Depression

[Kidder81]

It's hard to know the best support for people, social media and the like is awash with mental health & "wellness" grifters, taking advantage of people (for coin) when they have no credentials and are just trying to further their own "career".

[tbrick18]

With all the Christmas festivities its easy to forget that for some this is a really difficult time of year.
In our area there has been some tragedy in recent weeks between suicides and the untimely deaths of teenagers, some of who my kids have known.

Keep an eye out for your friends, family and neighbours....a simple "how are ye" might make a difference to them.

If anyone on here needs a chat in private, pm me and I'll send you my number no problem.

Take it easy all, and happy Christmas everyone.

[Rudi]

With all the Christmas festivities its easy to forget that for some this is a really difficult time of year.
In our area there has been some tragedy in recent weeks between suicides and the untimely deaths of teenagers, some of who my kids have known.

Keep an eye out for your friends, family and neighbours....a simple "how are ye" might make a difference to them.

If anyone on here needs a chat in private, pm me and I'll send you my number no problem.

Take it easy all, and happy Christmas everyone.

Fair play TBrick, delighted your young fella is going well. Hope Small White Mayo mans son is going well.

[seafoid]

So sad but well worth a read on the late Red Óg Murphy.

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/2022/11/26/the-life-and-death-of-red-og-murphy-we-had-no-reason-to-believe-anything-was-wrong/

That's a heartbreaking read.
All too common though.

In our area, there have been two suicides in recent weeks. One was an elderly man, totally out of the blue. The families are distraught.

The impact of something like this is un-imaginable and I can only hope nothing like it ever visits my family, but I must admit it's something I'm afraid of and I always have one eye open watching for signs of it.
Horrible way to live, but my family have been touched with mental health problems and it leaves you with that fear that it could be worse.

Whether by suicide or ill-health as in the case of Dillon Quirke, the death of a sportsperson is particularly shocking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12DyfIAajpg

[seafoid]

This programme in Galway is very laudable

https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2022/1222/1343278-water-safety/

[seafoid]

https://www.independent.ie/news/tommy-tiernan-opens-up-about-his-mothers-suicide-she-would-always-be-on-my-mind-42268985.html

[seafoid]

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/man-utd-legends-to-play-charity-match-against-north-belfast-fans-and-ni-stars-like-carl-frampton-and-shane-todd-for-mental-health-42270656.html

[paddyjohn]

Keep talking folks. Bump

[Milltown Row2]

Keep talking folks. Bump

Great article on Saffron Gael today from Brendan, great to hear people highlighting their issues and keeping it at the forefront.

Its ok to have problems and even better to talk about them

[paddyjohn]

Keep talking folks. Bump

Great article on Saffron Gael today from Brendan, great to hear people highlighting their issues and keeping it at the forefront.

Its ok to have problems and even better to talk about them

Correct. Demons have been haunting my door over the last wee while and talking is the way out

[Eamonnca1]

Sorry for the long post. I don't expect anyone to read this, but it's been therapeutic writing it all down.

Disclaimer: I love my wife and we have a happy family life. But when it gets bad, it gets bad.

I had a massive fight with the wife on Monday (which was a holiday here and daycare was closed). They seem to get bigger each time because of the unresolved issues that come out of them.

I've asked her before not to let our 4 year-old daughter sit in her lap in the car while she's driving, even if she's "just" moving the car into the street. On Saturday she went to move the car into the street and took our little girl with her. I said "She's not to sit in your lap while you're driving." She said "I understand," which I thought was a strange response.

I watched out the window, saw her pulling out of the garage, then stopping, and opening the driver's door to let our daughter out of her lap. She then put her in her little plastic car, and drove off around the corner, leaving our daughter unattended, which we never do. This is a driveway in an apartment complex with cars and delivery trucks coming and going. I thought "What the Sam Hill is she doing?!"

I grabbed the baby and ran downstairs and outside. By the time I caught up with our daughter, mom had already parked the car in the street and the two of them met at the gate. Our daughter was heading towards the street, although she would have had a hard time opening the gate to get her plastic car through.

I looked at my wife in horror and she immediately knew I was upset. I said "I don't think she should be allowed to sit in the driver's seat in any circumstances until she's old enough. I don't want her thinking it's okay to get in the driver's seat. I've seen her play with the controls of the car. Our garage floor has a slope. She might get into the car, play with the gearstick and move it into neutral. If you've forgotten to pull the handbrake (which she frequently does) then the car might roll forward and run over the baby and she won't know how to stop the car."

She said okay, and was sorry. She hadn't thought of that angle. I said words to the effect of "I'd appreciate it if you'd listen to me next time and don't openly defy me. I specifically told you not to do it and you did it anyway." I think I also brought up the business of leaving our daughter unattended in the driveway. This is where she started getting defensive and interrupting me. I raised my voice to make myself heard. Then she starts berating me for yelling. Some neighbours walked past and saw the whole thing. I told her not to do the usual thing of turning this around and making it all about me and my temper. From that moment forward, it was all about the shouting. The original problem of her not listening to me went out the window. More shouting and arguing ensued in the house. I put the kids in the bike and took them to the park.

