s: We've been skirting around writing about this topic for a hot minute. Because, let's be honest, thinking about the mountain of crap that has piled onto our lives in the past two months isn't exactly how either of us like to spend our precious little free time!
That said, we were really blindsided by how deeply crisis affected our dynamic and it seems worthwhile to jot down some of the reflections we're having - like, what just happened?! How can we avoid some of the negative side effects next time?! Have we learned anything?!
D: While none of our loved ones died, or got sick, or got sent to prison (at the time of this writing)...we did go through some serious not-fun, life-changing moments both as a couple and as a family. I feel like that has to be said. Crisis doesn't have to be an 11 out of 10 nightmare occurence. Crisis can merely be someone you love making a really stupid decision. Or it could be something from your past that you'd hoped would stay back there, only to become part of your day to day life. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe you don't have a job. My point is, crisis is a real part of life and it shouldn't be a word or concept reserved only for things like a death or mental health issues.
s: Although, let’s be honest, it very much impacted our mental health in ways I don’t think either of us could have anticipated. But we'll get into that in a sec.
D is right - crisis is a real part of life and I think sometimes it can sneak up on you because it doesn't look like the sky is falling like you imagined "crisis" would. At least, that's what happened to us. But ultimately, we got so consumed by our family’s needs and troubles that it quite literally drained us. To be clear, we really had no choice but to become consumed by these things - we take our job as parents and family members very seriously. But the psychic and physical toll that this most recent season of life has taken was a doozy.
What did that look like, you might ask? Shorter tempers, exhaustion, insomnia, random bouts of crying, over-eating, drinking more than normal, loss of routine, less self-care (exercise, meditation) - just to name some off the top of my head. Needless to say, we were no fun to be around. As a matter of fact, my parents recently pointed out that we weren't around anyone for those six weeks. We became isolated in our house of chaos.
As all of those pressures mounted, our dynamic took the biggest hit.
D can better describe than I, but sufficed to say that I was/am guilty of fluctuating between being in my submissive role and going into full-on fixer/doer role. We call it my "tunnel vision" mode. When in that zone, particularly where our kids are concerned, I have had a hard time leaving it. So, magnify that by a hundred and that was my daily baseline once we got out of bed in the morning. I was essentially emotionally unavailable, keeping my head down and plowing my way through the maelstrom of our life. Occassionally, we'd find moments of coming close to our space, but it was (seemingly) impossible to really rest there. I'd snap back into "tunnel vision" mode, giving poor D whiplash as all he needed was my care and attention.
D: Yep, even dominants need a little love and affection when it looks as though everything is falling apart. The thing that helped me get through crisis mode, though, was knowing exactly what s was going through and how she was handling it. I knew she was burying herself in the mundane in an effort to ignore Cthulhu rising out of the depths to unleash an eternal nightmare on us all. It's not like she up and decided to go into tunnel vision because there was something wrong with us or our dynamic: it was how she weathered the storm.
Knowing how my little girl operates in times of crisis wasn't a cure, however. I knew that she was reverting to tunnel vision because of survival instinct, but that didn't change the fact that crisis-life was vastly different from non-crisis life and vastly worse. And that is when my survival instincts kicked in, which is to say, analyzing everything do death and attempting to argue my way back to pre-crisis life (narrator: he didn't). She won't say it, but I was insufferable. I thought I could just call out differences in our dynamic and say, "why can't we just do that instead of doing this?" Helpful, right?
s: In some ways that was the hardest part. Being able to identify and articulate the differences in our behaviors and communication, but feeling completely unable to change anything. I think it boggled both of our minds. It's like we both thought that we could magically snap back into our desired dynamic just because we could talk about it openly. But that simply wasn't the case. As a matter of fact, I'd say it took a few weeks for us to find our footing after our life began to be "normal" again.
What we couldn't realize at the time was that we were both simply depleted. We were loving and worrying so hard that we just flat-out loved and worried ourselves dry. We wanted to care for each other - and be cared for by each other - in the ways that typically soothe, restore and envigorate us, but we couldn't recognize in ourselves that we just had very little to offer.
Does that mean that we didn't care for each other? Absolutely not. We most certainly did in small ways. We tried to give each other grace and space; we tried to listen and help advise; we tried to be aware of our own crisis-fueled shortcomings. And, at the time, that was the best we could do.
So, what would we maybe do differently next time?
Honestly, I'd love to sit here and say that we'd figure out how to keep our dynamic active and "normal," but I don't know if that's a reasonable expectation. What I do think I'd do differently is to focus more acutely on the small things I can do to be a good little girl. For us, that means being mindful of how I'm coping. Am I retreating into my head-down-plow-through-it-all mode? Am I aware of my partner’s needs? Am I aware of my own needs? I think meeting that initial hurdle of awareness could be a game-changer.
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