[Bluebell]

I loved your opening post; as a fellow Brit I had never given much thought to the phrase in fine fettle before.  Your tales of your walks, growing veg, preserving warms my heart.  I wish you a wonderful year full of abundance.

[FaithWalker]

I'm glad you are still here and continuing to post Treasur.  Yes, I agree at what a lovely picture that was painted for me in your description.

Kind thoughts towards the nursing home and I hope this wave of the sickness isn't devastating for the folks living there and the caregivers.

[Treasur]

Hmmm, well God/the Universe seems to have decided that I was making good enough progress to throw me some more things to fettle. Either that or my Plan A that was progressing nicely needs altering 

On a side note, was listening to the Ten Percent Happier podcast this morning while working. (Heartily recommended, some interesting stuff on there including a recent podcast about how our skills base changes with age  ) anyhoo, there was a podcast with the Gottman’s who sound like very nice people. I was half-listening bc I was busy doing something else and bc I no longer see some of this stuff as relevant to me 

Two things struck me though. One was that the overarching tone of their POV just felt a million miles away from how my marriage ended. And it seemed just as bizarre now as then, but with hindsight, a lot of the ‘normal’ relationship stuff I read post BD just didn’t fit the circumstances at all. Like bringing a flan to a knife fight lol. Still find it reassuring sometimes to have those little validations of ‘yup, that really was a whole lot of WTFness, not normal for me at all’  And how unlikely it was that any ‘normal’ sorts of sultions like MC or honest conversations would have made any difference at all, so I am belatedly glad that I did not have to beat my head against particular types of walls 

The second was that they talked about loyalty....about how it is a repeating everyday kind of choice, not a one off one. My experience, and I guess the same goes for many of us, is that every bit of any loyalty in my then h just evaporated seemingly overnight. Not just to me or our marriage, but to our pets, friends home, my family, financial obligations. Just pffft....all gone. Remarkable really. Although of course in reality it must have been happening unseen by me before BD or with the transfer of those localities to other people or things. And of course so obviously nothing to do with me or any of the other things that he had previously been loyal to for years. But of course, looking back, it really explains why from my POV I couldn’t understand why my h couldn’t end his marriage but still treat me with some compassion (at least for the other troubles in my life at the time) and decency. Or why I kept getting metaphorically punched in the face for expecting that he would and looking for signs of it.....well, until I stopped expecting it  and started expecting contempt or indifference at best. And Mrs Gottman calls contempt the sulphuric acid of relationships which feels about right to me lol. I had to work pretty darned hard to not hate and feel contempt for my xh  but, regardless of how he feels/felt and while I didn’t an to explain away the unacceptable, it never felt right to me to choose to hate someone I had loved so much for so long. I can live with that but I suspect it got easier as my xh disappeared out of sight. Less exposure to the hideous stuff made it easier to choose some weird kind of quiet backshelf kind of love....well maybe it’s not love tbh, just not hate if that makes sense.

Perhaps that is my version of a kind of loyalty to both of us? I don’t know.

Still, it’s an awful thing to do to someone who loves and trusts you, isn’t it, that kind of contempt and zero loyalty or respect? Simply beyond my comprehension even now. I have no idea how one might feel secure in being loyal to anything or anyone again were I in those shoes. But as I get older, I see loyalty as a much underpraised virtue. I wonder actually if it is a pretty common LBS characteristic, loyalty towards a whole bunch of things and people. Until circumstances force us to reshuffle our allegiances perhaps. 

Will be back with an update later...

[dogwalker]

Hi Treasur.
I'm just passing thro and catching up with a few old friends. Glad to hear your doing well and Fettling along. I think that describes
my life too although Im trying also to be more frugal too .. Such old words but seem to give comfort

Take care DW.

