Hi Anita

Thank you always for your boundless compassion and understanding! I’m glad that you had a good time socialising. I’m sorry to hear about your continued sleep difficulties. I think that you really truly deserve peaceful rest. All you do is try your best to help others. I’m sorry that sleep isn’t working out for you. ❤️

You are right, a low stress environment is really important for me to manage my health. I did a lot of work before to build up my tolerance to stress and to remove unnecessary stress from my life. The baby dysregulated my nervous system, particularly to do with the hormones (cortisol levels get progressively higher throughout pregnancy) and partially due to stressful circumstances. I haven’t recovered from that yet. I’m not able to cope with stress at the moment. Because of the baby, I’m not really able to do much self-care either. Just busy looking after him really.

I do agree that blame is harmful. It is difficult because sometimes communicating problems and feedback is needed. Upon reflecting, I think that communicating these things with love is important.

I have been thinking and learning about things. I think why this has all hurt so much has been because I have struggled with self-love. My husband was the person who taught me to love myself. I know it is maladaptive, but I based this around his feelings for me.

It is a childish logic, but for someone who hadn’t  experienced much love in life because I always lacked it, I felt unworthy of it. I blamed myself as the cause instead of seeing that some people are unable. When he loved me, he saw me as worthy. I felt like I was good enough for the first time because he told me I was.

Having these relationship difficulties, feeling the loss of love. It makes me feel unworthy and unlovable. Logically, I know that this isn’t true. But logic doesn’t dictate emotions sometimes. It takes a while for them to catch up.

On top of the relationship difficulties, my whole life has changed as a result of having a baby. A coping method I used to reassure myself was proving my worthiness to myself. I worked hard and tried my best to help people etc. Now my life is mostly just helping my family.

For a long time, I suffered with disliking myself for the difficulties I experienced in life. I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I worked hard to change myself into someone that I could be proud of.

I am still that same person. I just can’t prove it to myself anymore. I think I need to work on loving and accepting myself as I am.

Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏

Hi Anita

That is a very uplifting message! Thank you for sharing it with me. ❤️ It’s very thoughtful. You are an angel. 😇

I think that for me, the first couple of months were not that bad. I was mostly very tired and had to be careful not to do too much because I would get abdominal cramps. Also, I was very lucky in that I didn’t get any morning sickness.

Pregnancy hormones have lots of natural painkillers and muscle relaxants. I had to come off my medication before I got pregnant due to some nasty side effects, so I had already adjusted somewhat to not being on the medication. It was very hard not being able to do acupuncture because of being pregnant. But the TCM doctor was able to give me some herbal medicine that is okay for pregnant people to help during the flare ups. I took as little as possible.

As the baby grew, that’s when things got worse. I had pelvic pain even before the baby, so the last trimester was agony. I could barely walk and the last month I couldn’t.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding!

My thoughts are that none of us choose how we feel. It sounds like my husband has been struggling with his own issues too. For a while, I blamed him for blaming me. That isn’t very helpful either.

There is something else that is important to know about him. He has a very good memory. Something that he struggles with is that he doesn’t forget arguments. I am lucky in that my memory is fairly poor. I remember fragments for a time then forget. And I vaguely remember an overarching theme for important stuff.

I think that must be hard for him.

I can honestly understand that. The world can be hostile at times and challenging. The idea of adopting has always been nice to me too. It sounds like you had a good understanding of what being pregnant would be like and made decisions that were right for you. ❤️

I am wondering how you are doing? Are you sleeping any better?

Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏

Hi Anita

Thank you for your support as always Anita! I learned some more about my husband’s perspective today. He tends to be a bit fatalistic when things are in a rough patch. Whereas I tend to be more optimistic that we will get through things and work it out and understand that people have a tendency to argue when things are stressful.

With the baby I did just take it for granted that he would be there when I had everything figured out with the baby and was ready to work on the relationship.

