By Ox Drover
Since I have been in the medical profession for many years as a Registered Nurse Practitioner (now retired) I have been interested in the reactions our bodies and our minds have from stress.
Stress is a contributing factor to poor health and decreased immune response. Increases in the frequency of infection for individuals with a high level of stressful events in their lives have been well researched by many researchers. It is also well proven that our thinking and ideal mental responses are also diminished by high levels of stress.
Stress is not just the negative things that happen to us, but according to researchers Holmes and Rahe, stress is the result of “life events.”
I have been aware of this and have “charted” my high stress levels throughout most of my adult life using the “Holmes & Rahe Stress Scale” of “life events.”
Holmes and Rahe studied the effects of stress on humans (both positive stress/change and negative stress/change) and came up with a way to measure the intensity of stress. A score at or above 300 on their scale within a three-year period gave a person a higher than average chance of having illness or an accident happen to them. (Which of course adds even more stress to the person.)
The “take home lesson” from their scale of intensity of stress is that when life is throwing us stressful situations we cannot control, we need to keep the level of changes we voluntarily make at a minimum.
Since my life seems to have been a continual cycle of huge stresses, many of which have not been under my control, I have consciously tried to keep the voluntary contributions to this stress level at a minimum. For years, though, I was actually not doing a very good job, as I was still engaging in interactions with the psychopaths and their dupes. Recently, though, after going NC with the Ps and their dupes, I thought I was doing a pretty good job here lately, and I actually was.
Yesterday, however, after several peaceful, low stress months, I encountered my mother as my son and I were coming out of a checkout line in a store. There was a short “scene” in which I was “triggered” and angered. Wounds were ripped open. I was highly and instantly stressed! Shot full of adrenaline.
I came home, had a pity party, and ranted some and went to sleep. When I woke up this morning, I felt much better emotionally, and was back on a “level road.” Physically, though, I felt wrung out, like I had dug ditches with a shovel all day yesterday and was still so residually tired, even after a good night’s sleep, that I was just needing a day of rest.
This feeling lead me to an “ah ha” moment, when I realized that I hadn’t had a big adrenaline rush in quite some time. I had been living in a peaceful and pretty calm state of mind, fear was low, and my body had not been having to deal with high stress levels either internally or externally.
Though I am entirely convinced that it will take several more years of consistent peace, low anxiety, and little change, for me to completely recover from the effects of the high stress levels for such long periods of time, I do realize I have come a long ways in living a life of peace and calm.
When I was having adrenaline rushes almost on a daily, or even hourly, basis during the “crisis” mode, never coming down from that adrenaline rush, I didn’t know how it felt when I did come down. I saw the way I felt (pretty bad) as “normal.” (Because it was the “usual” state.)
Now that I have lived in peaceful circumstances long enough that I haven’t been under a continual surge of stress hormones for a while (literally enough of them to make my body shape change), I can easily tell what I feel physically and mentally today is a response to what happened yesterday.
My body shuttled the blood to my muscles (in a fight or flight scenario) and used up all the glucose stored in my liver to feed them. So I really AM tired, not just “feeling” tired. So, today I rest, exercise a bit, but not too much, and recover my physical normalcy. I will continue to try to keep changes of any kind at a minimum, and not make any voluntary significant changes in my life. I will keep my environment as calm and peaceful as I possibly can.
The damage done to my immune system and to my body and psyche from years of continual bombardment from stress hormones will take years to resolve (if it ever does completely resolve), but it is important that I do my part to keep stressors at a low level. No Contact is the biggest tool in my “tool belt” to keep stress at a lower level. Avoiding any situations and persons that irritate me or add to my stress level is another good tool.
Doing positive things for myself, pampering myself, are more great tools in my belt. Being aware that I need to rest physically (I acknowledge that I am somewhat a workaholic) is also very important. My dishes are still in the sink—the world has not come to an end! I’ll do them when I feel like doing them—today, tomorrow, who cares?
Today I will focus in the good things in my life—the love of my sons, and the positive aspects of my world.
Oxy,
I am 48 and in relatively good shape physically. I work out at the gym about 4 days per week and for the most part I eat healthy. For the last few months I have had pain in my joints, almost like a burning sensation which started in my left elbow and forearm. lately, my entire body hurts when I wake up in the morning. I have numbness in my arms and legs/feet, even when I am working out.
