[mermaid]

There have been many times that I’ve thought about writing here and then have thought that I really don’t know what to say. I feel like I’ve been examining myself so much, almost too much, in the past months and that there is so much inside, but that a lot of it just seems inaccessible and just comes out occasionally as tears like someone testing my reflexes on my knees. I guess I am just trying to rebuild my life, yet I also feel that I am trying so hard to “fix” myself…to understand what happened and why or even not to understand even, just to find some magic way to “release” parts inside me shaped by the past that brought me to all the experiences with my husband and still trigger pain or hold me back…those belief systems they talk about that don’t serve you…the magic wand! One year ago my husband had disappeared for 2 weeks, he had taken our car against my will after he had smashed its windows and walked off one night when I wouldn’t give him the keys to go off for the night in it with his friends. He sold the car far below its value and fast and within 2 weeks had spent all the money, much of it on gambling, thousands (and at the time I thought that that was most of the story of where it had gone, but it wasn’t) and then when it had all gone and he had actually got debt again even he called me…and…I responded. And even then I didn’t leave, it would take me returning after nearly 3 months in Mexico and then another 3 months of total craziness and so much money before I threw him out and then 3 months more before I left the country. And now here I am 🙂 I guess still quite confused about where I’m at, but at the same time positive about the future, about taking full responsibility for my life and living it how I want to, but still quite battered, quite sensitive. So much shifted when I finally left my husband, and then especially when I moved far away. So many things that now seem so crazy except for my memory of me just trying to get through it and keep my head above water had become the norm so fast, my norm, my everyday. It just felt like being so trapped…trapped in a hell and you can’t quite understand how you got there and how this person who you know you fell in love with can behave in such a way, a way that seems so very hard to understand. And yet you don’t leave and don’t leave. Anyway…it is good to remember some, but not to spend too much time on that…to be able to fill my mind with new thoughts and hopes and feelings in my body, but also to acknowledge that it happened and to grieve as well and be grateful for being able to move on. For those that really feel that there is no hope with the person they are with, then it really does change when you are no longer with them, it gives you the space to just be you and focus on yourself and all that is important to you and to take care of yourself.

[mermaid]

Well, I haven’t been writing much here (and the forum seems very quiet at the moment!) because I don’t really know what to say. I am trying to get some counselling sessions from Gamcare, but it is taking me time to organise registering with a GP after so much time away from the UK so I feel that I very much need to be talking to someone, but still haven’t organised how to do it. I have been staying with my cousins and they are taking good care of me, and I would have talked more with them, but my problems suddenly have become so trivial really in the family as my cousin was diagnosed with lung cancer last week and I have done my best to be as much support as possible and be a cheery comforting presence in the house. I still feel that I have gone through trauma and my eyes often daily just spontaneously fill with tears suddenly recalling things that happened in the last couple of years in Cuba. At some stage it would be very helpful to tell the story from start to finish to someone. I still feel very much that I need to reflect and process so I can learn and move forward from it all. I feel absolutely no bitterness or anger towards my husband in Cuba, or very little, and that surprises me. I just feel betrayed on so many levels and still find myself thinking about it all so many times every day and still dreaming about him every night (in ways that always seem to be also showing me how damaging the relationship was to me). And I can’t stop myself wondering and wondering what all was lies and what was the truth, what was “real” as people were telling me so many more things about him after I left him, but they too were also lying sometimes – I was caught up in such a web of lies, wondering who I could trust, questioning my own sanity. And also wondering how much of it was gambling. It is so hard to have a close relationship with a person who is a manipulator and to get out of that relationship once you have found yourself in it. At the moment, I just don’t know how to talk about it all. I just find myself in the UK after so many years away, and feeling so disconnected to life here (there is so so much stuff, people spend so much money, and live such different lives to the one I have bee used to!) and with so much debt and little income. But, really, I only have myself to look after and feel very lucky that I have family who are giving me sanctuary and encouragement.