[MadLuv]

Still, it’s an awful thing to do to someone who loves and trusts you, isn’t it, that kind of contempt and zero loyalty or respect? Simply beyond my comprehension even now

this  is and has been my biggest hurdle. I am still friends with everyone I even dated. I just don’t dismiss people who have been significant in my life. So, to have the most significant one dismiss me is the hardest to get past. Throw the disconnect with the kids it’s maddening. When my daughter died my high school sent me a hand written lovely card expressing his own pain for me. When my husband left my college bf called me to tell me what a fool he was and it wasn’t me it was him. He has called me every month since to check on me. I tell you. Those encounters have saved me from devaluation of myself. It really is THEM and not us. Still, you wonder how they carry on. I don’t think it will ever be a well lived life for them. I truly don’t. Thank you for your always i insightful  words Treasur. They always help me reflect

[Couragedearheart]

Treasur,

It’s a difficult thing to accept that other people not just think and believe differently than us, but that maybe they aren’t even working with all the same parts. My exh didn’t think like I thought because he had no ability to empathize with anyone outside himself, and a complete inability to self analyze. He says now that he feels like it was a part of himself he had no access to at all for the past 30ish years, he said it’s like waking up and realizing you have only ever been using 25% of your brain.

How could he do this too me. Easy really, he never considered me at all. He felt jealous, and shameful, and less than and inferior…..so he did things to attempt to ease those feelings, one of those was flirt with someone else. And it worked, and it worked well so he continued to do it. It worked so well he began to feel clever and cunning and special and smart for having pulled the affair off and having been the center of 2 peoples affection. He convinced himself and everyone else I must have been bad and awful and deserving of it, else why did he feel so bad before and so much better now?  Any attempts on my part to end the affair or even the deception that was fueling his feelings of being smart and clever as a mastermind, were obviously attacks. They were attacks on him and his happiness and his one chance to finally feel good about himself. And here I was the author of his misery (cause he was miserable before, and he isn’t now, so if you put 2+2 together…..)was my  attempting to destroy everything and demanding he go back to how things were.

So he lashed out. He lashed out with every bit of hurt and rage and pain from everything that had ever hurt him. All the rejection and a abandonment and fear and rage he ever felt.  And it felt good to finally stand up for himself. To not just lay down and take it. And of course the author of his misery objected to how he handled things and told him he was crazy and wrong and confused……gaslighting at its finest, but she was wrong she didn’t know he finally felt proud of himself, his ability to stand up for himself.

As long as there is someone else there to help him continue the story he made up in his head…..there’s really no reason to ever doubt it. The cognitive dissonance has no real incentive to end, in fact ending it would be an incredibly big emotional toll. As long as he can continue to project all his hurt and every emotional wound onto me then he doesn’t have to do the difficult part of feeling it. As long as he can just kept the whole thing running everything will be fine.

Then there is me. Trying to figure out how to make this a story about me….because of course well it happened too me and it sure as heck felt incredibly personal.

But then that’s partially just my ego. And partially me projecting my own value system, self work and empathy onto another person. Because the reality is if a person operated like me…..they really wouldn’t have done this to another person. Because if they thought like me or their heart was like mine…..the would have seen and known and understood the cost and the damage they were causing.
 
Sometimes I am reminded of my own blind panic at the height of my ptsd, I often wonder if that’s the space that exh just existed in. There is no way to tell what’s real, what’s the past or present, there’s just triggers and not triggers. You kind of just spend your time trying to run from triggers and huddle down in spaces that aren’t triggers and hoping it will end.

Sometimes the worst most damaging thing in the world is just a very unaware hurt person who is only doing whatever feels good to their very damaged nervous system without any further thought. Like a panicked animal in a trap attacking anyone who gets near them, or a drowning swimmer. They might never come out of that panicked response enough to realize what they did. Maybe it’s better they don’t, I don’t know. I’m not sure I would want to know that I did that to other people, it might make me harder for me to love and forgive.

Anyway

You know I am always sending you my love.
Courage

[Treasur]

Thank you for reminding me.
I don’t know if my xh had an MLC but I do have sound objective third party supported reasons to know he had a ‘something’.
With time, I forget that sometimes.