I was reading some info on line about fibromyalgia and I know this has been a contraversial diagnosis because it encompasses so many symptoms. I also realize it’s a diagnosis that many health professionals have related to stress. My blood pressure is usually low. I have also read about the affects of stress, causing auto immune deficiency disorders.
All my life I have had more energy than most. My kids are 18 and 16 and I usually have more energy that they do. But lately, I am fatigued but I think i am past the depression of the experience with the S/P (a year later). I feel that this could all be stress related. I am in an Executive level position but ot a job I would call extremely stressful.
Lately, (I think because I have had more info given to me about the S/P regarding his being fired and the stripper and her three kids moving in the house we built), I am having more thoughts and bad memories about him, bad dreams….etc….. as much as it all grosses me out to think aboout who he is today, it does bother me.
I am actually going to bed and falling asleep while i read at 10:00 at night. it’s frustrating. I know you can’t diagnose but please tell me it will feel better. 🙂
Dear Oxy, What a timely and valuable post. Anyone coming from a relationship with a P has been massively stressed on many levels.
My ex manufactured stress for me, presented it as real, and I ate it up. There was always the real and obvious stress ( interupted by manic high periods within the relationship) and then the subliminal stress… the always nagging stress that you know something is off, but can’t quite find the source, or the remedy.. the the shaky feeling inside of being off balance, fearful of the other shoe dropping and so on.
Perhaps you have illuminated a good focus for our healing. To really work on charting the stress ( as you have ) will in time teach us what to avoid or seek for that matter. I would venture that even not knowing about a P interaction, if we just carefully measured our stress and responded by removing ourselves, we would avoid some P’s in our life.
In the film I keep referring to “What the Bleep do we KNow”, the physicists explain how our bodies become addicted to adreniline and stress responses and we seek out the behavior to keep up our “supply”. This is what prbably leads us to the P attraction, and prevents us from leaving. We have to unlearn these very physical responses within our bodies.
In the last few days I have struggled with the decision to put down my beloved, young and otherwise healthy dog, who is one of the first litter I bred. He is a 100 olb animal and came down with a paralysis, which while curable mostly, onvolves what can be months of convalesence, unable to move, needs hoists, therapy, possible complications, bedsores pneumonia etc. My pet had been unable to move his bowels or relieve his bladder for several days.
Sometimes an animal makes a fairly good recovery but relapses are common. ( Coon hound paralysis for the dog lovers out there).
During the days of hoping for signs of improvement while he was at the hospital, it ocurred to me that if I took on his recovery I would be setting myself up, feeding myself, the stress I had been avoiding. Taking on a herculean task, while trying to get my life on track, job seeking, house for sale, don’t know where I will be in the comiing month, in the middle of a brutish divorce, trying to be there for my young adult children etc. All my instincts said do it, go all out to save him, whatever it takes.
It was very difficult to step back and consider what I am capable of, and if I was taking on the “straw that broke the camels back” in terms of emotional mission.
Not to blather, but I tell the story because it was the first time I SAW what I was going for, and actually considered that my addiction to stress and maybe drama, was involved.
My vet had strongly recommended that we let him go, and so finally we did. He was a fine and noble animal. He taught me much about love in his final days. He will be missed.
Thank you Oxy for your insights and sorry to hear that an encounter with your mother caused you grief.
Good to have these tools in our belt to keep us on track.
Peace
Oxy, I like what you said about tracking your stress through the years. It never occurred to me to look at my life story that way. I tend to view it as chapters related to relationships. But if I look at stress, there were only two significantly lower-stress periods in my life. One during a decade-long relationship with a man who was steady but boring. (I’d probably appreciate him a lot more now.) And now, in the post-sociopath period, the only time I’ve ever been alone.
There’s a world of personality analysis that could be done with that last paragraph. But suffice to say that the sociopath cured me of a lot of things. And one of them was imagining that I had an infinite tolerance for stress.
One of the reasons I finally got myself together to finally toss him permanently out of my life was that I felt like I was dying. My heart hurt all the time. The long bones in my legs ached in a way that painkillers didn’t touch. I was constantly dealing with some kind sickness from pneumonia to systemic staph to colitis. My head ached. My eyes hurt.
I spent the years from 50 to 55 with him. When I met him, I had a white streak in my hair at the top of my forehead. He wanted me to dye my hair, and by the time he left, the roots were bright silver all across the top and sides, and my hairline was receding. I took a picture of myself after he left, and I looked like someone who was dying. My skin was greenish, my cheeks sunken. I was exhausted all the time.