[mermaid]

Thank you, Nomore. It does seem to be something we get “sucked into”…insipid and then it has taken our strength, confused us, morphed so many times, has so many layers…all the lies, the deceit, the shocks. Like trying to keep one’s head above the water in a rough sea, or surfing, and the waves keep buffetting you and taking you under. The term “co-dependency” is used quite a lot and seems to cover such a broad range of things. The brain chemistry is certainly complex and I think we are only starting to get a tiny insight into what might be happening. I still am feeling very wary, a little scared, about falling into a similar situation in the future because I got myself into and stayed in a situation that was so harmful to my own well-being, and I knew it, but I placed the focus more externally, in my husband, and in my environment, than in myself. If two people are in a relationship that goes through so much turmoil, then of course it makes sense for both to learn how to move forward from it and understand their own personal experiences. It sounds like you have weathered the storms to come out into some sunshine and it is good to hear that your husband has benefitted from his treatment. I wish you both much luck too.

[mermaid]

I often thought, while at the same time knowing that this was not how I wanted to see things or be, that it was somehow even addictive, definitely giving you shots of emotional adrenalin, the roller coaster of my life with my husband. It was also somehow like having some kind of special (and I was fully aware, messed up) bond…the cycle of discovering that he had lifted/taken/stolen another item because of his gambling/debts, the waiting for him to return (terrible, it was often several nights and days) and to see what he would confess, that “closeness” of our conversations when he was feeling all remorseful (briefly and I now don’t know how much he was faking it to manipulate me to pay his debts)…like some kind of secret dark world that only we shared, that was the basis of our intimacy. Then the hope that it would all be ok, although I knew that things were too far gone, but I fell into all the cycles and fantasies. Yes, it felt very messed up, but drama sucks you in and then things do feel kind of dull without it. It was “my story”…a more interesting narrative of my life, craziness in Cuba, far away from anywhere that offered me stability and perhaps the environment to see things more clearly, like some kind of movie that I was acting in and had forgotten that it was not real….did not have to be real….And then when I did finally decide to end the relationship, the calm did feel good, the gradual departure of all the physical sensations of stress in my body, the going to bed and sleeping, not wondering all night if and when he would come home, shaking in bed, desperate for it all to go away. And not having to guard my things, being able to safeguard my money and only be spending it on me. Not being sucked into the vortex of the drama that he created. So, Jilly, I can very much relate, and it is something that can be so hard to climb out of, but the world opens up again when one does and it is like coming out of a thick fog.

[mermaid]

Jilly, Reading your reply is so very helpful. It is often the most wonderful thing to truly be able to relate to another person, to empathise and feel understood, to share in this way – it gives so much strength. I can so relate to the drip, drip, drip and how you just find that this is your life now and it does feel kind of crazy, but that you have also developed a kind of numbness to it and that if it weren’t for all the drama you might even miss that…the highs and lows…in some crazy strange kind of way…but mostly it is just accepting that this is how your life has become, not really understanding how you got there and why you don’t act in your own best interests instead..sometimes it’s like just only being able to come up for air briefly now and then and the rest of the time you are below water fighting with the currents.

