My thoughts are with you both today. 

Hiya Briannah And Nikki. You ARE BOTH Very Brave Individually, And As Husband And Wife. My Thought's are with YOU BOTH, as I should imagine that Today is Not going to be easy for Either of You, or for Your Mutual Friend either. Briannah And Nikki, You are obviously Very Loving, and Very Caring towards Each Other, and that My Darling's, is Absolutely Fantastic. If Nikki, You can Open-Up to Your Mutual Friend, and They to You, I think it WILL Do ALL of You some Good. Please Do NOT be afraid to shed some tear's either. ( I have ALWAYS Been an emotional Person, even as a Youngster. ) .  Briannah and Nikki, You are Both, already, held in Very High Esteem, right here on TGGuide. We are so lucky, to have a Couple, who Are so Open, and Honest, and Loving, here with Us on TGGuide. I Know that I have Not been able to comment on All Your Post's on here, but, I can assure You Both, that I have read them All, with interest and it is great, that You can Both express Yourselves on here openly. Briannah And Nikki, this TGirl has nothing but the Utmost Love and Respect, for You as individual's, and as a Couple. Briannah And Nikki, Good Luck, Good Health, Take Care, And My Love, And My Very Best Wishes, Stephanie. xxxx 

Verbal communication beats out mental thoughts hands down as what may sound good in the brain without speech may not translate well into the spoken word. 

Best of luck today.

Thank you everyone!  We're home safe and sound (My feet are frozen, it snowed and I wore heels).  Actually, I wore a stupid outfit for the weather entirely but it's was saying no to and tackling my dismophic desire to be invisible and in solidarity with Nikki facing his fears I put on an outfit he loves on me and am wearing my black dress with really bright magenta look at me tights.  He was amused that I am as willing to work on getting my things under control as I am supportive of him doing.  Doing it together make the work easier! He was also highly amused that we share the tights.  LOL  I don't ask him to get better and refuse to get better for him.

Nikki is well, and I think opening up and talking about everything with her made him realize, sadly, how MANY people out there share their story.  That they're not alone, and while they know they didn't deserve that, there is something to having a secret shame hidden from self and others that hurts inside.  She pointed out some things that I need to work on to continue improving things as a couple and i think I took them more seriously than Nikki.  LOL  But he deserves my best, so I'm going to try to overcome a lifetime of communication trends and learn new ones.  It can't be any worse than my attempts at trying to type like a human.  She was also quite frank in telling him he has to decide for himself how far he wants to open the box, and that it's possible to reclaim the missing memories if he feels like he can't resolve it without facing it (some people need that) and that it also possible to resolve it without ever visiting it (some people need to never look) and to really focus on his feelings with that while in therapy.  Very sage advice.  He's feeling good about it, maybe he'll blog.  Talking about his emotions has always been hard, but he's doing better and I think liking it.  Or he's humoring a crazy wife. 

Nikki seems like some of the internal pressure valve opened up and he was relaxed on the way home, and I think is going to strait to bed when he gets out of the bathroom since he works stupidly early in the morning tomorrow.  He told me on the way home when we were talking about how lucky we were to find this board that the reason it works here for him as well as for me is the lack of pressure on him to transition, something he decided for himself he's not ready to do feeling this uncertain about himself and just starting exploring the new possibilities.  Hearing him say it wasn't about me and my idiot fears was a big relief.  I don't want to hold him back.  And the diverse voices and life choices here gives us both a wide variety of stories and examples.  And the love and respect and kindness has been tremendous.  This is the most amazing place.  She did tell us that Columbus has more of a vibrant going out type scene than we get here, and will ask around for places for me.  It's not that much further out, and it would be fun to have her join us on hangout vs date nights.    So we're expanding our considerations.  It's further, but it's not like we don't go there to visit people now.  And i like the road trip feel to going there.  It's a nice mindset. 

And I got Boston Market Chicken.  Twice in two weeks, SCORE! 

Yeah, that secret shame hurts so deeply, to the core. Good for you Bree that you recognize this for Nikki. She needs you so much right now, I feel. You know I support you, too. It's just that that secret shame rings so true for me I had to comment about it. It sucks, so much. From personal experience, trust me, it does. She will love you all the more for your unequivocal love right now.