I look back at it now, and wonder how it possibly went that far. A lot of it I’ve recovered from, and what I didn’t recover from, I can blame on aging. But I understand perfectly why his previous relationships include at least one serious and apparently permanent emotional breakdown and one suicide.
Most of my family have chronic anxiety disorders (associated with our ADHD/Aspergers/OCD temperaments). I wonder how many people who get involved with sociopaths have these tendencies. And how many of us imagined we could handle the stress and learned our limits in these relationships.
For me, recovery involved turning my life into my private sanitarium. I stopped working. I stopped trying to date. I stopped pursuing new relationships. I isolated myself, and devoted myself to fixing our what was wrong with me and fixing it.
In retrospect, it was probably a typical (for me) OCD approach. I got a lot of good work done on myself. But it probably took me longer to stop obsessing over it than people who went to work on rebuilding their lives, rather than the insides of their heads.
As I tentatively started re-engaging with life, maybe a year and half after he left, I fought back against situations that threatened my control over my life, now or in the future. I evolved from saying “NO!” to saying “this doesn’t work for me” and then developing communications strategies that gave people reasons to adjust their expectations of me.
Until I read your post, Oxy, I wasn’t really thinking about it in terms of stress. I was just terrified of falling apart again. I viewed these efforts as better care of myself. But as you pointed out so well, that includes managing our internal resources. Being kind to our emotional and physical systems.
There’s a lot I do today to manage stress that I never did before. Beyond the obvious — like journaling, meditation and getting outdoors to enjoy this wonderful place where I live — I take a number of neutraceuticals to help the anxious brain chemistry associated with ADHD/Aspergers/OCD.
One thing I’ve learned through all this is that stress leads to more stress. I make bad decisions. I manage relationships badly. Concentration is harder and work takes longer. I look for ways to feel better that aren’t necessarily good for me — shopping, sugar, zoning out on computer games.
Another thing I’ve learned is my worst times in missing him or turning over the old memories come up when I’m stressed by something else. There is some kind of switch in my brain that goes into the betrayed-and-abandoned fugue state when the external pressure gets too high.
It took me a while to figure this out. I actually used that fugue state to power some of my internal work, while that was so important to me. But now, when I find myself slipping into that rut, I slip on my headphones and give a half hour to a Holosync or Pema Chodron CD. It pulls me up out of the emotional swamp, and I return to my stressful situation with a better perspective.
Dear Keeping Faith,
Fibromyalgia is one of those things I think may be related to both stress and a predisposition to “something.” Years ago when I first started having those symptoms, along with “Chronic Fatigue syndrome” many physicians thought it was a “crock of crap” and it was “neurotic women”who had these symptoms. They couldn’t find any phyisical problem so they thought it was a neurosis.
Medicine and research are catching up on a great deal of these “neurotic” illnesses and finding a basis for them that is physical. I don’t keep up with advances like I used to, and haven’t gone to any continuing education classes like I did before I retired (that was another reason I retired was because I wanted to put my energy toward healing myself rather than the stress of trying to learn new things with me also having short term memory problems from the PTSD, it was too stressful. I even turned in my license which required continuing education hours for a “retired” license. I could go back to school for a short time and get it back, but I made a “healthy choice” FOR ME.
I think what they used to call “chronic fatigue syndrome” may also be very stress related and at one time they thought it might also have a viral component. I remember when I was diagnosed with that I had had a flu episode right before it started in earnest. One physician I worked with called it TATT, “tired all the time.” He more or less poo-poos it, but believe me, I did not poo-poo it when patients reported it to me.
Much of “family medicine” is related as much to psychological aspects and stress detection as to bacteria and viruses.
Being TATT and “pushing on” with your responsibilities, and then taking on the added stresses of children, your job, house hold things, and trying to have some sort of social life, all the time being STRESSED TO THE MAX adds even more stress to the problem and makes you even more TATT.
In the two years before the P attack criis, I had buried my husband, taken care of my terminally ill step father for 18 months, taken care of my bedridden mother (surgical complications) run two households, and had four infections and surgeries related to them, two systemic allergic drug reactions, two hospital stays and one outpatient surgery. Plus, I will dealing with my P son and trying ot take care of his “emergencies”—I was like a hamster on a wheel, going faster and faster and getting no where!
Eyes wide shut, I agree that you did the right thing for your dog and for you. When we are “running on fumes” like a car nearly out of gas, we must lighten the load.