It is strange for me too to use the words “abusive” and “abuse”, but it seems to also help me to realise how much I was knocked around hard being in the relationship and how much the other person, knowingly and perhaps unknowingly, manipulated and took advantage of me. It is hard for me to describe exactly how though if someone were to ask me: “In what ways were you abused?” Financial abuse, yes, for sure. Extremely so. Which is no small thing. Emotional, definitely…much harder to explain how that all really was. But living in a world of deceit for another person’s gain. Not being shown appreciation, respect and the other person taking and taking. And when I didn’t deliver as he wanted and he was trying to get me to pay or just wanted to do what he wanted with no one to say no, then the anger and disappearances for days and nights. “They” say he was living with a 17 year-old for much of the past year, while pretending to live with me too, and then taking money from me for her. He smashed the windows of our car, then took it and sold it for much less than its value and then disappeared for 2 weeks and spent it all…a lot likely gambled, but also it seems he was in a hotel for 2 weeks, drinking a lot…women, most likely..and I thought I would leave him and didn’t…much longer story. He took all the money that was from exchanging our car when I didn’t know he had already made the transaction and disappeared for 4 days and they say he took another 17 year-old to the beach. He spent more time away from the house than there, more nights not coming home at all and then when he appeared it was drunk. He was often unrepentant. But then sometimes he was meek, tearful, like a frightened child, but this never lasted very long and never was enough to change his behaviour. Most of all he lied and lied to me and I still can’t separate the lies from the truth. I got sucked into his vortex of hurt, need and deceit and it was nearly always about him…then he would turn on the charm for a while and tell me how much he loved me and needed me and be so affectionate and it felt so “real” that the other things he did felt like they were from some dream world, that it couldn’t really be him (apart from the gambling). He took and took money, always found ways, and lied and lied to cover up what he had done with it. I believed he was another person altogether for a long time and then as more and more he did terrible things and dominated me I just lost my strength. But…I got out. And it is such a crazy thing, this love, this losing ourselves in feelings for another person and feeling it is the most important thing we have in our lives, latching on to the parts of it that do make us feel good…although they might be very few and rare…and enduring all the rest, over and over. And, yes, it is so important not to feel guilty and blame oneself…but to move forward and learn how to live how we truly want to be living and by loving oneself we show others how we want them to treat us.

[mermaid]

Thank you, Monique. I haven’t been writing here as much as I was back in the summer as I’m feeling quite stuck on what to write and what to think, how best to move forward with processing it all. I left the UK over 26 years ago and so it is very strange to be back, even if I think it will only be for some months. It is my port in a storm and my family are here and my finances are so decimated that I have no option but to live with family right now. It is also so cold!!!! Brrrrr! 🙂 So there are so many transitions and changes for me. My family are very supportive. They are focussing on the “practical things” – me getting my debt paid off, being “more settled”, putting on weight(!), etc. I tell them quite a bit about some of the things that happened, but they are the actual “acts”, physical events, and I don’t really talk about the emotional journey and how I feel, I just say that I feel a bit traumatised, but I am fine and will be able to move on fine and learn and grow from it all and not repeat the same mistakes, etc. etc. I think their attitude is that it is all over now and that I shouldn’t look back and that I should stay away from relationships for a while and from Cuba. I feel very much that I need to talk, to reflect, to process, to take my lessons from it that way. It was an abusive relationship and I was trapped in it for a couple of years. That is not sooo long. I have no children with my husband. He is now geographically a long way away. But I know how hard it was for me to get out, how low I had to get, how easy it was for me to take the harm he was doing to me over and over, how I enabled and enabled, how I really made it all far worse by how I acted, promoted his behaviour, sometimes handed it to him on a plate, and really how easily I got sucked back in over and over. A lot of it was about gambling, and his behaviour became so extreme around it and he just kept going and going, taking anything he could as collateral, chasing and chasing his losses. Padlocks didn’t work and I had to keep things in the house next door and he even took the laptop when I was in the shower. But, also I don’t really know how much of what he said was gambling really was, either. When he saw that I was sympathetic to him being an addict and needing to get help (even when I told him it was his path to walk, he saw obviously how I kept helping him avoid getting into further trouble and how I was less upset (sometimes) when he could say it was gambling) he used this as well. In Cuba it is common for people to lie and manipulate. Not everyone is the same of course. But there are many people who lie and deceive. 60 years of communism has created a society of hustlers, in many ways. My situation was immersed in that environment. It got to the stage where I didn’t know who to believe. I learned late on that my husband is a compulsive liar and often lying for seemingly no reason, but also to manipulate and to not have to face the consequences when he has done something “bad.” There were stories about what he was doing that were so shocking, like some kind of crazy movie. The hardest for me, I think, was to live in this web of lies and gradually find out more and more that he had been lying about so many things. I couldn’t trust him and I couldn’t trust myself in that environment. I didn’t know who to believe or who to turn to. At first I thought the lying was only mainly connected with the gambling, but then it just came out more and more. But my husband could say that it was others who were lying, as they were too, for their own reasons, their own gain, to protect themselves, to protect him ,and so I often chose to believe him instead. I couldn’t find the ground beneath my feet. And even with all this, I didn’t want to leave Cuba, had become so used to it, love it, was attached to being there. So I had to pull myself away from Cuba to be away from him, too. So here I am in a gambling support forum, yet of course there is always so much more going on. With my situation, this feels especially so. I would love to have “answers”, to be able to separate the truth from the lies, but I know that I will have to come to my own peace, that there are many things I will probably never know. It still feels so confusing. I feel I can’t trust my own judgement. Friends tell me I let people walk all over me, that I trust too much, that it was my own fault, etc. I want to learn how to “stand up for myself”, know how to impose healthy boundaries (“Little Miss Boundary”), look after myself better. I feel I have experienced very much how “love makes you blind” and it feels…well, scary. So, I am very much wanting to learn and grow, also to reflect and process. I’ve been in such a world of lies and manipulation, in a culture that was not my own, with its challenges, but with many aspects that I grew to appreciate. Gambling was a part of it, but not in the way I believed it was last summer. I also saw how strong I felt when I left Mexico to return to Cuba and how when I got there, back in the situation there, that I wasn’t able to act at all how I thought I would be able to, that I found it so hard to protect myself, that I needed to go through so much suffering before I climbed out of it. I did in the end, and with the support of some very good people in Cuba. And really now I am wondering how I feel. and how to move forward.

