Counselling focused on recognising what went well with the dinner with my husband and what might have gone better.

It’s important to recognise where I managed to get things right: saying that I will share more with my husband when he is ready to ask about it was a good statement of boundaries. I felt immediately better and don’t have the desire to volunteer information that might be difficult for either of us.

Richard (my counsellor) asked a couple of insightful questions. The first was about balance: would I have changed it if not been through so much?

What did he mean by that?

Years ago, I’d been a naïve young thing, feeling, emotional, but unable to control my feelings. In short, I was unfiltered – but it wasn’t a problem that affected my life in any appreciable way. I had no concept of mental illness, and my world was populated by black and white concepts.

My husband grew up in a complicated world that stole his innocence before he was even old enough to know what the word meant. As a result, he suffered from mental illness, and all the rejection and difficulties that accompany that. I was often the only person with whom he could share his feelings, which were often volatile, uncontrolled, and sometimes damned-right abusive towards the people who were in his life.

I was the closest person – well within the blast radius of the fallout from his trauma. I feel that I might learn to live with the lingering emotional radiation, but I will never really be cured. I now carry my own emotional burns and am deeply changed by them.

I miss the old unfiltered, naïve, innocent me.

I didn’t grow, I was contorted.

Richard suggested that when my husband next goes into his place of looping through old issues in our relationship, that I ask him what outcome he would like from the conversation. I know my husband will say “that’s very controlling” or “that’s a very unemotional way of putting it”, but returning to what Richard said last time “so what?”

Challenging my husband is scary. Refusing to engage is scary. There was always the risk of payback in the form of anger – or a serious meltdown from him.

He stresses that I need to protect my own mental and physical health. I have been through enough of his second-hand trauma and my own first-hand trauma. I am not as physically robust as I used to be. I have been battered like a ship in a storm lasting a quarter of a century without a port.

My friend Patricius says that its “SEP” (somebody else’s problem): I need and must stay out of the way so that those whose job it is to look after him must do just that.