She sent me a text a few minutes later saying she was going "somewhere else." I tracked the car on my phone and saw that she was on her way to her mother's house, one hour away, which is unoccupied at the minute because they're on holiday. She spent the night and the next day there, coming back on Tuesday evening in time to help me pick up the kids from daycare.

After putting the kids to bed I tried to talk it out with her. I let her speak first. I let her deliver a monologue lasting about ten minutes, uninterrupted. It was all about my temper and my shouting, and she played down the original problem. She attributed that to a misunderstanding, that she thought it was still okay to have the child on her lap if driving a few yards within the complex, she thought I only meant out on the public road where a cop could pull her over.

Then it was my turn to speak. I got about six words out and then she started interrupting. I was trying to tell her that I have a massive problem with how she interrupts me when I'm speaking and I end up not feeling listened to. I tried to explain that I felt like she openly defied me just to prove that she could. When I said that our daughter was not to sit in her lap, she said "I understand" rather than "okay" as you'd normally expect. It felt like she was acknowledging the request but had no intention of doing what I asked, and sure enough she did what she liked anyway, which she often does. It took me over half an hour to get these points across because of her constant interruptions. I would get about five words out only to be shouted down. At one point I took out three plastic cups and set them on a kitchen worktop, invoking the old three-strikes-and-you're-out system we used to use when our daughter was a toddler and misbehaving.

I tried to speak again and was interrupted almost immediately. I turned one of the cups upside down and said "strike one." She then flicked the cups off the counter and they went flying across the floor with a crash.

We tried writing down our grievances on a big sheet of paper, but she took the marker and started writing my grievances for me in her own words, which completely twisted the meaning.

After about another twenty minutes of me trying to speak and say my piece, she demanded that I apologize for shouting, which I did. She refused to talk about anything that happened before the shouting, claiming that "this is what abusers do, blaming their victim for making them violent." She only wanted to talk about the shouting which was "the core issue" as far as she was concerned.

I asked her what she would do if I had thrown cups across the kitchen the way she just did. She denied throwing them. Said she just "knocked them down" and played it down. I said that I may have a temper, but she can give me a good run for my money too. She denied it. I said that she was yelling at me in the driveway too. She argued that I was worse because I was yelling louder.

When I persisted with my attempts to tell her about her listening problem, she demanded that I leave the house and go somewhere else to spend the night. I refused.

She kept repeating that I was trying to argue that it's okay to yell at your wife. I said, approximately six times and through her constant interruptions, that it's not okay, but she kept coming back at me with this claim that I was trying to argue that it's okay to yell at your wife.

She gave me an ultimatum. She said that if I yell at her one more time, she's going to leave me. She had already moved a substantial amount of money out of our joint account and into her personal account, preparing to switch to a life as a single mother. She ordered me to come up with a plan for anger management and look for counselling. She denied that she has a problem with her own temper.

I got the usual barrage of criticism for not being proactive enough in planning activities for the kids and "letting her do it all." (It's not true. I work my ass off in the house, there's a lot more I could write about that.)

Since I effectively had a gun put to my head, I accepted all her demands, gave her a hug later and let her cry it out.

We had a normal day yesterday, and she clearly feels a lot better. Last night I asked her to move the money back over, and she already had.

She's back to normal happiness again, but I'm not. I feel completely defeated and still not listened to.

She has this annoying habit of interrupting when I speak. Most of the time it's about trivial stuff and it doesn't really matter, but during the big important discussions it becomes a big problem, especially when it comes to the safety of our children. She tends to dismiss my point of view out of hand. She has trouble listening to me. She has her own ideas about what I'm getting at and just runs with them, cutting me off before I get to my actual point.

I don't feel respected by my wife. I still feel like an employee with a bullying boss. I still feel the need to jump out of my chair and look busy when she walks into the room. I still can't take so much as a one-minute break to look at a newspaper or look at my phone if she's doing something productive, but she has the freedom to sit on the couch and watch TV or look at her phone for half an hour while I scrub and clean the kitchen. I brought that up during our "discussion" but she used some sort of convoluted logic to prove that I'm really not proactive enough.

I don't know how to bring this up with her. She spent all day yesterday thinking this was resolved, but it was just a truce that I called to stop her from breaking this family up.

Last night I slept on the couch (we've been doing a lot of that lately because she's such a light sleeper, and I use CPAP which sometimes wakes her up). I had trouble sleeping, and I dreamed that I'd fallen asleep during the kid's upcoming birthday party and she was angry with me for letting her down.