[mermaid]

Thank you so much, all of you, for your replies and caring empathetic words. It is good to be back! So many times in Cuba I wished I could access this site, but I stayed away just in case it might affect my husband, even when it got to the point where sometimes I didn’t care and I believed that he deserved more time in prison. It does still feel very unreal and I wonder so much about what really did happen and what others told me was happening. What I actually experienced with him was terrible enough, but then there are stories and stories, such as him leading a double life for many months with a 17 year-old and some of the money he got out of me for supposed gambling debts going to support her….it all feels very surreal. I feel this could all happen because of so many lies and all the deceit surrounding the gambling behaviour. It sucks you in to such an unreal world and you end up questioning everything, and often your own sanity.

I went back to Cuba determined that I wasn’t going to give him any more money or things he could pawn/sell for gambling or pay his debts. Straight away he greeted me with debts and trying to force me to pay and find ways to get at money somehow and responded with extreme anger and sometimes disappearing if I didn’t. When I did manage to keep funds from him to go and gamble he always found a way and it wasn’t until I split with him that he explained how he had debts all over town as he would go to people and ask them for money to start the gamble and then at the gambling places he would continue to borrow money, large sums. So each time I finally gave in and paid his debt believing it was all the people who ran the illicit gambling places and had their big black men heavies come to the house…it was always several debts all around town that they would not have pressured him to pay in anywhere near the same way. I guess, in the end, he always found a way and would always, and the more money he lost, the more he chased.

The world of lies and deceit is so so destructive. The abandonment over and over. The empty promises. The withdrawal and moods. The complete manipulation. I think some things will come out in the wash over the coming weeks and months and from afar I will learn more about what happens with my husband…and I do want to know. I do want to understand what parts of it were lies. Because in the end, when he saw my “understanding” for his gambling, how I forgave and forgave, everything was about the gambling, and it seemed he had no problem in revealing it to me…and I still don’t know if some, maybe quite a lot wasn’t, although I do know that he was and will gamble in any way he can, and has done since he was a boy, that it completely consumes his life. I was a gift from heaven for him and his gambling compulsion and fed and fed it for over 2 years. But now I have left and Cuba feels very far away.