[Treasur]

Years out, it probably is worth the reminder that there was a ‘something’, but my reasons for that have changed I think. Initially it was bc I wanted to explain (and perhaps excuse a bit) why my h became what he became. I’m not sure that matters so much to me now. And I didn’t want to believe that this was who he was and that a large chunk of my life had been built on scary sand. But it is worth the reminder that there was nothing I could do about really bc it wasn’t about me. And it was just as bizarre an experience as it felt at the time and beyond my comprehension.. But still not of my creation. Like weather really.....my only choice was how wet I was prepared to get 

[Treasur]

So, that little update I promised.....

My mother got coronavirus after Christmas, was ill but survived. Her care home was closed to visitors in January bc they had a few cases. They announced they were reopening, I booked a time to see my mother....and then they had a bout of norovirus so had to close again. My mother was ill again, but survived although she is increasingly frail now so diahorrea/vomiting is not good. They are just about to reopen....and my car broke down but it will be fixed tomorrow. My friend’s mother, who also had dementia but was in her 90s as opposed to in her 70s like my mother, died so lots of long walks talking out a lot of grief.

I started Italian lessons....mi chiami Treasur, ciao  .....and I started moving forward in cleaning up some of my life admin with both anxiety and success....and I started making progress on my Plan A of ‘what the next chapter of my work/life looks like’.  I had actual real plans and timescales and s$it, go me. New work commitments, and more of them. There was a lot of good fettling going on. (Those of you who know my prior posts will know that for the longest time I could not even imagine a plan let alone put one into action so this was a big deal to me)

And then, my lovely landlord had a serious crisis in his own family a couple of weeks ago and got in touch to tell me that reluctantly his only way forward is to sell this house so he can do what he needs to do for his own family......so Gracie and me are having to look for a new home, and it is very hard/unlikely that I will be able to stay here in my little town by the sea bc it is a very expensive holiday spot for Londoners....ergo not many places to rent bc most are let as holiday homes. And it will take me another couple of years at least to get my finances back to a place where I might buy somewhere and I would never be able to afford here even so. Think over 500k for a 2 bed flat....

Well, the PTSD wolves returned in force. And brought puppies! Those of you who have got through PTSD will know what I mean.....the sad truth seems to be that I am much much better but my amygdala baseline seems to be set higher now. Grrr. I heard a woman on a podcast say that she has learned that her anxiety comes in two forms....an overwhelming pack of wolves and something that is a bit more like a relentless scratching noise at a window. This was definitely wolves  , but the scratching takes effort and energy to manage too and I seem to be stuck with patches of that. I think that when you lose a lot, or after a lot of WTF, a bit of your brain knows these things are all too possible bc it happened before, so it’s a kind of tightrope act between Fear and Realism, good and bad.

So the wolves jumped around snarling about how I was going to lose everything that mattered to me once again and how afraid I should be and how powerless I am - my new friends, my allotment, my sense of safety, my little cat bc a lot o rental homes say no pets, my walks by the sea - while the puppies yipped about shame and how much less I was than I used to be and what an irretrievable mess my life was and what a big fat failure I am and how i’m all alone and how many years I have wasted. Gah. It was horrific tbh. I think the sense of shame about my own vulnerability, about how far I had fallen financially post BD and post PTSD was the worst of it.....horrid. It was a very noisy place in my head.
But
And it’s a big But
It lasted for about three days instead of the weeks/months it would have done before. It paused me but it didn’t freeze me. It did frighten me to feel like I felt and it has woken up some grief bits bc tbh I am tired of loss so having to accept more perhaps is not easy.

I knew that some of my brain was lying. Or that it was pretending it knew what actually it couldn’t know yet. Ah, that awful catastrophising and noisy self-doubt that trauma packs, eh?

I used the old Rule of 3 to decide not to rush around finding somewhere/anywhere bc I was afraid. And decided to catch my breath and THEN start thinking about what I wanted to do. Bc after a few days I could remind myself that I had a couple of months at least, that I do have choices, that I have cash in the bank that I didn’t have a year ago. And that maybe a new chapter will unfold differently, maybe better even, in a new place. That maybe here had given me a safe place but that maybe a new place will give me a different platform to build on.

