Dear Honour:

I read your last post and thoroughly re-read your first. At one point you experienced a loving relationship with your spouse. That was in the past and no longer is the situation. The situation is that her sickness has taken over and is ruling her life and your life. It is in charge.

These are the ways it is in charge: refusing to see a doctor for medication change or adjustment, refusing psychotherapy, will not get her out of bed before noon on most days, will not get her to clean the house or do chores other than feed the animals, complains when you clean the house instead of spending time with her, yells at you, says hurtful things to you, ends all your efforts of discussions with arguments, treats your efforts to help her and the relationship with suspicion and distaste, and blames you.

You wrote: “I don’t want to fight, but I don’t want to leave. I just want to be able to work WITH my spouse to figure this out… It’s just so strange to see my spouse go from being a loving, fun, determined person into a grouchy, rude, lazy person. I feel guilty for that judgement though, because I believe that happier person is still there somewhere.”

My input: unfortunately you cannot work with your spouse because she is not available for that work. You have no one to work with. That “loving, fun, determined person” is gone and you have no control as to if and when she is back. Reading about her from your posts, it was a temporary break from her sickness that allowed that loving, fun and determined person to resurface.

It just occurred to me to ask you: what were the circumstances, or the change of circumstances that led her to change from loving-fun-determined to sick again?

anita