Dear Soul-searcher:

Welcome back! Your partner is still in the military, your relationship with him is almost 5.5 years old, started, I believe in December 2014. His son is about nine.

You shared today that before Covid-19, you were on your own for three months while your partner was deployed, you had a routine: waking up early every morning, going to the gym, then to 8-9 hours shift at work, then back home to study, cook, read, etc., and in the context of living on your own with that busy routine, you felt good about yourself, motivated.

Then Covid-19 happened, you were sent home from work, isolated at home, having lost your routine, the gym, the pre-pandemic habits and way of life,  and you are “left alone with (your) own thoughts!” Your partner came back from deployment and is back living with you (?) and co-parenting his son, and you are “finding it so overwhelming, not just them but everything”.

* “I am never consistent with what I do”- it is not your fault that your habits have  been disrupted. You are letting the Covid-19 related  distress spread to ->ou blaming yourself. You are not guilty of this global pandemic!

* In your very first thread, July 2015, you wrote about your partner: “I do love him, and I love him very much. Despite his faults..  He’s not very good at talking.. terrible at confrontations”-

– make sure that at this time, you do all you can to keep your relationship with your partner calm, no matter how you feel. If you let your Covid-19 distress spread to your relationship and infect it, your overall distress will increase even more.

No confrontations with him at this time. Keep it confrontation- free for the duration of the pandemic, no bringing up his faults; contain your distress. Express some of it, responsibly, but don’t burden him with it, and expect him to contain his own distress as well, to not burden you with it.

October 29, 2019, less than a month before the first case of Covid-19 in the world, your partner “dedicated his time to go gym 5 times a week”- it must be distressing for him too, to not be able to go to the gym.

At that time, late Oct last year, six months ago, you felt “so exhausted.. can’t even look in the mirror some days.. so tired with work.. I feel fat, I feel disgusted with myself”. I suppose in the last three months, you felt better (“I felt good about myself, motivated”), and now, you feel badly again.

It is very important, best you can, to not go  to extremes. When something bad happens (and the pandemic is bad!), try to do damage control: don’t let the bad thing that happened make everything in your life bad.

Don’t blame yourself when you are not at fault, practice self compassion instead, for being a victim to this virus, as we all are. Don’t let the virus infect your relationships. keep the peace with the people in your life for the duration of the pandemic.

Does this make sense to you?

anita