Bad dreams - My story

www.ohalbatross.com

I been having bad dreams this week and can't really put my finger on just why.  My sleep patterns have be very erratic and that doesn't.

The first one had to do with my first husband. I heard someone come in my front door and say "its just me" when he came in the house was flooded with water and garbage. He explained that he was just coming by to let me know he wasn't coming back.

After 20 something years I didn't really think he would be back. That relationship is far away now and in my mind I have erased some of the really bad stuff. Glazed over the verbal abuse and the drinking oh and the cheating. It was a severe co-dependent relationship we were never apart joined at the hip until his hip joined another hip. I was a half of a person back then waiting for my better half to show up and it was long wait.

I was suffocating in that relationship. It was a mix of addiction and depression for me. The kind of love you have when alcoholism is involved is based on extreme needs and manipulation. I never wanted to be left alone and he was my knight in shinning armor. He made me feel safe for awhile. We connected at a deeper level because he also lost his mother at 11. Two halves don't make a whole it is more like a hole.

I loved him in a desperate dependent way. He was funny at the beginning and I needed funny. There were signs of trouble even before we got married. He was always getting tickets and staying out all night. He lost his license and I had to drive him to work. I didn't care he needed me. I had found someone it seemed that couldn't live without me.

As the drinking escalated I became more like an overbearing parent trying to keep their kid out of trouble. When you turn into the parent the intimacy is the first to take a hit. We drifted and he stayed away more and more and I shut down emotionally.  I was losing him and that made me afraid to move in fear I would make it worse. I tried to create what we had in the beginning retrace my steps and be more appealing.

It wasn't possible I was burned out with trying so hard at life. When he left I thought my life was over I failed at the one thing I wanted more than anything to be loved and needed.

When I arrived at the Al-Anon I was a ghost. I had nothing left to give I had given it all to save my marriage and failed. I sat through those first meetings comatose. I didn't have any expectation that I would ever feel anything but sadness again. My whole life had walked out that door.

Outside work and the meetings I laid on the couch.   My sponsor would call and say over the answering machine that she was coming to pick me up for a meeting.

We went to meetings just about every night and soon I started to awaken. I didn't really do anything. I really only did the first step which was easy. I started to see just how distorted my thinking and my life had become. I had made him my god. He called the shots and I thought I was responsible for everything that went wrong because he told me I was.

I did recover and learned a lot about myself in that relationship. I did go on to love again. It didn't last forever as I had hoped it would but I learned a lot about myself again.

The dream made me think about him and how our life was flooded with garbage we brought with us from our past. Sometimes I think about what we would have been like together if we had both found the program at the same time.

I have never been much for wanted to bring the past back. No time in my life looked attractive enough to want to go back. When the present isn't exactly what I want it to be I have to be careful not to get too dreamy about past relationships and remember that sometimes they were nightmares.