This morning she didn't see much of me because I skipped breakfast (which I never do) and had an early remote meeting that I had to lead. After the meeting she got snippy with me over a misunderstanding about masks, she'd left the context out of a statement and I misunderstood what she meant. We took the car to daycare and she kept making technical suggestions about getting the cleaning lady back to take some of the chores, what to do with calendar invites, and things to make the mornings run more smoothly. I was mostly silent and just nodded in agreement to everything she said. By the time we got to daycare she knew something was wrong, I think she could see I was on the verge of tears. I wanted to help her bring the kids in, but she dismissed me in the hallway saying that "there's something wrong with you, you look like you hate me." I just said "no" and almost started crying, and I walked out. She looked through the glass door and unlocked the car remotely so I could take my kick scooter out of the boot to take to work. That's where I completely broke down bawling, and I think she saw it.

I scooted on into work, stopping for a sit down and cry on the way. I held it together when I got to work, then took my computer to a private room, shut the door, and sat on the floor crying for an hour.

She has texted since saying she's sorry I'm upset and she wanted to give me a hug. I told her I'll be okay.

She's already set up a counseling appointment, I was in the process of doing that this morning for myself but didn't have time because of the meeting and getting the kids up.

I'm still in the room now but feeling a bit better after having written all this down. If you've managed to trudge through all that, thank you.

[LC]

Sorry for the long post. I don't expect anyone to read this, but it's been therapeutic writing it all down.

Disclaimer: I love my wife and we have a happy family life. But when it gets bad, it gets bad.

I had a massive fight with the wife on Monday (which was a holiday here and daycare was closed). They seem to get bigger each time because of the unresolved issues that come out of them.

I've asked her before not to let our 4 year-old daughter sit in her lap in the car while she's driving, even if she's "just" moving the car into the street. On Saturday she went to move the car into the street and took our little girl with her. I said "She's not to sit in your lap while you're driving." She said "I understand," which I thought was a strange response.

I watched out the window, saw her pulling out of the garage, then stopping, and opening the driver's door to let our daughter out of her lap. She then put her in her little plastic car, and drove off around the corner, leaving our daughter unattended, which we never do. This is a driveway in an apartment complex with cars and delivery trucks coming and going. I thought "What the Sam Hill is she doing?!"

I grabbed the baby and ran downstairs and outside. By the time I caught up with our daughter, mom had already parked the car in the street and the two of them met at the gate. Our daughter was heading towards the street, although she would have had a hard time opening the gate to get her plastic car through.

I looked at my wife in horror and she immediately knew I was upset. I said "I don't think she should be allowed to sit in the driver's seat in any circumstances until she's old enough. I don't want her thinking it's okay to get in the driver's seat. I've seen her play with the controls of the car. Our garage floor has a slope. She might get into the car, play with the gearstick and move it into neutral. If you've forgotten to pull the handbrake (which she frequently does) then the car might roll forward and run over the baby and she won't know how to stop the car."

She said okay, and was sorry. She hadn't thought of that angle. I said words to the effect of "I'd appreciate it if you'd listen to me next time and don't openly defy me. I specifically told you not to do it and you did it anyway." I think I also brought up the business of leaving our daughter unattended in the driveway. This is where she started getting defensive and interrupting me. I raised my voice to make myself heard. Then she starts berating me for yelling. Some neighbours walked past and saw the whole thing. I told her not to do the usual thing of turning this around and making it all about me and my temper. From that moment forward, it was all about the shouting. The original problem of her not listening to me went out the window. More shouting and arguing ensued in the house. I put the kids in the bike and took them to the park.

She sent me a text a few minutes later saying she was going "somewhere else." I tracked the car on my phone and saw that she was on her way to her mother's house, one hour away, which is unoccupied at the minute because they're on holiday. She spent the night and the next day there, coming back on Tuesday evening in time to help me pick up the kids from daycare.

After putting the kids to bed I tried to talk it out with her. I let her speak first. I let her deliver a monologue lasting about ten minutes, uninterrupted. It was all about my temper and my shouting, and she played down the original problem. She attributed that to a misunderstanding, that she thought it was still okay to have the child on her lap if driving a few yards within the complex, she thought I only meant out on the public road where a cop could pull her over.

Then it was my turn to speak. I got about six words out and then she started interrupting. I was trying to tell her that I have a massive problem with how she interrupts me when I'm speaking and I end up not feeling listened to. I tried to explain that I felt like she openly defied me just to prove that she could. When I said that our daughter was not to sit in her lap, she said "I understand" rather than "okay" as you'd normally expect. It felt like she was acknowledging the request but had no intention of doing what I asked, and sure enough she did what she liked anyway, which she often does. It took me over half an hour to get these points across because of her constant interruptions. I would get about five words out only to be shouted down. At one point I took out three plastic cups and set them on a kitchen worktop, invoking the old three-strikes-and-you're-out system we used to use when our daughter was a toddler and misbehaving.