I tend to be an enabler, and a volunteer for taking care of those I love at great expense to myself. It never occured to me to not take care of my step father, and I will say that I marshalled other helps as well, hospice, paid house hold help, my sons’ help, physicians and nurses who were friends were also available for consultation and that was great, but just the physical work, the scheduling all of the conflicting requirements for both their health, and the grieving I did over the impending loss of my much loved stepfather was way over board! Plus, I was working two 12-hour days a week at a job that was very physically and mentally demanding.
I think we can all come up with some really good “excuses” to do what we do—take care of family, jobs, pets, etc. to over load ourselves.
But while we are so stressed and TATT, we are also NOT thinking with our heads, but we listen I think to a lot of the “shoulds’ and “should nots” that are socially driven expectations. We are so “close to the trees we can’t see the forest” of what expectations we are loading on ourselves.
If you had a horse you would not expect it to pull a loaded boxcar all by itself, you would not whip it because it tried and failed. Yet, I think we load ourselves, and harness ourselves to “loaded boxcars” alll the time and then beat the crap out of ourselves because we can’t pull it.
I try now to look at my life like a loaded wagon that I am expected to pull (just like I was the horse in harness.) I try to treat myself (as the draft animal) a little more kindly and with more compassion and empathy–that’s another thing, I think we have empathy for EVERYONE BUT OURSELVES–than I would “myself.”
So for whatever reason I realize my “wagon” is getting too heavy, I stop the wagon, rest the beast of burden (me) and/or lighten the load. For me that meant getting rid of my large herd of cows, but I kept a few pet animals. I quit breeding and raising Border Collies, I cut out some but not all of my social activities and focused on only the ones that meant the most.
I learned to set boundaries that not setting had exposed me to EXTREME EMOTIONAL STRESS. People who were/are negative influences, toxic stressors or just plain irritating, I cut out of my life entirely or kept them at such a distance that I was not stressed out by them. At first, learning to set these boundaries was a stressor in itself because it was scary to do so and risk “offending” them…but now, I realize that if they are offended, TOO BAD or as my sons would say “tough titty, kitty.”
Now that irritations and stressors are not as common and such a daily occurance, I am slowing down, smelling the roses, and not continually TATT. But day before yesterday’s adreniline overload made me realize (finally, I’m a slow learner I think) JUST how negative an impact even ONE episode of the “rush” has on me. So I will renew my efforts to cut out stressors and focus even more on peace, calm and healing.
No matter how strong we are, or think we are, I think that our own “abuse” of ourselves by neglecting our own needs is one of the “biggies” in slowing down our healing. Last night I read several chapters in the Psalms of David and got a good night’s sleep, turned the problem I can’t fix or control over to God and did the dishes this morning! My energy level is back up and I have a new resolve. TOWANDA!!!
Oxy:
Your article was applicable and insightful. As always, I appreciate your words of wisdom, and you write beautifully. I am grateful for your helpfulness and counseling at Lovefraud.
Thank you.
Peggy
Kathy,
I think you and I must be “twins separated at birth” (and by a couple of years as I am 62) In so many ways your thinking and mine run in the same ditch!
I too have created my own sanitarium here, my own little insane asylum as it were. The thing that really broke me down was when that was VIOLATED by the Trojan Horse Psychopath and my sanctuary become UNSAFE. It blew me away as this farm, this dirt has been my “emotional home” even when I lived and worked in Africa. It was the absolute place I felt safe and secure and then it turned out to be UNSAFE. The decision to leave here and go into hiding was a big stress for me because by doing that (and thinking I might not ever be able to return) tore me loose from the ONLY TRUE ROOTS I EVER HAD.
I realized though after that, that a place, a piece of dirt, even a community is not what we can depend on, we can’t depend on anything outside of our self for our safety.
I have read, and I think I need to reread Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s search for Meaning.” He talks about what happens to people when they lose everything except their bodies. He was in a Nazi prison camp for I think 4 years, and he lost everything in his life except his life, and yet, he FOUND MEANING in his suffering. I realize I “volunteered” for much of my suffering, which he did not do of course, it was thrust on him by a violent and horrible mind set at that time. One of the things I had to do that he probably didn’t have to face, was to FORGIVE MYSELF for being a volunteer in the suffering, for remaining in the suffering when I could have “broken free” and yet I didn’t. That was a big turning point in my life.
I suggest you go to the link and look at the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, it is sort of a mind opener for sure.
