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For me, I think that it wasn’t necessarily a shelf breaking, but myself breaking instead. We had a rough 2 years that put a lot of my life in upheaval (career, house, state, new baby, health issues). Just when we thought that things were working out, something else would blind-side us or pop up.
Last year I “broke” in the sense that I could not longer handle life’s challenges at this time without medication. I felt like a failure because everyone else could choose whether they needed or not, but I was one of the ones who never needed it – and now I did. Now everything that I had put into place didn’t work anymore. Intellectually I understood the deck was stacked against me always being one of those people, and that I can and still could make changes to change that. I did go through my own grief processes regarding this – my pride at not being “broken” despite life circumstances was very enormous – and false.
My husband and I wound up having some hard conversations on where we were going, and what we really wanted. These experiences seem to have brought us closer together, but I still found them to be significant.
When our daughter underwent a learning evaluation and the tester mentioned that she could have Asperger’s Autism, it opened up a new way of seeing things. As I looked into it for her, I wound up seeing elements of myself in the mirror. It is very jarring to find out that your “Normal” is completely alien to everyone else’s “Normal”. It is equally the camo you set up to blend in with the world was paper-thin and everyone knew you weren’t fooling anyone with it, but was socially constrained not to tell you (or maybe they didn’t know what it as), and if they had told you, you would not have necessarily understood it anyways. My father had taught me about thinking differently, but he just ascribed it to some form of dyslexia – and there were things that are common to Asperger’s autism that he didn’t know about and I didn’t know about.
I still don’t have all the answers or jigsaw puzzles of my life put back together. I am not even sure I have any grasp on what the questions are:) And I think a valid case could be made that I don’t have the puzzle box to guide me in matching the puzzle pieces together. So, we are clearly winging it..
I look at the self-understanding I received from adding the description of Asperger’s autism to my definition of me as a chance to redefine my life. There are things that I struggled with that I now understand why I struggled with them. I have a greater theoretical understanding that most people don’t think or process information the way I do, and that there are things I can do to help bridge the gap. There are other things that I can re-prioritize now that I understand the emotional cost of doing it, instead of just doing it because everyone else was. I can allow myself to wear noise-cancelling headphones while listening to 4th of July fireworks because I can recognize that my ears are more sensitive in this area, and it is more cost-efficient to take measures to manage it instead of just dealing subconsciously with it at the time.
The main lesson I have taken from this board is take everything slowly and thoughtfully before making known life-altering choices and potentially decreasing the “cruising range”.
I agree with you Heber. The church traditionally becomes or hosts the social support center for women. My dad and I had a conversation once where we talked about the tendency for men to consider their wife their best friend, and to a certain degree that satisfies their social wants. Generally, I think women need a larger support group because: a) They are usually handling more of the “mental load” of the family – the logistics of identifying and scheduling the needs/wants of the entire family – and in practical terms need sources of support for that. The minutea like achievement days, doctor’s visits, developmental assessment, making sure the uniforms are clean and ready when needed. I am not saying men don’t handle these things, I am saying that I think more women tend to handle the planning and organization of those details and that both genders take care of the actual tasks.
b) Women communicate in networks. I read a book a while back about gender communication styles, and the premise of the book was that men communicate to establish and work in a hierarchy, and women communicate to connect. While it may not universally apply, I think it provides a context for why there is disconnect wherever men and women are striving to communicate (church organization, family patterns of communication, workplace environment…) If women are communicating in networks and developing community connections, this becomes a support group. It is very difficult to have a support group when you are establishing a pecking order in said support group.
c) There are fundamental biological processes that women go through that are overwhelming to a huge degree that I don’t men experience to a similiar extent – namely pregnancy/childbirth and menopause. It is helpful to know that you aren’t alone in this when biologically everything is drastically different than what you are used to. I know guys can go through stuff, but I think that the stuff that they go through is less intense in that there are fewer hormone fluctuations, over a longer period of time.
bc_pg wrote:6) A woman generally makes a major shift role from “wife” to “mother”. For the husband the shift is much less extreme. It is often the case where the husband feels very left out – almost a third wheel when this happens. This can be difficult at any point, but from my personal experience I wish my wife had been a wife longer before she was a mother. I honestly feel our relationship and parenthood would have greatly benefited had it been that way.
The marital shift can be immense. We waited 2 years before we had our first child and had our 2nd child 6 years later. Both times it felt to my husband the equivalent of ditching him for a cuter model and getting ticked at my husband when he didn’t want to support us. So he did what he could to serve us, but there were times when it was given grudgingly out of obligation. It didn’t help that he became a stay-at-home dad and I went back to the workforce after 8 weeks. Not to mention my hormone induced roller-coaster of feelings….