I am trying to sift through it all bit by bit and rebuild my life and the worst is definitely behind me. I will need to accept many things I will never know. I do wonder how I could have been so stupid, so trusting,so forgiving and so lacking in care for myself, but I know that is all past now and I just need to try to grow from it all.

So so nice to be here! So lovely to read your replies. Thank you! I will gradually catch up with people here and start posting as I get a little more settled. I feel a little “needy” for now and that perhaps I am in a place where I am looking more for support than I can give to others, but hopefully with time…

[mermaid]

Hi Everyone, I am back after 6 months! I just got to the UK a few days ago and am really not sure where and what next. It has definitely been a journey in the past half year since my couple of months last summer here with the support of GT. I am still trying to process, understand what I can, accept what I can’t, heal, and move on. In the end, I just wasn’t able to embrace what I had learned here and look after myself well in Cuba. My husband’s behaviour just battered and battered me and I let it beat me down and things felt desperately hard for a few months and I felt very alone with it all. There was the gambling, but much more going on and the level of lying and deceit and absence/abandonment connected with the gambling created a whole world of confusion and mistrust and people all around me telling me he was not gambling, it was other things…..wild partying, drinking, women…and it may very well have been a lot of that, too, I don’t know if I will ever know. But, I know I experienced enough personally to see the gambling be extreme and it was so destructive and I found it so hard to protect myself, and just to stop paying the debts when I didn’t want to at all but felt somehow forced to protect him from the possible consequences that he always told me would happen to him. There was so much manipulation and I succumbed to it so much. I tried to padlock and protect things and he took hidden money, padlocked TV, laptop, speakers, bicycle and, and…even when I was in the shower and he had quickly returned to the house. Actually in the end there was professional support available, for addicts in general, mainly oriented towards alcoholics as it seems no gambling addict seeks help in this way in Cuba, and I hung on to see him finally go to a session with the psychologist, but then could just not tolerate any more and had lost all my money, even wondering how I was going to eat. For me right now, I am trying to sift through how I feel and what I believe happened as so much of my life with my husband may have been just lies and deceit and the stories…the gossip…what people told me about him once I had left him were mind blowing, really. I am looking at support for people who have been in relationships of narcissistic abuse as it seems to fit my experience and will see how I can find myself some counselling support and read what I can. I need to start again financially, career wise, with a place to live…with so many things, and have so much debt, but I am at least out of the relationship and away from the environment where it all happened. And…I am happy to be back here and to have a place to read and express and process my feelings and experience.

[mermaid]

Well here I am at the airport my last chance to access this site for a while although i know i will often strongly wish i could and wonder about all of you i have interacted with here. I will be back though and there will be updates. I am so grateful for the replies, the advice, the support, the sharing here. It has made all the difference and now i have to build con it all and put things into practice, which means a bit of reinventing myself too! Rome wasnt built in a day! I do get some of the messages loud and clear now, finally. Sometimes it is as much the f&f of cgs as well as them who dont want to face up to the truth. I will be thinking of you and cheering you on from my Caribbean Islandia. Be strong everyone. What a wonderful siete this is. V, thank you!!! I hope that cyber toast brings good things.

[mermaid]

Well, I bought my flight for Saturday and I am just going to go, armed with all I have learned…all the theory, and it is time to see how I go with putting it into practice. As I arrive in Cuba there will be a full lunar (“supermoon”) solar eclipse. I hope it ia a good sign for an emerging of a new me! 🙂 Reading the posts on Eva´s thread this morning was good….can never have too much repetition on self care!

[mermaid]

Thanks Vera, you always drop by and give me the jolt. And I truly appreciate it. Ok, I get it now! I think I was getting it before, but I didn´t want to listen to myself (like the cg!!!).

I hadn´t seen him controlling his gambling in a long time….but I guess he has bouts of being able to control it a little more, a little less…to keep on gambling at different levels, but to keep on doing it somehow. He overshoots still fairly often, but by lesser amounts sometimes, knowing somehow how much he will be able to dig himself out afterwards. He has got himself into situations that have really scared him and not been able to getout of them for weeks, but they have not been enough for him to take actions to stop. They can get pretty low, but cg´s forget fast and bounce back.