It sounds like a lot of your body and medical problems were exacerbated by the stress you lived under and I know mine was too. I am actually a pretty healthy individual with good medical genetics or I think with my stress levels I would have died a long time ago of one infection or another. I could go on with an “organ recital” of the ills I have suffered that I think were DIRECTLY related to stress depressing the immune system, and the debilitating effects of chronic adrenaline overload.
BTW I am very hyperactive, more hyperactive than attention deficit before the trauma, (actually I am VERY attention deficit NOW after the airplane crash which killed my husband and have a bad case of CRS) For those of you who may not know what that means it means “can’t remember chit.”
After my husband’s death I spent the first six months taking care of my step dad and my mother until my step dad’s death, and then the next year I got involved with the P, and the next year I too veged out on the computer with mindless games. It kept me from thinking. Then when I started to try to heal, to set boundaries, all hell broke loose! I was at my lowest ebb in a decade or two, I guess since my son had first been arrested in 1991 for the murder.
Then as one shoe after another “fell” and I kept waiting for the “next shoe to fall” it came to the crisis where I had to “take action or die.” I chose to live and I guess my real healing started then, when I bought the RV and went to live on the lake in hiding. I finally had the solitude and the safety to start examining myself. I spent a great deal of that year crying and doing introspective things to assess what I needed to do for myself I made some false starts, but made some good decisions that were positive too, so I am now trying to keep a level keel, keep the stress low and ACTIVELY working on ME…and meeting my needs rather than someone or even at times my OWN expectations of what I SHOULD be doing. It actually took a long time for me to go to bed with dishes in the sink and not feel the STRESS OF GUILT for doing so. Silly,huh? But I think a lot of the stresses we place on ourselves or allow others to place on us are just as silly. The EXXENTIAL THINGS we need to do to keep our “boats afloat” are really very few.
I am fortunate that like you, I could NOT WORK at a job, and I thank God every day for giving me that option, and myself for realizing that I had that option, because I’ve always been a “work a holic” working long hours at stressful jobs where I had to be in top form because people’s lives depended on it. I got most of my self satisfaction from doing that. (to my own detriment).
It is difficult to overcome a lifetime of programming when you are nearing your sixth decade, and to hit the “mute button” on the implanted parental tapes of “you should…” and “You must….” I am now more free to make my own decisions and decide what truly NEEDS to be done, and keeping my own welfare at the top of the priority list.
Especially when your tapes mostly come from a dysfunctional family and all the teachers and guides you followed because they seemed like exact opposite (but were only the flip side of the same coin).
Nice to meet another denizen of the self-created sanitarium. I could only afford it because my parents had died and left me a little money. But since it was my father who started this whole mess with me, it seemed only appropriate to spend his money to try to fix myself.
BTW, thinking about your mother. The therapist who helped me work through my incest memories told me that, if I had been incested today, the likelihood is that I would have been identified by a teacher or someone else, and been able to get immediate help. I don’t know if that’s true, but if so, I’m glad things have improved. It happened in the 60s, when there were no resources at all and no public awareness.
I wonder how different your mother might be today, how much more willing to believe and protect you, if there had been someone around to believe and protect her. They call incest the gift that keeps on giving. But now I think that the incest is just a symptom of the generational effects of sociopathy in the family. My father’s father was a monster. He was a monster. And all of the kids lived with the fallout.
One’s dead from complications from drug addiction. My beloved sister, whose still alive, had a life of relationship disappointments and her son died at 16, in a situation that was clearly an outgrowth of this family mess. And me…well, I keep trying to undo the effects in myself and become a better parent to my son.
Sometimes I wish I could get a shotgun and point it back through the generations to the first one that went bad.
Oxy and everyone,
It’s nice to be in a place where people “get it”. You know until I started reading your post to me OXY, I didn’t realize just how much stress I have gone through in the last few years, particularly this past year with being stalked by the XS/P. You know, the day to day stuff we do as mothers and employees is stress enough, let alone ill parents, friends or relatives dying, trying to “have a life” and force yourself to get out and do other things….. when I did an emventory after reading your post, I realized most other women would have probably been institutionalized or worse.
I do think I need to weedout those people who exhaust me and do the things that are good for me and not expect so much from myself. Maybe then, I’ll feel better physically too.