I feel angry that things have gotten like this. It’s something that I’m trying to work on at the moment. I have an unrealistic view of pregnancy and looking after a new baby. I think that this has something to do with it. I didn’t expect looking after a newborn to be so hard. I didn’t expect to have difficulties with my husband either. I know that is naive, but I didn’t. I didn’t really know much about having a baby when I was pregnant or when he was born. Realistically, though 90% of couples argue after having a baby. It was my expectations that were unrealistic.

It is a shame that the dentist that you liked wasn’t available. It is something special when you have a really nice one. I hope that the next one you have is nice too.

I’m sorry to hear that the numbing went wrong. That is really awful!

Thankfully, we have had a good couple of days with no arguing. We have talked a little about some difficult stuff, but not too much, softly and gently with each other.

Do you like numerology? Do the numbers have a meaning for you?

Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏

I hope that you get some sleep! ❤️🙏

Hi Anita

Thank you for being gentle with me. Your questions are fair, you are just trying to better understand the situation.

My understanding of her is that she is known to have a bit of a temper.

My husband empathised with her feeling attacked because I reached out to her instead of letting him handle the situation. He was upset that I didn’t let him handle things, which I can understand. I’ve never done that before. I shouldn’t have.

He never used to say mean things before the baby.

It has been difficult for a while, not just because of the baby, post postpartum depression, lack of support and sleep deprivation. The baby was unplanned and it took him a while to adjust to the idea of being a father. At the same time as the pregnancy we had to deal with a lot of stressors. A visa, homelessness, moving to a new house, a pet dying. At the same time, I was having a breakdown.

For most of my life, I was afraid of having a baby because of trauma. During the pregnancy, I was afraid of breastfeeding, I was afraid of seeing infant nudity in a parental care role, I was afraid of labour, I was afraid of being a bad mother.

Because of his beliefs in Traditional Chinese Medicine, he took on this idea that he was not allowed to argue with me or it could affect the nature of the baby. He resented not discussing his feelings during the pregnancy.

Then after the pregnancy, the birth was quite traumatic. Which caused conflict and the arguments began. Then my IUD failed and that caused more arguments because he was afraid of having another baby. We argued about general stuff like sleep, childcare and housework responsibilities. I had difficulties with intrusive thoughts in my son’s early life that caused difficulties too. It took me a long time to recover from the birth too. My husband was upset because he felt left out of the decision making process with our son too.

They say that 90% of couples argue after a birth and 50% of relationships fail because of one. It has just been a lot of stress to deal with all around. If your partner has postpartum depression, you are more likely to get it too. I think that we both have it.

We are both just very fed up. Life has been hard for a while and the arguing makes things even harder. He misses his family a lot. Even more so, now he has a child. He wishes that they could help. He wishes that they could have more of a relationship with his son. He misses his friends.

I was inspired! ❤️

That is a good tip that thinking keeps you awake. I will have to try to calm my mind and go back to sleep too. I hope that this new discovery makes sleep a lot easier for you!

Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏

It is hard for me that he struggles with setting boundaries. I can understand why he cares about people and had a childhood where he wasn’t allowed to set boundaries with family.

I’m a loyal person. I have ended friendships because people showed a romantic interest in me or because they were rude about him. I even set boundaries with my adopted mother because she said that she didn’t want to see him. I said that if you don’t want to see him, you don’t want to see me. I don’t let people disrespect my husband.

Hi Anita

You are very special! ❤️ I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t been sleeping well again. I hope that tonight is easier.

It is hard to suffer from the far reaching effects of child abuse.

I don’t know what my husband is covering in his therapy. I wouldn’t ask about such a private thing. He has started to take breaks during disagreements for himself since starting therapy. I am hopeful that as he appreciates the benefits for himself, he will understand the behaviour more, feel less threatened by it and be more open to me taking breaks.

Thank you for sharing all of your thoughts and the information on fears of abandonment.

He tends to want to continue disagreements and arguments for too long for me. He is a naturally loud person, so raises his voice sometimes. He tends to follow me if I try to walk away. He tends to threaten to leave me and say mean things when he’s angry. He never used to say things like that before. It’s been hard.

Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