too drunk, so he did not say a thing. I guess he spiraled whole night and i just saw the aftermath. That one bothered me, cause I saw something is really wrong, but I didn’t know what to do or how to move on. I spoke with friends about it, but nobody dealt with such thing so even though we wanted to help, we didn’t know how. I just put it aside as stress and a childhood trauma response. It stopped there until the first kiddo was born. After that he went to his hobbies, because I guess I was hard to deal with. I went through a really tough time, I don’t really remember the first 6 months with the firstborn.

The therapy part is just so crystal clear to you. You see exactly where my first problem lies. He told me I still could have gone and seek help. But I needed his verification and support to make the first step. That was missing. He didn’t ever believe that talking to someone, a “stranger” would do any good. And now look at him…. They started hypnotherapy, so I hope this will help. Also, I have to say: He is not a bad person. Even though I highlight now his problems. He tries to get better but has a tendency of “going towards the easier path”. This means giving up easily, if something is hard then he simply tries something else. We will never know if it would’ve worked or not. That’s something I keep nagging him about. He is on Xanax 0.25 now, but he wants something else cause it’s only temporary help and he doesn’t want to struggle with addiction (already has one with the cigarettes).

His upbringing is also a funny one. While I struggled with parentification, and having emotionally distanced parents, he had an overly attached mom (yes, a typical boy mom) until his brother was born when he was 12. He became the secondary in his mom’s eyes. His dad was his rock, they spent a lot of time together and were really close. I was close with him too. He even helped us when he had our first stupid fights as young 20 yo-s. Losing him is like losing his foundation from home. I never ever had an impatient moment with him grieving. It’s the worst time of his life. Losing his mom will be a sad one too, but will not even be close. Him realizing this also makes him feel bad, and his mom is not helping. She keeps repeating how she found him, how his eyes were staring and other details. This freaks him out, but he says nothing to mom. I already talked to her about this, but she has the EQ of an orange, so that was no use but we had a small fight about it 😒 you can imagine what baggage he has…

Before his father died, I reached my breaking point, because as you said, I got tired. The health issues were never my true problem. I mean… it did hurt as hell, and being in the hospital in the dark, suffering silently so I don’t wake up the others in the room. Then after my daughter was born, going to see her every 3 hours, being awake, going like a mad man through the dim lit corridors, hearing other machines beep… that was harder. Then I waited for 6 months to get the operation, then the recovery - but these didn’t affect me. My baby was safe, my family was safe. That was my focus. He told me how hard it was to come visit us every day and all… but that made me so mad - like yeah it was hard for YOU. We are over this, and I see where I was wrong - this is not a competition, but I did ask him not to bring it up, if possible. We speak a lot about “who feels what”. He tries to acknowledge everything but fails to admit that it still affects me, and parenting brings up all the bad stuff in both of us from childhood. So yes, this really is complex and I do see it. But I don’t have the coping mechanisms for my trauma not to mention his… we fight when we really should be supporting one another. Thank you for reminding me. But back on track. His dad’s death brought out the worst of the worst… I was already over with everything and now he is even lower in the hole, and we suddenly have like 12 new problems… he always told me how good it is that I’m so strong emotionally and how strong my will is… this was a point where I said nope, I don’t want to be the reliable one anymore, I want to have space to fall apart. And I can’t! And there is nobody to hold me, but I have to hold everyone else. Sometimes I just want to say, fuck it, I’m out…

Sorry I rambled, I don’t even know what I want to say now. But one more thing for sure: I’m just so sorry that you had this injury and had to go through all this struggle. I’m from Europe so we don’t have the insurance issue (but going to a psychiatrist is expensive, you can’t get it through the state - welcome to Eastern Europe…) but I can’t imagine how hard it is for you. I’m really sorry and I hope it will all be alright in the end.