Kathleen,
My mother’s brother was 7 when she was born, he later is definitely a psychopath, and I believe as well bi-polar, but he was jealous of the new baby and tried to SMOTHER her. His mother knew of his attacks on the baby but kept silent (peace keeper) because if she told his father “he would get a spanking and he might run away from home.” She did her best to keep my mother out of his way, BUT the smotherings until she would pass out continued until she was 7, at which time my grandfather caught him and thashed his butt, and the smotherings stopped—but I feel certain that my mother has a trauma bond to my uncle (I refer to him as Uncle Monster) only at the time of his death did I realize the EXTENT of the emotional and physical abuse he heaped on his x-wife and kids, holding them at gun point for days in a violent drunken manic episode. I did know he did that once to my grandmother for three days and he finally fell asleep and she could get to a phone. She called, and I took a pistol and went to get her, before I got there (a 2 hour drive) he woke up and I guess she warned him I was on the way and he was not there when I got there. When my grandfather who was in the hospital at that time got out, they rented an apartment near us because they were afraid to go home.
For years after that every holiday at thanksgiving and Christas was a scene with her demanding that I spend it at her house WITH HIM THERE, and I refused. It was always the same screaming, guilting, crying, etc from her about how I was “ruining” her christmas by refusing to “forgive him” etc etc. So I would take my sons and go elsewhere for Christmas or Thanksgiving. It got to the point I hated to see a holiday come up and by the time he actually died, the holidays had a negative connotation for me. I am getting out of that a bit now, and actually decorated with atree etc for the first time in almost a decade.
When my uncle’s cancer diagnosis was announced, my mother who was his POA and executor became so anxious about “doing a good job” of taking care of him and his affairs, arranging for live in help, cleaning his house (guess who did the actual work of cleaning his house—yep, ME!!!)
Though his old dog was suffering terribly and had been for months, he refused to let her be put down, but after his stroke when he knew nothing, she finally let me put that poor animal out of her misery. She even obscessed about using his money to buy canned dog food for the poor animal which had NO TEETH instead of the cheapest hard dry food that he had purchased for the dog. She was under such emotional turmoil and stress that she was indecissive about every small detail. Talk about OCD. LOL Anyway, I finally heard from his children the horrible things he did to them and their mother and realized what a true MONSTER he was. A criminal who should have been incarcerated for his life without parole.
I realize mom has a “trauma bond” to him that made her have to learn to survive in a hostile environment with a mother who refused to protect her and it goes back to the days she was pre-verbal. She has little if any memory of that, but plenty of memory for the smothering. But, she excuses it on all levels.
When my grandmother who was a passive enabler by secret keeping—keep the peace at any price, but YOU pay the price–mother assumed her role of peace keeping, but with a swift and horrific punishment if you did not go along with it. She is in her prime now. I can look back and see the dysfunction now, but growing up I would have said I had a “good life” and even for decades after I left home I would have told you my mother and I had a “good relationship” because I DID PRETEND NONE OF THIS HAPPENED, or I trivalized it like I had been taught to do. But I can no longer play that game, and I won’t. She can’t quit playing the game she doens’t have the strength or insight to quit, and to quit would be so painful she would jump off a bridge if she was hit with that much pain at age 79. It would be intolerable for her. Doesn’t make her behavior acceptable, but does make it understandable.
I have a great sadness for anyone or anything that suffers that much. My old horse had to be put down last year because she grass-foundered and was so sore she couldn’t put her feet to the ground wihtout horrible pain, and I hated doing it, but I had to put her out of pain. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t had the courage to do that….but I can’t stop my mother’s pain or delusions, or her denial. Her suffering doesn’t have a remedy except her death.
I can fix my own suffering, and get my hand out of the emotional meat grinder and quit TURNING THE HANDLE. LOL
Funny this being the theme…high stres strated with the car last nght when he opened all the windows in the rain and then telephoned me so I looked out the window.
woke up this morning to a volley of emails…cutting, nasty character assasination ones…telling me i old and dried up and how everyone thinks I am evil and a joke..he emailed my fiend again and told her to stop laughing at him with me…telephoned earlier but I wasnt answering the phone…left two messages, calculated with ill hidden threats but nothing you could put your finger on…..all innuendo and what ifs…
I have a terrible headache, feel sick and cold to my bones…its like it has made me ill over night…I cant stop thinking of it and now the night is here I am waiting, wondering..I have smoked so many fags i am all smoked out and nicotine sick..I also feel flat and brow beaten….Lat week i had a boil…you get them when you are run down..I have another one coming or maybe it is the same one I dont know. Feel weak as as kitten. He has definately stepped up the campaign, he isnt asking to come home, he wants the kids.