Damn! Are you sure you’re not an English PhD? 🙂

So let’s break it down: 1) Currently you are physically safe, right? I mean you have a roof over your head, food and water, no one is threatening or harming you, right?  2) Currently your daughters are safe too, right? I mean they are not being harmed in any way?  If these are both true, then the enormous urgency to take this first scary step right now is that you can’t bear the torture that’s going on between your ears a second longer, nothing more, right? But we already determined that making a life-changing decision from an unhealthy mental state isn’t a wise move, didn’t we?

You may say, No,  that’s not quite accurate. The real urgency is that my daughters have been without their dad for too long and I need to fix that right now, and my answer to that would be No, if they are safe both physically and emotionally, then this decision can wait a little longer until your mental state is healthy.

Look, you and I are strangers typing on keyboards from two different continents, and through the exchange of only a handful of messages I can tell that you’re a very smart guy. You’ve been looking for various ways to escape your suffering for many years but every choice you’ve made has only increased your agony. So what if you just chilled out for a second, relaxed, took a deep breath, and took the time to understand real well exactly what it is you’re trying to escape. What if you stopped drinking, started exercising again, and focused real hard on stepping outside the chaos in your head and looking at your situation from an objective standpoint. What if you took, say, one month or 6 weeks to do these things religiously before deciding whether or not to take that first scary step? And what if during this time you looked down for a way out instead of up (as Peter suggested)?

Have you ever considered that the choices you made may have been crappy ones for you but the right ones for your girls? In other words, is it possible that your being away from them the past 3 years could have actually been better than the alternative for their wellbeing? The truth is that you may not have as much to feel guilty about as you think you do.

So back to what Peter said: Sometimes the way out isn’t up but down, and you may say: I’ve done that already and it hasn’t worked! Okay, fair enough. So let’s talk about that. What exactly have you done other than self-help books, audios, you-tube clips, inspirational quotes, and a few meds?

B