Yay for communication

Therapy last night felt like a win. And I don’t know if you’ll ever appreciate how much that truly means to me.

I pretty much live or die by the strength of my relationships. My marriage, my friendships, my relationship with my therapist…when things are stable, I feel good. When they’re not…holy shit do things get bad.

Right now, my marriage is…it’s good, but I can see some red flags popping up. Things happening that have happened in the past when we were bad.

My therapist keeps reminding me that my alcohol use will eventually affect my relationships. And as my drinking gets worse, I think I’m starting to see that. Things right now are fine, but I feel like things are at a turning point right now.

I can either keep drinking the way I am, and my relationships will probably fall apart, or I can do something different and go nowhere near the pain and turmoil that my drinking will bring.

Last night in therapy we talked about my best friend and how I reached out to her. I showed her our conversation, and I think she was really glad that I actually reached out to someone and was honest. Even if it wasn’t my husband, it’s still a good start. So we talked about concrete ways that my friend could actually help me, and she had me write down a specific and concrete goal for the week.

Honestly, this weeks goal is super easy and I’m not too worried about meeting it. I just have to measure what I’m drinking, everything I’m drinking, and log it. And then show it to my friend every morning and bring it to therapy with me next week. So I’m not trying to change the amount of drinking for this week, just measure it and log it to see where we’re starting.

We also spent a long time talking about the thing that happened that upset me over the weekend. Even thought I wrote about what happened in pretty good detail, she made me talk about it with my words. Ew. Disgusting. It made me feel all types of awful to talk about it instead of her just reading what I wrote. She did eventually read what I wrote but not before she made me use my words. Gross. It was actually physically painful for me to talk about, but I’m glad we had the conversation and that I was able to open up about it.

I left therapy feeling better than I did when I went, and I always use that as a measure of success.

I measured my drinks last night and stuck to my goal, I talked to my friend and told my husband that I wanted to talk to him…so maybe that will happen too.

Life is hard. My life seems exceptionally hard sometimes. But I’m doing the best I can. Communication and honesty are so important in maintaining healthy relationships, and I’m grateful for the people in my life that I’m able to have those relationships with.

I’m glad that therapy went well last night. Because right now, it feels like nothing else is. I feel like my life is on really unstable ground right now. And I desperately need some stability and for things to be ok.

Life is hard. Talking about things helps.

Even when that sucks.