Hey, the bird show. All right, so it feels a little strange to talk about my therapy here on the air, but I will. I've been seeing therapists on and off my whole life. You know, I grew up in a jacked-up family where nobody really cared about each other very much. So I think I've sort of been in and out of therapy my whole life because my relationships with people just have never felt right. Girlfriends never felt right. My place in the world, just a little off. Something didn't feel right, you know, and there's some connection there. So I've sort of dabbled in it. For those of you that don't know, my wife was hooked on prescription medication for five years. And she's just come out of that, and she's recovering now. But it was a really, really brutal five years in our house. Like my wife just turned into this person that I don't even know. Certainly not the woman that I signed up for and she hasn't been the woman that I fell in love with. Just the drugs have taken her over. And it has, it's been a rough five years for all of us for everybody in the house

without getting too much in depth with it um she's over that now and she kicked the habit

but for like five years now i've sort of been in the house but not in the house you know what i

mean mm-hmm like mentally yeah i just been putting a lot of distance between Stacy and I, because I'm not going

anywhere.

I've got kids.

I made a commitment.

So I've always said to myself that if I'm in a marriage, that you've got to give it

250% before you walk out the door.

And when you have kids, at least in my head, you have to give 450%.

So I did what I could do. Stacey was going through this very painful time. I was going through

it with her and then I sort of wasn't going through it with her also because I was keeping her

at arm's length. And we disconnected. You know, I didn't know how to deal with it.

Sometimes I was helping out, and other times I just mentally had to check out, you know,

because this person was not the person that I fell in love with and I wasn't like it.

Well, I think a lot of times people don't realize the effect on caretakers in any situation,

because everybody's affected by anything that's going on, like you said, and so I think that the person going through whatever struggle they're going through has to go through it because it's there. For you who wasn't going through that physically, you had to kind of stand by and endure it and then deal with it. And I mean, I think that there's so many people that don't know how to handle that situation. And I think not only caretaker, but also addiction in the way that that runs through people's lives and marriages, you know? Yeah. And the people around them aren't really allowed to talk and complain about it because the focus is on the person that's addicted and the pain that they're going through. So if you're the caretaker or you're in the house also, you sort of repress it and you're like, well, I'm going to put myself on the back burner right now because this person's going through real pain and I can't really bitch about it. So you sort of keep it inside. It's like depression. Like partners of people who have depression have to deal with the other person's depression. The consistent thing is that the caretaker is not going through it. So you're not addicted to it, but you have to deal with it. So you're feeling fine and you're ready to do whatever, but you can't. And over time, I mean, naturally somebody's going to distance themselves from that. And I did. And the relationship is deteriorated. So now she's off the pain

medications and she kicked it in one weekend and she's just been awesome about it. And she has turned back into a better version of what she was before she was on the pain medication. It like should jumpstart our relationship again. This is, I got her back. And you're so proud of her too. I'm really proud of her. I mean, to do that in one weekend and stick to it, like doctors would say,

would predict right now, she's not going to stick with it. Because 99% of people that do it on their own and do it the way Stacy did in one weekend, go back on the pain medication. But I've seen this woman in a lot of pain this week based on her back and her eye and she is not touching it and I only laugh because

you cause the eye problem right not purposely people on accident on accident so to make a long

story short I've disconnected from my wife and now that she's this new person I'm having a tough time

getting back into that mode I've kept her at arm's length for so long and disconnected that I just don't feel there. I just don't feel it's there. It's like that mode almost has become more regular. That's the routine now. That's what I know. I mean, it's five years. We're not talking about five weeks. We're talking about five years. So I decided to go to start therapy for it. How do I get back to this place that I need

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