Nothing much has changed. He is still doggedly holding onto the addiction. He is figuring out how he can keep it going one way or another. He uses and more words that sounds more convincing, uses more I Promises, but they don´t mean anything.

He returned very briefly to Facebook. He admitted that he had gambled the money, still saying that he didn´t want questions…ok, I understand…he doesn´t want questions, I don´t want lies.

He is being all….needy. He wanted to know when I will be getting on a flight and if I will so he can know, because. ..he is suffering so much with me dragging it out and he wants to ask the judge on Friday for permission to travel to Havana to meet me and he has to know when I am flying by Friday so he can ask him, and then he has to travel that same day as they can only release him the same day (generally, he is not allowed to leave the province during his parole period and people´s movement in general is very tightly controlled in Cuba, and especially people of descent from the east of the country – it is easy to get into trouble). So he wanted to put me on the spot, a few minutes of Facebook time. All he wants is to be with me and never leave me, etc. etc. And this just as I am realising how much he has continued to gamble. Ugh, its all so icky co-dependent. 🙁

So I told him to find a bit of money and get in touch with me tomorrow. That I will think it over and we will talk tomorrow.

I feel so tired from it all today. I am more resolved to be firm now. No more enabling. If he doesn´t want me to completely control the moneyand stick with it then there are no options for our relationship to continue. I will go back to Cuba…but I haven´t decided when yet. I want to have the conversations with him face to face and, if need be, I want to take my leave in a different way than in July. And I want to go to the beach!

I have my armour on, the drawbridge up and I don´t see an of it through rosy coloured spectacles. I may still be a bit squishy, but there are no more chances now.

[mermaid]

Thank you, V. As always your response is so helpeful and I already feel better. I don´t want to budge and I want to give him some thinking time and for him to be aware that…well, I have power at the moment as I can choose when or if to return to Cuba, and he has been quite desperate for me to do so. He knows what I am asking of him, really.

And I was thinking about it more and do believe he gambled it…he got so upset and stubborn about my asking…money just evaporates from him without the gambling, but he was telling me how a few weeks back he had to sell his clothes, etc. and he probably needed to do that combined with the money I had sent him because of a gambling episode. And, perhaps he also did the same last week when he got annoyed because he had borrowed money from someone based on expecting me to have sent him some. Perhaps he has changed his style and manages not to overshoot *so* much…I can´t know from here. I do now highly suspect he gambled this set of money, weeks back, though, and for now I will assume that was the case. And that the lies around his gambling continue and the lack of willingness to truly let me control the finances when I am there still exists.

Very little progress 🙁 Less than I had thought. I believe he is *trying* but he has no support…and the reality is that there is no support…there is just me….and I am also his closest target.

I will sit tight for a while longer in Mexico….I will eat tacos and drink tequila. I will work on a design for my Little Miss Boundaries cartoon figure.

Thank you so much, this site is so so so helpful.

[mermaid]

Well, Little Miss Blob who is trying to be Little Miss Boundaries is struggling, but…trying. My husband was back on Facebook this morning, in a good mood, wanting to know when my flight was for. I told him firmly that I didn´t want any more lies, that 100% honesty is fundamental. He said he would not lie to me anymore on this particular issue that it is all about – detail of what happened to some money and that´s why he told me the truth yesterday, but…he didn´t tell me what happened to the money and only said he would tell me when I got to Cuba. I asked him if he had lied to me because he thought I would be annoyed, and he said, yes, a bit. Then I asked him to explain again with the money, but not the details, that we could talk about it when I got there. He just got totally annoyed, said, enough no more. I said I wanted to know and wanted to know that I could trust and that I am waiting for him to show me I can trust before I organise my flight. He said I am always talking about problems and he wants to talk about other things, know that I am well, etc. and he said no more, I´m leaving, and we ended the conversation, both upset.

