How do I pull back, move forward and not 'fix' it?

[Love79]

My husband is an amazing man, but we have found ourselves so stuck in the daily routine of life. We have both made decisions that have affected us, and I acknowledge my decisions while stuck in my own spiral have affected him greatly.

We have been financially stressed for years, and feel like we haven't gotten anywhere. We have arrived at a crucial point in our lives and I feel we were making progress with plans, but to do this we need to do some things that don't sit right with either of us. I am taking the path that it is a stepping stone (of which we have had many) and he is feeling like it is putting him back in prison and he is stuck.

He acknowledges that this is depression due to environment, and I am petrified that he will leave and we won't get the opportunity to live our dreams.

We are both suffering anxiety for different reasons, and he recently admitted that the thought of spending time alone with me creates an anxiety in him but he can't explain why.

I know I have let him down in the past, and please don't get me wrong, he is also not perfect, just me acknowledging my contribution to his unhappiness, but I have recognised everything and honestly validated his feelings with him, and felt we took a huge leap forward, and now his anxiety is overwhelming him.

He feels he is not the father he wants to be, the husband he wants to be, has taken a job he doesn't want to do in a place he hates, but the thought of relocating (which we were in talks and plans for) is too much for him.

I love him but I feel that I am a huge trigger for him at the moment, how do I do this?

[Sophie_M]

Hi Love79,

Thank you for sharing so openly. It’s clear how much you care about your husband and your family, and how hard you’re trying to hold things together through what sounds like a really stressful and uncertain time. It must feel painful to see the person you love struggling and to feel that you might somehow be part of that pain, even when you’re doing your best to make things better.

You’ve shown such awareness and empathy in the way you’ve reflected on everything that’s happening. Sometimes, when both people are dealing with anxiety and low mood, it can be really difficult to find a way forward together, even small steps can feel overwhelming. It might help to have some extra support for both of you right now, especially from someone outside the situation.

You or your husband could reach out to Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636) or Lifeline (13 11 14) to talk things through with a counsellor anytime. If he’s open to it, MensLine (1300 78 99 78) offers free support for men struggling with stress, relationships, or depression. You might also want to look into a service like Relationships Australia (1300 364 277), which provides affordable counselling for couples and families who are trying to reconnect and manage these kinds of challenges.

You’re doing a really loving thing by reaching out and asking how to approach this thoughtfully. Sometimes, simply creating space for both of you to breathe and talk honestly without trying to fix everything at once can help shift things gently forward.

Take care of yourself too,
Sophie M

[therising]

Hi Love79

I really feel for your and your husband so much. I think one of the toughest things about the 'Things have got to change, they just can't keep going on the same way' factor in a marriage is the incredible level of discomfort that can come with it. Having been married to the same guy for 23 years, my husband an I have had that talk in recent times. 

Some of the things that can make this stage of a relationship so tough can involve

• The need to be honest with each other, especially about emotions or feelings
• The need to do be honest with ourself when it comes to where we're at mentally, emotionally etc
• The need to start asking a lot of questions, on the quest to reform the relationship. One of the major questions can be 'How did we get to this point?'. Hindsight can offer a lot of revelations
• The need to develop a shared vision that resembles progress of sorts. Seriously tough when all you're used to looking forward to is maybe degrees of disappointment, no end in sight when it comes to financial stress and stuff along those lines. How to see things differently can take a serious stretch of the imagination and/or sometimes some solid guidance from someone who can offer us their vision, one we haven't considered
• The need to break certain long term habits, especially ones that have created a comfort zone to fall back into when the relationship presents so many uncomfortable challenges and emotions

Just a handful of factors in a long list of challenges. 

Not sure whether you can relate but I've found falling back into reliable comfort zones really tests me. Whether that zone involves emotional eating, emotional drinking or some other emotional reliance that's not so good for us, it can be so hard to break those habits. What begins as an innocent thing that can offer us a sense of relief or joy at the time, can become a habit before we know it. To add to it, what becomes the easiest thing to do can replace the practice of rising to challenges. Personally, I discovered this rather recently. Being out of practice, when a new challenge does comes up and I have no choice but to face it I simply become stressed or anxious a lot of the time. While emotional eating has become my comfort zone, I was never able to see it actually becoming my prison cell at the same time. Each developing bar of our cell can represent something, such as low self esteem or a lack of trust in our ability to manage, missed opportunities to gain certain life skills, a lack of practice in exercising the imagination outside the zone, the loss of much needed opportunities to address deep emotions etc etc. Eating, drinking, 'retail therapy', gambling etc helps develop all those bars of our cell and it can keep them firmly in place until such habits or addictions are broken. 

Reforming a marriage can be such an intense thing because there's so much involved on both a surface level and a deep level at times. Definitely a test of the partnership in so many ways. I've found what is tested above all else is the friendship. I wonder whether it would make some difference if you were to ask 'What do I need and expect in a friendship and what can I give?'. I'd say one of the most mind altering questions I've ever asked in my marriage was 'Were we ever really good friends to begin with or did we just find ourself in a relationship together?'. It definitely helped shed light on a lot of issues.