Emma

Emma, I think being older when I landed physically in harms way helped so much in being able to tell people what asshat husband was doing to me at the time.  I sorta had to learn the hard way, trying to sort between Grandpa's healthy teaches and messages and my parents really unhealthy ones, and I let myself into a really dangerous situation.  But being an adult, albeit a very young one at the ages of 19 to 21, I had some sort of ability to separate what was being done to me from deserving it.  I don't know where that goes for either of them, being children at the time who so often internalize the blame for everything.  How do you stop carrying that inside?  I don't know.  Maybe it's impossible, but I believe Nikki can learn to come out of his pain past it, because he's so amazing. I just think it will be a long slow process.

Listening to them tonight really makes me wonder what I would have turned into if I hadn't had my normal relatives to counteract the really bad ones.  How would that interact with my sociopathic leanings, which never developed into a full blown lack of feeling/empathy because Grandpa worked so hard to connect me to the world and life and the value of others?  Where would I be today?  I don't think I would have done as well as they did.  I gained my strength later, and if I had hit that wall at a younger age i doubt I would have overcome as far as they have.  I was really lucky despite all the bad, and this was a nice reminder to appreciate that.  Remember, we hate leukemia.  It stole the last 20 or so years of my grandpa's life and our shared times. 

He spoke of making a conscious decision not to self-medicate all of it away when he was young, and how glad he is that he was able to build what we have together despite all that inside.  He's so much stronger than me in many ways, and I"m stronger in others, and together we take on the world.  But I completely awe at his strengths and courage.  I hope whatever he chooses to do in the future to heal, he learns what he needs and how to give himself whatever it is he needs to make his life as wonderful as he deserves.  I do all I can to help him achieve that, but me alone will never be enough.  I know that too.  Just like I have to stand up on my own when he holds his hand out to me, my legs still have to make the effort to lift me back up when he pulls when life knocks him down.  But my hand is there for him always.

I really loved that she had a fully balanced perspective, and wasn't shy about asking how the other felt about our feelings.  What are your limits in this Bree?  Do her limits make you feel limited?  sort of talk.  And she knows my strengths and flaws and was able to be really specific asking if I was doing certain behaviors that could make this a problem, and I think was fairly surprised to learn I hadn't been.  I'd been working on being a better turtle for a while before I started this new phase of our life.

And this was a stark reminder of the difference between shame pushed on you by life, and shame from things you actively chose to do.  My worst shame moment was a choice I made that was horrible, and i knew it was horrible, but I was going to do it anyway until I was interrupted.  But there is a realization I had that choice, and made it.  This that they and you carry is so different, none of you had choices.  And that makes my heart bleed for all of you, to have that much pain and you never earned it like me.

Bree,

I completely agree with Veronica. I know it's hard and easier said than done but we have to try to leave the past behind. I think it's fair to say that we've all done things that we are ashamed of, I certainly have. Here's a couple of things to try:

1. Say the Serenity Prayer. I'm not religious, but it's a wonderful philosophy. We cannot change the past so we try to accept this and change the things that we can;

2. Brene Brown has written several books on shame, she's wonderful. One of her main points is that shame loves and thrives in the darkness but whithers in the light of openness.  We try to protect ourselves by not admitting and sharing those things we did but that only adds to the shame. Talk about it, share your story, maybe only with Nikki, maybe with a therapist, but get it out. It's not perfect (nothing is) but it's sure helped me.

Warm hugs,

Emma

I am completely l learning about things I suppressed in opening these boxes with Nikki.  I am totally becoming a better Bree because I have grown so much since my past.  Sometimes I have articulation problems. When I say I earned my shames, that is acceptance, and growth from it.  My natural tendency is to hide it all and present a shiny Bree that isn't real.  I worked hard to overcome it.  But I don't wallow in it either.  I don't usually think about these things, but it's all connected orginacally in my head as I"m learning to navigate and love the new.  Nikki's new life experiences (new to me, as in first time they are being shared with me, not new to him, I understand this) touches pieces of my life I never exampled