The first time around it completely broadsided both of us and we were very unhappy for the first 9 months or so. The second time wasn’t so bad for my husband because he knew that these feelings of rejection were on the horizon – it wasn’t easy though. My husband observed I truly didn’t come back to being myself until around the 18 month mark.
Porter Rockwell wrote:Currently my wife is in one of those ‘spirit has pricked her heart with guilt’ states where she feels the whole family needs to do better – to faithfully do home evenings, scripture study etc. Incidentally this comes at a point where all the issues has bubbled up to the surface in my mind, and is haunting me all the time,… So it’s a bit of a difficult time…
Thanx for that insight Ray. I am thinking of how she will react, and how it would be if the situation were opposite all the time. I love my wife dearly, above anything, and REALLY don’t want to hurt her. That’s why I’ve put off talking with her for so long. But I want us to have a whole, healthy relationship, I don’t want to have secrets from my wife.
I could have written this post in regards to my husband. To pour salt into the wound, he wants me to “tell him more things” and “talk to him more” because I tend to shut down and push him out of things.
I wish he knew that I don’t tell him things because I don’t want to be a burden to him, and I don’t want to make his load heavier. Why should I add my doubts to his burden in life, when I am not even sure whether my doubts are here to say or are just smoke and mirrors. Also he tends to be very dismissive of my thoughts and I don’t want to be caught off guard having to defend things from what he thought I said or what his gut instinct is.
He already cops the “I read my scriptures so why didn’t you?” attitude not infrequently recently. When he does this, I resist pointing out the number of times I dragged both girls to church without him when he should have gone as well.
Right now, I try to find common ground and let my doubts fly under the radar. I want to have as much marital “cruising area” as possible – especially since our little girl is going to be baptized in November
. Since all I am responsible for is the cross-state logistics surrounding the date and preparing the Baptism/Holy Ghost talk, there is no reason I should pop up on the radar. I think I am also afraid of rejection. My husband has said (in the heat of a post-partum battle about 8 months ago) that he didn’t me as the person he married 10 years ago. When I brought up the idea that I might have Asperger’s Autism, he said I was identifying with it out of love of my daughter. When I sent him a multi-page highlighted description document from a female Asperger’s Autism, he said he didn’t see any of those things applying to me. When I showed my mother the same document, she said “I wasn’t sure about some of those descriptions, why do you feel they apply to you?” and I explained and she said, “Ok, maybe this is a good fit for you. How do you feel about that?”. It’s not that I don’t want him to have the same opinion I do, I just don’t agree with the knee-jerk “this isn’t how I see you so you must be wrong” statements.
My husband is becoming more nurturing and supportive over the last 3 months. We are drawing closer together in quite a few areas, while drifting in this area…
I am not 100% sure what the difference between VT and HT is, but I think you are supposed to have a prayer, and a spiritual thought/lesson from the General Authorities (preferredly the Ensign message), and check in with the family. If that is the case, I would just look for a spiritual thought/lesson on a topic that you 2 have in common and work on rebuilding that friendship. And if they try to redirect you back to the official monthly message, just tell them you felt inspired to select something else that felt more pertinent to the family you were teaching.
I don’t know if this would impact your cruising range any…
I would probably take options a or c – that way, if you get asked about it, you have a plausible reason to be dodging HPG. (Not that you need one per se, but whenever the non-sheep do something the sheep don’t expect, questions tend to arise.) One of the best lessons I had was on self-improvement. Our R.S. president (who was teaching) brought in her antique kettle and some polishing silver with rags. We would shine the kettle for a minute or 2 then pass it on. The contrast between it at the beginning and at the end was stark. I think for some people (like me) inspiration can come through words, but most often it is words with feelings/impressions behind it. I am the type of person who is guided through the universe on words. I feed myself words. I develop relationships through words. I talk through problems with words. If words cannot be used to describe or define it, it does not exist very well for me. I wind up creating a mini translation guide for the words of people I love translated into the equivalents in my brain and think about writing the translation guides down for me to remember them:) Most of the time, what I recognize is “inspiration” is specific words in my brain that do seem to be independent of my thinking. Since I have come to this forum, I have been re-thinking that all thoughts that are independent of my thinking are actually so – they might be “inspiration” that my brain found subconsciously and finally dredged to the surface. I don’t have a percentage of “inspiration” that comes by words that is actually my brain figuring things out vs “inspiration” that my brain is fed and retains. However, I do know that they are at least opposite ends of the “inspiration – words category” spectrum.
