YAY! SNOW DAY. Words can not explain how happy I was to roll over, pick up my phone, and see two text messages telling me to stay home, work was canceled, and I'd still be getting paid. Hells yes. On top of the fact that I only worked 2.5 hours on Veterans Day and I was given 6 hours of holiday pay just for being employed with my company on said holiday? No complaints here! I'm basically getting 13 hours of pay, for doing NOTHING. MAUAHHAHAHA.
Anyways, I've been promising a write up about our first therapy session and I suppose I should get around to that before I forget everything that was said. First of all, I was supposed to have an individual counseling session right before our marriage one, but when she saw we were both there (they were literally back to back) she changed her mind and decided to just pull us both back together. Once in the room she told me that they were trying to cut back on individual counseling sessions that the in house therapists conducted because there are so many crazy people and not enough staff. She asked me if I'd be okay doing Therapy over Skype with someone in Hawaii. I'm not really thrilled about this idea, but I understand that marriage and children's counseling needs to be done in person, so I'm okay with at least trying talking to a computer and seeing how it works. I got my appointments set up for that and I'll let ya'll know how that goes once it happens.
In marriage counseling news though, it went great. Seriously great. Husband and I are pretty open with each other about negative feelings once we hit the blow up stage so nothing that was said was really a surprise to either of us. I wish I had something concrete to really talk about, but it was the first session and we didn't really get into anything too heavy. Our therapist did however put his gaming into a bit more perspective for me. It's no secret that Husband hates the Army. It may not be the entire branch, but this post is the death of careers. People arrive high speed soldiers sure that they want to be in for a career and within a year are shit bags counting down the days until their contract is up. Husband tends to get shit on, a lot. A lot a lot. He's miserable at work and is constantly assigned the stupid mind numbing tasks because he's only required to do his job when the radar breaks. The rest of the time he's on bitch duty. He said that he doesn't feel validated, and that he feels worthless at work because he's doing something you could train a monkey to do. When he comes home and games, he has a whole world that looks up to him. He spends more time helping other people level up than he does working on his own character. He gets thanked, people care about him, if he's offline for a few days when he signs back in people were worried, they want to know he's okay. He feels important when he's playing these games because the people he plays with make him feel important. It both amazes me that he can get that kind of validation from a video game character wielding an imaginary sword, and breaks my heart that I can't give him that. I wish that I could make him feel validated, that I could make him feel important, because he is. He's an amazing man and the most important person in my life, and it kills me that I can't make him feel that way. Although I still hate his computer and couldn't ask for a better gift than a baseball bat and permission to break that thing into a tiny million pieces, I understand a lot better now why he feels the need to game. We're working on trying to find a happy medium of him still being able to blow off steam, and me not feeling like a glorified maid that sometimes gets paid in sex. It's a work in progress but over the past few months he has gotten a lot better at balancing his time. He's not getting up super early to play anymore, and he really only completely disappears on weekends that he has friends over, and even then he's getting better at at least coming upstairs and spending an hour or two with me before returning to the man cave. It's hard, but we're getting there.
Another thing that we talked about that really blew my mind, and I actually remember thinking "That's going to be such a great thing to blog about!" (cause I'm a freaking loser like that) came from a discussion about money. We're both pretty crappy with it, but we've come a long way from overdrafting the account $400 the first time he got paid. Yeah, it was bad. He said that he feels a million times better and that a lot of stress was lifted off of his shoulders by me getting a job and bringing in money as well. She asked him how he felt when I wasn't working and he said there was a small part of him that resented me for getting to stay home when he had to go put up with all of the bullshit everyday, but that's not how he really feels. That overall he just wants me to be happy and he'd do whatever it took to make sure that I was. She clung to that small part of him and explained an amazing analogy that kind of just shocked me into amazement because I had never looked at it like that. Those little voices, the nagging "well this is stupid, don't do that, they suck, etc. etc. etc." You have to listen to those voices, you don't have to do what they say, but you have to acknowledge that they're there, because those voices are the cause of self sabotage. She said to pretend you have a big conference table inside of you, and all of your emotions are sitting around it. If you don't listen to what each and every one of them has to say, and give them a chance to tell their side of the story, they're just going to get louder and louder trying to be heard, and eventually if you don't listen to that little negative dude and give him the floor, he's going to sneak away from the table, come in through the back door, and burn the whole fucking building down. Teach you not to listen to him! For some reason this really resignated with me. We all spend so much time trying to shut out those negative voices in our head, but is it really doing good or is it causing more damage? I know if I try to avoid that voice long enough I eventually become overwhelmed with a case of Idon'tgiveafuckitis and my life tends to go down hill pretty quickly. But what happens if you listen to that voice? Let him vent his frustrations, tell you WHY he feels the way he does? Don't give him the gavel and let him lead the rest of your emotions, but acknowledge it, face why you're feeling what you're feeling head on. I tend to hide from my problems instead of dealing with them, so I loved this analogy and will be holding conference calls a lot more when I start to feel like things are slipping away from me.
The last thing that we talked about was the fact that we seriously have the same four-six issues that annoys the crap out of us about the other person. We both know what the other person doesn't like, we know that it hurts them, that they're the causes of all of our fights, and we change them for a bit... but then fall back into the same things all over again. We were given the homework assignment of just noticing when we're doing something we know the other person wouldn't like. Not changing it, not saying "Oh I'm sorry, I know you hate this." Just noticing. How often do I leave the dishes until morning.... for a week? How often does "I just need to finish this dungeon" turn into it's been three hours dude, the movie is already over?
I do have to say though, once we left our session we talked about it a little bit, not a whole lot just expanding on points that were made. I told him that I could understand his gaming a little bit better and he could understand why I feel like crap that he can't get that validation from me. He was so loving for a few days after the session it was almost nauseating, and I loved every second of it. I was told he loved me at least 500 times in four day in at least half as many ways. He gave me a million kisses, and told me I was beautiful multiple times. He's not an outwardly affectionate person most of the time so this melted my heart. He pretty much only tells me he thinks I'm pretty if he knows I'm having a "I'm fat and disgusting and I hate myself" kind of day, so to hear that when I was actually feeling decent about myself felt awesome. On the off chance that I have any male readers, seriously, tell her she's pretty. Even if she looks like shit and has eye boogers, it means the world coming for you.
So there's the super long drawn out bat shit crazy marriage post. We're going to be seeing her twice a month, and I'll be seeing my individual counselor twice a month, which makes me love the fact that my job has such flexible schedules because that's a lot of missed work for a normal 9-5.I've realized that I really suck at ending blog posts, I never know how to finish them. I feel like with something so serious I need a profound quote or something that sums everything up, but you know me, that's not going to happen. So instead I leave you with this:
Vagina.
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