The flush is back

I’ve been getting low since the weekend. It’s really hard to write at the moment.

I’ve been taking testosterone every other day for about a week and a half. Initially, my morning wood came back, but it’s stopped now – depression and anxiety will do that.

The hot flushes are a response to stress and anxiety emphasised by low oestrogen, so I think that’s what’s going on. They make it harder to get to sleep. Which means I’m tired when I get up. Which means that I’m feeling low already. Which means that I’m in a cycle until I at least manage to catch up with sleep.

Radio silence

Since yesterday lunchtime I have not heard anything from my husband and I am starting to worry. I have told him that if I don’t hear from him by the end of the day (this is a “standing order” kind of commitment), then I will go round and check on him.

I left a voice message lunchtime. Mid afternoon I got a single emoji reply back: 👍

Does that count as a response?!

I could drop in on the house on the way home; although I have counselling tonight, I have time to do that. However, I don’t think that I’ll do that tonight – if I haven’t had a more verbose answer by tomorrow evening, then I think I will drop by. Something to discuss with my counsellor.

Hopefully I won’t end up curled up on the rug after tonight’s session.

Counselling

There is always a lot to cover in counselling. Tonight was no exception.

I started by telling my counsellor what my husband had shared with me regarding to sauna visit after the meal I cooked in Thursday. We are now an open relationship.

He asked whether I felt better or less guilty for his things had happened on that day. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt very glad that hubby had had a good time. We still need to discuss boundaries.

Then I take about the experience on the the nudist beach on Friday. That wrist it was a body-positive experience, the discussion we had on the beach and afterwards in the coffee shop really got me down.

I really want to work through my observations on myself with my husband, explain why I think they apply, why they are a problem that sets me aside as ASD rather than just bloody difficult.

I explained that I was angry and hurt that my husband hadn’t read what I shared with him about myself properly. I talked about what happened in Saturday. I described the sense of shutdown I experienced after he told me to “fuck off”, which I said was like somebody threw the circuit breakers in my brain and it just powered down. I still feel angry.

I talked about the unusual style of depression that took me on Sunday. I’m thinking about it now. My husband has often said that depression is caused by unexpressed or unheard anger. Interesting.

I talked about the radio silence from my husband.

I tried it a few theories about what’s going on for me. For example, I cannot work out how my husband will respond to anything I say. I said that I thought that it was down to my neuro-divergent brain having a faulty “model” of how emotions work, which would then fail to predict this he would respond to any given situation. Then I postulated the theory that perhaps I wasn’t neuro-divergent, but he was, in such a case I might have what would pass as an adequate model in my mind, but it still wouldn’t work because it was being applied to a non-typical mind. My counsellor then said that perhaps both were true: my husband definitely has enough metal health troubles to be neuro-divergent himself … just differently so. Another interesting thought. Maybe we both are. That’s why we’ve worked so far(ish), and that’s what’s killing us now.

Whatever, I am still stuck trying to make a decision. I’m working from a place of insufficient information about myself still. How will I feel on more testosterone? Do I actually want more testosterone? Do I still feel that I want to explore kink? (Yes) the difficult part of that question is how important is it? Worse – do I still want to live with him? If not, what the hell does that mean for our marriage?

I talked about appreciating my difference and either capitalising in it, or learning ways to manage – I can only do that if I accept that I have some kind of ASD and proceed on that assumption.

I said that my husband has already complained about making so many concessions – that latest being opening up the relationship. He is making monumental efforts to keep us together. I have to recognise that. However, him accepting ASD feels like it’s a must for the future.

Finally, he brought out the emotions wheel (you can see it below) and asked me to try to work out what I feeling last week when I had my major shutdown. It’s too bloody complicated. There was fear and sadness in there, that was easy. I was definitely overwhelmed (hence the shutdown). I felt insecure and inadequate. There was fear of abandonment in there. I felt despair. I was definitely vulnerable.

While I was doing the wheel, I said that I felt jammed. The counsellor thought that I was getting overwhelmed again, but I wasn’t – it was lit jammed, too many things all trying to be felt at once.

The funny thing with that feelings wheel: I think that I know the meaning of every single one of the words on the wheel, however more than half of them I haven’t got a clue how they actually feel.