I can´t get him to open up and tell me what happened with this particular amount of money. He just gets so annoyed that I keep asking him, interrogating him, and he digs his heels in. I know it is futile. I actually don´t think he used the money to gamble, it got spent in other ways that he thinks I wouldn´t approve of. But it is his gambling “beast” also that likes this being able to have control over me not interrogating him over money, and that feels the shame.

He could very well go and gamble now because he is upset.

So…I am actually ready to go to Cuba, have the practical things pretty much organised, but…I am sitting tight now to see what he does. I don´t want to negotiate this whole transparency about money thing (and there is a history we have on his bad use of money and just doing things with it without telling me that goes far beyond the gambling) when I get there, I want to do it now before travelling. I don´t want to budge. And I see that it will be a problem over and over when I am there. He just wants to still have things on his terms, that if he doesn´t want to tell me at a certain time he won´t. Of course it is futile to try to make him. I had believed we had got beyond this stage…

Even though I am completely alone here in Mexico, I have to stay strong and stand up to this. I can´t buy my flight yet. He has to know that I don´t want to go back to him when he acts this way. But I know he doesn´t understand why I am insisting and I can´t make him understand.

I am so so sad again.

[mermaid]

I´ve been quietly reading the posts on the site, relating to much of what they say, but at the same time trying to distance myself some from thinking too much about all of this…it has been feeling a bit too much…worrying about what might happen in the future, what might be lies, what could have happened instead…what if…? It is so hard to have lost trust and then end up questioning everything, and think how to rebuild that trust (yes…by seeing actions…).

If my husband is changing his gambling/manipulating patterns to adapt to changes in me, then…it would be very hard for him to do. It would mean that he has been able to control himself and no longer overshoot (just gambling exactly the amount of money he had) – and he normally overshoots by a lot of $ – and no longer chasing for several sessions in a row. That would be suddenly a lot of control for him, and just a big change.

It is in the calm again…that cycle…he is trying not to, he is feeling “very normal” himself and that he has things under control…and I am extremely wary, anxious and thinking about my return at the end of the week. There have been positive changes and I see him wanting to make it work…I just have to be there to see how we navigate things together.

I am trying not to focus too much on the gambling as such, on the past. And not to worry about the things I don´t know. I am finding I am questioning my husband a lot and that makes me feel awkward, and that I also want to mention the G word less to him right now than I have been, and not to remind him why I feel so nervous so often still. I…try to justify myself to him…too much. But I feel he expects more trust than I can give right now and he needs to earn that trust (which, really he knows). I am just hoping he gets himself sorted out with his new work, and that we can eventually work out a house to live in…a bit more foundation! From that foundation we will see about the G stuff too and the terms we negotiate together.

Really, I am just feeling a bit drained from lots of G thinking and the search to trust.

[mermaid]

Thank you, M for posting on my thread. Your great kindness comes across in your words. It truly sounds like you are moving forward and progressing well in the School of Self-care! Yay! 🙂 Although there might be times when it feels a little harder, you seem to be living more in the present and looking forward to the future than dwelling on the past. Your mind is freer to focus on how you want your life to be, and on your daughter. It must be very hard sometimes to watch her with your ex, a little bittersweet perhaps, but at the same time, it sounds good that he is being more responsible with her. I totally understand that you have your guards up, of course…and wonder when his next slip will be, when his behaviour will deteriorate for again, but at least you are stronger and more protected so it will all not affect you as much in the past and you will keep learning and getting stronger. He has noticed the change in you too, and that seems a good thing. I´m encouraged by reading your posts and being in the group with you…it makes me see how positive steps can be taken. It doesn´t matter if it takes a while to learn and to embrace them, they happen and they bring results. 🙂 I am not gone yet, but I will be thinking of you often in Cuba and waiting to be able to get an update when I next take a break.
xx

[Author]

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