Dear Anita,

I hope you are okay?  I haven’t heard back from you for some time now so I wondered if you have not been well?  Hopefully just happily busy …

I have been very busy, a lot happened this month.  I am super happy with the therapist, she is not only very nice, but I have been seriously “activated” after each session towards new and positive understanding and realisations, so it is worthwhile to do the long trip there and back.  She gives me homework each time and seems very motivated to help me, so I am really pleased.  The realisations and inner changes have caused me to need a lot of time for recuperation and inner reorganisation though, so this is partially why I haven’t been posting.

The situation with my old dog has improved but is nevertheless still an issue because my other dog sometimes jumps on her (it’s his male dominance instinct unfortunately, he’s otherwise lovely) and this is causing her damage and pain to precisely the area we are trying to heal.  I had kept them separate, one here and one at my husband’s house, but now he has lost a major part of his income and won’t be able to keep two houses any more.  This is obviously a big thing, not just regarding the dogs, as he is also going to have to move back to this house.  (Yes, you are seeing correctly!!)

As you can imagine, this was BIG news!  It is perhaps not as traumatic as it might have been, though obviously nevertheless not exactly what I would have wished for as an overnight surprise, because I had started to allow more personal conversations with my husband recently.  It was due to spending so much time together taking the dog all over the place in an attempt to find the right treatment.  I usually kept him at arms’ length and no conversation about our past relationship at all, but spending time together was very upsetting as I could feel how it felt to be together like in the old days.  He was a very good and kind husband for the first 6-7 years of our relationship, until the continuous downpour of things going wrong (it was always other people trying to ruin our lives, never with one another) just got too much for him, which is when he became introverted and angry, and I was the only one around to take it out on, unfortunately.

Anyway, so I told him that spending so much time with him was too disorientating and that I needed to reduce it back to a minimum.  This caused him alarm, because what I didn’t know is that he had been wanting to ask me for a long time to give him another chance but hadn’t dared say anything, and now he thought he might not get another opportunity so decided to take the bull by the horns.  Hence we have spent the last couple of weeks speaking a lot.  I can see that he has definitely improved his awareness of his problem behaviours.  I do not know where this is going, if he is really changed inside, but at the moment we are going to have to start living together again so I will inevitably find out.  He definitely acts like his gentle old self again, and feels like that to me.

Well, Anita, I don’t know, I would never have imagined this could happen.  I am not going to write any more today as I have an awfully stiff neck from getting in a draught, but I finally had a peaceful moment and wanted to at least post about this unexpected turn of events.

Juanita