I believe that there are instances of words being received by the brain that are not subconscious thoughts, and I call these “inspiration”. Also, sometimes “inspiration” for me is the words being brought to my consciousness by an exterior force far stronger then my brain would make them. I will never be able to forgot my father saying, “I think you should serve a mission.” and the way those words echoed and sounded in my brain and the feelings that came with it. Since I had 1 foot out the LDS door at the time, I was not thinking of myself that I should serve a mission. I think my father had been saying stuff like that for a while, but it had “gone in one ear and out the other” until then.
I was stunned to be sitting in sacrament meeting one day without my husband, and I heard in my heart and mind these words, “It’s time to start your family. Your first child should be born by the end of next year.” While I had been thinking in general terms of starting our family, we weren’t seriously thinking about it. I brought it up to my husband and we spent 3 months talking about it (I told him “This is what I believe is revelation for us – go talk to God yourself about it” as needed.) Our first child was born in November of the next year.
My 2 cents – I don’t think you should post it on your profile. 1. It’s personal – posting it on your profile will make it harder to control who gets the information. I think it would be hard on your family to find out about your FC if someone else saw your profile that stated it and told them.
2. Someone might bypass you whom in other circumstances would have gotten to know you and the situation.
I came to the realization the other day that my father (who I have looked up to for years) is more of a fundamentalist Mormon then I had figured. Growing up, he had always known and told us that he was not a conventional Mormon, and we were not a conventional Mormon family. That was helpful growing up because it made it easier to just be ourselves, and not expect to conform to the Mormon society (in southern California – we wouldn’t have made it in Utah). In terms of doctrine, I thought that my views and my father’s were similar enough that we were on the same side of the spectrum – but now I know that on a variety of issues, we are on opposite sides of the spectrum. It was just eerie, because through the years I have seen my siblings disagree with my father over random things and principles (they are much younger than I am) and now I understand what they were experiencing. I finally get it.
I know how to handle the situation, and I can always go back and re-read the threads on loving family with differing beliefs – I just never thought it would apply to my dad. I am surprised, a little sad, and feel both a little wiser and a little more foolish at the same time.
Heber13 wrote:I think guilt is ungodly. We should either avoid the actions that make us feel guilty, or we should repent and get rid of guilt so it doesn’t burden us…but we should not think we should feel guilty if we don’t.
I treat guilt as a warning sign that something is out of whack. Sometimes I need to avoid the situation, or “repent” (in the sense of following the 4 “r”), but it also might mean my priorities or expectations need to be adjusted. For me, guilt and anxiety go hand in hand – so if I am feeling “guilty” it might be causing anxiety – which means I need to make choices to put everything back in perspective.
Old Timer wrote:
I believe mental illnesses are covered in the effects of “Adam’s transgression” in our 2nd Article of Faith (as part of the Fall) – which means I believe their effects have been paid for already – which means we have been redeemed from them – which means we don’t need to have faith in being healed of them in the here and now miraculously. If that happens, as I believe it does on very rare occasion, great; if not, we need to deal with them the best way we know how and thank God daily that we live in a time when medication and therapies are available to use in that effort.I view my husband’s ADHD in this vein and look forward to meeting him when the way his brain works does not complicate things:)
My husband is developing coping mechanisms to compensate for his ADHD. He takes medication responsibly, monitors his diet, and tries to work around this. On many levels, he does “all he can do” to minimize the effects of this condition on our household. And yet, the weakened emotional filter is there, the constantly being distracted/unfocused on what is important, and other classic hallmarks of an ADHD family are there. I have chosen in some areas to take on more of the load because I recognize that it is not in his makeup to be able to handle some of it.
What has helped me is understanding that as my husband does what he can in this area, that our family is strengthened, and we are given additional dimension of understanding and “grace” to love my husband in his mortal limitations. When I am frustrated with him and the situation in general, it gives me a little help to be more merciful to him, more understanding, but also the strength to go back to the drawing board and find something else that will help him to be more of the husband and father he wants to be –
in spite ofthe ADHD. And in some cases, he is on the road to becoming the husband and father he wants to be becauseof his ADHD. swimordie wrote:
Konvert Kid wrote:As I understand helping is ok but expecting specific responses is not. Does that sound right???
