Day 5

Perhaps my personal favorite of the new steps Hubs and I have managed to insert (prayers on-going) into our tit-for-tat cycles is the recovery step. Those tit-for-tat skirmishes are brutal, both emotionally and physically. The skirmishes between Hubs and I have yet to degenerate into blatant domestic violence, but even without the blunt force trauma, the sustained emotional charges and manuevers have a marked physical component. Tuesday's skirmish was short and mild on our strictly personal scale, but exhausting, nonetheless.

During morning libations on the front porch yesterday, Hubs shocked me by speaking of his own residual symptoms from the skirmish. lt was the first time I remember him bringing it up. In my strictly personal therapy, this step is part of treating my psychotiic episodes like a case of emotional flu. Does it get more psychotic than domestic tit-for-tat? Are we really spending this much energy arguing over who is more tired? Are we really gouging each other's heart out over whose pain is more valid? To my just-a-patient senses, that feels like psychosis personified.

Proof unavailable, but yesterday felt like solid progress. We continued discussing the passionate topics which we volleyed during the tit-for-tat skirmish in far gentler and compassionate tones with generous sprinklings of self-care and gentle diversion. It turned in to a house-piddle day, just piddling around the new-to-us house, moving a brick here and plying a screw there. While we wound down for bed time, I moaned that the visit is already more than half over. Time is going way too fast. I quipped that maybe we should get back to the tit-for-tat so that the rest of the visit would feel longer. He began grumbling Groucho Marx style and I grumbled back Gracie Allen style. The splash of humor didnae slow the hands on the clock at all. Sigh. . .

Onward to day 6. Small steps, big faith and lots of prayer. . . Letting God lead the dance.