A while back we were in our living room chilling out on a winters day enjoying being wrapped in furry microblankets and warm.  I think it was a weekend, so total relaxation mode was kicked in.  I was surfing the web, I think Nikki was embroiled in a movie while he tinkered with some 3d art.  I opened my Facebook, and freaked the fuck out entirely.  My ex-husband was trying to friend me.  Which, on it's surface, all the normal emotions of someone who hit you and threatened bodily harm and to steal your child suddenly intruding in your life was there, but something was off.  I couldn't define it, something was wrong with my reaction to it.  Working with Nikki made me understand it.  Just as the relationship with him has altered my relationship  with sex, it has altered my relationships with a lot of thigns, including what I carry actively around in my head.  I had let a lot of it go and never known it.  I stopped thinking about being hit every time I disagreed with him.  I learned relationships can be safe.  I never unlearned they can hurt you badly, but I learned you can be totally safe in them too.  And that is what I was acting on for two decades.  I had subconsciouly packed away the past because I didn't need it to function anymore.  And it wasn't until now when we're talking, and we do a one says something, and the other tells them what they hear that I even realized this.  And that's what was off about him intruding and my feelings.  I was spiraling of course, but the comfort wasn't working because I wasn't working on the right fear.  I stopped being scared of him a long time ago.  I had taken the time to learn how to kill a man with nothing but my fingers through his eyes if I ever needed to.  I understand even as a weaker person I have chances to defend myself.  I'd worked through all that.  but I had a deep seated fear of dragging all that baggage back into my life after I conquered it, and that was what I needed to address.  Nikki and I both were tryign to address what we logically thought was a fear of the person himself.  But i was actually scared of me destroying everything I worked for. 

I am becoming the best Bree there is, the one I used to wish I could be.  I take both your advice seriously to heart, and doing my very best to keep shining. 

Nikki knows the story, and I"ll tell here.  I came here to talk and interact and expand my humanity, I have no need to do my weird protective behaviors anymore.  At the end, when he realized he was losing his grip on me despite the violence and threats to bodily harm people and steal the offspring, I was slipping away, losing my fear, and neither of us was going to change that.  So he tried a new route, and swallowed ALL of my mom's medications.  He timed it so I would be arriving home shortly after.  I was out alone, my mother and my son were also out together.  As expected, I arrived home, and he told me what he did.  With the whole manipulation hoopla of I can't live without you.  But the actual effect on me was not what he was trying to achieve.  For the first time in my life, years of social training, and deliberate nurturing of the empathy skills I"d learned....stopped.  I looked at him on the floor, and thought about what I had looked like bleeding on the floor.  I thought about how I'd looked on the floor after he threatened to hurt people and showed me a gun.  I thought about the fact that the only thing I had touched in that bathroom (it was my mom's that I rarely used, I used my own in the back of the apartment) was the door handle.  I knew for fact I'd never handled any of the medication.  And I backed out of the room, I never even said a word.  And I closed the door, and I went into the living room and I turned on the television.  I knew i had just decided that if he lived or died, it had nothing to do with me.  I was not going to save him.  I would not stop him if he came out to phone to save himself, but I wasn't going to save him.  Until that day I had no idea I would back away from a person like that.  I had interrupted suicides before, and done everything I could to save them.  Teenagehood is hard, I suspect you all know how hard better than me.  Back then I didn't understand why anyone would want to die.  But he took those pills himself, and I wasn't going to do it for him.  The only reason I picked up the phone and made the 911 call is my mom arrived with my son, and I had to save my son.  Even though it mean nearly getting killed later, I made the right choice for the right reason, that wasn't something I wanted to scar my baby, being in the house with his dying father.  And I hated myself for it for a long time until I faced it and worked through it.  I was scared of myself.  It made me question my ability to be a mother if I didn't value all life like I thought I did.

That is the flat unvarnished truth.  There is shame in that that for a moment, I put aside all my hard work.  Not shame because society would tell me that was a horrible thing to do, but because it went against what <b>I</b> believe.  What I'd worked for.  And taught me that if I had a potential to be dangerous, and I took that seriously and worked hard.  SOme lines, even if you do change your mind at the end, are just dangerous to cross. 

But through my life i learned facing these lines, sharing them with people who want to know me, reinforces what I want to be.  Which is better than that.  I can't undo that moment, I don't know what I would do put back in it.  I am not that person anymore.  I can't even really emotionally connect with the memory of why i made what choices anymore.  But I can use that memory to always remind myself that being awesome Bree isn't free, and I have to be careful with the things in my head because if I'm not things could go really wrong.  I could harm someone, probably not physically, I don't have a sadism part to my personality, but by a careless word or thoughtless action that I am prone to.  So I was really careful and took that time to self-sort because I love Nikki so much I don't ever want to be that unshiny with him.   He has never done anything but love me even when he made choices that weren't what I preferred. 

But it also makes me hard to know how shame works in him.  He didn't ask for that creature to do that to him.  So I have to remind myself emotion is not the same.  Shame for me is a completely different place than for him.  Conceptually and practically.  His instinct was to hide it, mine was to tell him and get forgiveness and confirmation that I did improve, get better, and earned my self-value.  It's only real if you earn it.  SO I have to poke at things to figure out when I'm projecting my life understanding trying to follow what he tells me or not, does that make any sense?