From my perspective, that’s dead on…
If the mother is being completely honest with herself, she may recognize that she is “pushing” her child for a sense of her own approval, recognition, etc. Rarely are we humans that honest with ourselves. Which gets at the heart of why recognizing and overcoming these co-dependent tendencies is so, so, excruciatingly difficult.
I agree. I think that I set up a mutual co-dependent situation with my spouse over time. He has ADHD and chronic health problems. I wound up being a caregiver and breadwinner for the better part of a year. When I begin to realize I could not do everything, that led me here.
swimordie wrote:Self-sacrifice, service, care-giving, etc. are all noble and important parts of the joy and happiness we can attain in this life. But, the intention of the person giving is what is key.
That same joy and happiness will ultimately be sabotaged if the intention of the self-sacrifice, service, etc. comes with expectations:of approval, of appreciation, of recognition, of reciprocation. I am learning that if I act in expectation of external approval, external appreciation, or external recognition from my spouse, that does not bring happiness into my life. If I act in expectation of my internal approval and appreciation, or my internal recognition (pat on the back
:clap: ), that has meaning and creates an internal personal code of honor. I do chores around the house because I know that a cleaner house will set up the best environment for everyone – I will be happier, and my children will be safer. When I don’t have the resources to do the chores, then I do what I can when I can…It is also dumb-founding to him when my husband says things/acts in such a way using his approval/appreciation or recognition as bait – and it doesn’t get me to do what he wants me to do.
😆 ( I can’t help it sometimes – I like watching it not work anymore…
I found this quote at some point, and it has helped me to refine my focus:
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis,
it is between you and God.It was never between you and them anyway.swimordie wrote:In a transcendent faith paradigm, this is where the ideal of charity can best be experienced, explored and enacted. Charity out of love. Not for obedience. Not for exchange. Just from unconditional love. Anonymous charity would often feel this way. There is typically no chance for reciprocity. It’s just pure love.
I love anonymous charity. I love helping others to be in a better place. Sometimes all I can do is love people, and that is enough.
swimordie wrote:Of course, that’s not possible in most situations in every day life but that type of mentality is attainable. In a marital relationship, it’s the opposite of score-keeping.
I work on this.
swimordie wrote:It may be important to recognize, without being resentful, that a TBM spouse is pushing back as much or more because of their own image. It really has nothing to do with us. It’s just made to feel like it’s us because we’re the one’s that are changing the unspoken agreement. But, ultimately, it’s a them thing. Again, we don’t have to be resentful for their issues, but we should recognize it for what it is. Not make it about us, even if they’re trying to make it about us. That’s just the system talking. It’s abstract but, it is what it is.
Whenever expectations are unmet this can happen. It can take time for people to vocalize what the unspoken agreement is, and what their expectations surrounding it are before changing/refining those expectations. I have found that love, respect and communication are the best balm for unmet expectations – with an “I’m sorry” as needed, and repentance applied as needed. Sometimes, it is necessary to wait on the sidelines as the person goes through the stages of grief over their expectations.
SilentDawning wrote:
And how do you as parents cope with the knowledge that your children see you as you really are, and not as the pedestal occupying figure you once were?
I don’t think that children see parents as they really are. I think children see parents more clearly as the years pass, transitions are made, and the children become parents themselves. I think the pedestal part is a part of the innocence of childhood that gets rubbed off at some point.
I think that the goal is from day 1 to have a relationship with your child that can expand into a relationship with your adult child. I think this includes treating them with the respect you would treat your adult friends as much possible when you are interacting in non-parent instruction interactions. I think this means building your view of your child as a person who needs age-appropriate guidance and support, rather than a child who with guidance and support will become a person.
Example: I have a mentally handicapped sister who was given the assignment to sweep the kitchen floor (she was about 10 at the time). When she was done, she came and asked my father to inspect it and sign off on it. I wandered along and saw everything she had missed. My father gravely praised the spots that she had gotten right the way that a respected peer would review work when requested. He pointed out a few obvious spots she had missed, and requested she redo her efforts. As we wandered off, I asked him about it, specifically why he had “let” her get away with missing some of the work. He pointed out that he was working with her to help her do the best job she could – and that he saw her as an adult-in-training rather than a child and treated her accordingly. Some of the issues I had with my mother were because I became an “adult” in areas before her internal “child” calendar said I should, so on some levels there were power struggles over my independence. NOTE: I was not trying to assert my independence in the traditional WoW or LoC ways, I think I just wanted authorization to think differently about things, and have my opinion treated with the respect you would treat a peer’s opinion rather than a child’s opinion.)