And I was impressed by my ability to be honest with my friends (bc I did need to hide in my cave for a few days which they understood) and touched by how my new chums immediately wanted to fix my problem so they could keep me around lol. It’s a funny nice feeling to realise that you matter to people again when you had to train yourself to live so solo as I did. And so many offers of help and support and fixing (even if sometimes that’s a bit exhausting bc I hadn’t got to that bit of the page yet lol)....everything from options to help packing to storage to saying me and Gracie could move in with them if needed. Gosh.

And I started to think about what I might WANT, and the pros and cons of different possibilities, as opposed to what I thought I could GET....such a big difference, the difference between surviving and living imho. We can get stuck in survival I think....I susoect I was for a long time, years. And more and more I am musing on whether what I needed 3 years ago when I moved here might now have changed.....and maybe I needed a God post it note to see that how and where you build might be different from how and where you recover....

All work in progress, so i’ll let you all know how/when the new home hunting goes. It is possible, but probably unlikely, that I will find somewhere here as all my new chums want (and are harrying friends, neighbours and town bigwigs to find lol) so I am conscious of a slow goodbye process now every time I walk in my favourite spots. But maybe the Hello will be worth it, idk. It’s interesting to see how different it is thinking about where/how to live when you really only have yourself to think about. A bit of me likes the idea of a little house in the woods where I barely see anyone lol. Another bit of me thinks it would be better to live in a place where I have old friends or can meet new humans and where I can walk out to get a pint of milk rather than drive for 20 mins  funnily enough three options have appeared - a cottage in the middle of nowhere lol, a small townhouse in a little town near where I used to live some years ago and a small cottage In a little village that my xh and me once visited and loved. Funny old universe.... I have held back from making appointments for a week or so until I felt a bit more settled in my own pros/cons and judgment....didn’t want to poke the universe until I felt able to say yes or no  ....so that work starts this week. Tbh I am also thinking about just going to visit a few towns/places to see how they feel to me before even making appointments to look at specific houses, if only to test my own gut feel on what’s next. So, we will see....right now I have no idea where I will be living in 3 months time but I feel more confident that I will find a good spot than I did at first 

Just seems like God has some different kinds of fettling challenges in mind than I thought......

And surrounding all that, a sense that a lot of things in my country are a bit broken or stuck right now. Quite a lot going on here or coming to light that is just a different kind of WTF. Don’t know if it’s my age, or a post-Covid malaise bc a lot of folks I know are a bit  about quite a few things. And I have no words for the staggering insanity of what Mr Putin might be planning for Ukraine or how it might feel to live in Kiev right now.

[xyzcf]

That is a great deal to cope with Treasur and as you say we are living in a very disturbed world. ( I live in the US which has it's own share of problems and my homeland is Canada and what has happened there in the last 3 weeks is shocking.)

I am sorry that you have not been able to see your mum. These shut downs and restrictions are very hard to just suck it up.

Our PTSD can be helped and healed somewhat with the work done and therapy.....but.....I know I am different now to how I respond to things...and "anxiety" is something that creeps in for even minor things, let alone something like having to move!

And this move is once again not of your own choosing, it's something that is "being done to you" so that makes it hard..and it is a big deal.

My home is my safe place. My community, so far away from my family are the people who I can ask to help me, if I need a ride for a medical procedure and am not allowed to drive, if I need to run something by regarding house repairs. I know someday I will need to move back to Canada, when I can't take care of things myself but I have no desire to (as well the weather here is so sunny and "warmer" than home that I am not inclined to move back north.)

It is true that we regain our equilibrium quicker than we used to.

I was just thinking of something I learned in nursing school 47 years ago, that I often used to consider what my life stress level was at...and that was the Hans Seyle Stress Scale. A very good way to understand how the combination of stressors can contribute to our own health and mental well being.
https://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory

Thanks for sharing with us all that is going on in your life. Take your time to make the choices that feel best for you.