I tried to speak again and was interrupted almost immediately. I turned one of the cups upside down and said "strike one." She then flicked the cups off the counter and they went flying across the floor with a crash.

We tried writing down our grievances on a big sheet of paper, but she took the marker and started writing my grievances for me in her own words, which completely twisted the meaning.

After about another twenty minutes of me trying to speak and say my piece, she demanded that I apologize for shouting, which I did. She refused to talk about anything that happened before the shouting, claiming that "this is what abusers do, blaming their victim for making them violent." She only wanted to talk about the shouting which was "the core issue" as far as she was concerned.

I asked her what she would do if I had thrown cups across the kitchen the way she just did. She denied throwing them. Said she just "knocked them down" and played it down. I said that I may have a temper, but she can give me a good run for my money too. She denied it. I said that she was yelling at me in the driveway too. She argued that I was worse because I was yelling louder.

When I persisted with my attempts to tell her about her listening problem, she demanded that I leave the house and go somewhere else to spend the night. I refused.

She kept repeating that I was trying to argue that it's okay to yell at your wife. I said, approximately six times and through her constant interruptions, that it's not okay, but she kept coming back at me with this claim that I was trying to argue that it's okay to yell at your wife.

She gave me an ultimatum. She said that if I yell at her one more time, she's going to leave me. She had already moved a substantial amount of money out of our joint account and into her personal account, preparing to switch to a life as a single mother. She ordered me to come up with a plan for anger management and look for counselling. She denied that she has a problem with her own temper.

I got the usual barrage of criticism for not being proactive enough in planning activities for the kids and "letting her do it all." (It's not true. I work my ass off in the house, there's a lot more I could write about that.)

Since I effectively had a gun put to my head, I accepted all her demands, gave her a hug later and let her cry it out.

We had a normal day yesterday, and she clearly feels a lot better. Last night I asked her to move the money back over, and she already had.

She's back to normal happiness again, but I'm not. I feel completely defeated and still not listened to.

She has this annoying habit of interrupting when I speak. Most of the time it's about trivial stuff and it doesn't really matter, but during the big important discussions it becomes a big problem, especially when it comes to the safety of our children. She tends to dismiss my point of view out of hand. She has trouble listening to me. She has her own ideas about what I'm getting at and just runs with them, cutting me off before I get to my actual point.

I don't feel respected by my wife. I still feel like an employee with a bullying boss. I still feel the need to jump out of my chair and look busy when she walks into the room. I still can't take so much as a one-minute break to look at a newspaper or look at my phone if she's doing something productive, but she has the freedom to sit on the couch and watch TV or look at her phone for half an hour while I scrub and clean the kitchen. I brought that up during our "discussion" but she used some sort of convoluted logic to prove that I'm really not proactive enough.

I don't know how to bring this up with her. She spent all day yesterday thinking this was resolved, but it was just a truce that I called to stop her from breaking this family up.

Last night I slept on the couch (we've been doing a lot of that lately because she's such a light sleeper, and I use CPAP which sometimes wakes her up). I had trouble sleeping, and I dreamed that I'd fallen asleep during the kid's upcoming birthday party and she was angry with me for letting her down.

This morning she didn't see much of me because I skipped breakfast (which I never do) and had an early remote meeting that I had to lead. After the meeting she got snippy with me over a misunderstanding about masks, she'd left the context out of a statement and I misunderstood what she meant. We took the car to daycare and she kept making technical suggestions about getting the cleaning lady back to take some of the chores, what to do with calendar invites, and things to make the mornings run more smoothly. I was mostly silent and just nodded in agreement to everything she said. By the time we got to daycare she knew something was wrong, I think she could see I was on the verge of tears. I wanted to help her bring the kids in, but she dismissed me in the hallway saying that "there's something wrong with you, you look like you hate me." I just said "no" and almost started crying, and I walked out. She looked through the glass door and unlocked the car remotely so I could take my kick scooter out of the boot to take to work. That's where I completely broke down bawling, and I think she saw it.

I scooted on into work, stopping for a sit down and cry on the way. I held it together when I got to work, then took my computer to a private room, shut the door, and sat on the floor crying for an hour.

She has texted since saying she's sorry I'm upset and she wanted to give me a hug. I told her I'll be okay.

She's already set up a counseling appointment, I was in the process of doing that this morning for myself but didn't have time because of the meeting and getting the kids up.

I'm still in the room now but feeling a bit better after having written all this down. If you've managed to trudge through all that, thank you.

Feel for you man.  I am presuming you are in a foreign country so not to close to you friends, family etc which could only compound things.  Re the bit highlighted above I see this as a chink of light.  This tells me she realises that she was out of line, not fully I presume, but at least it is a starting point.

Stay strong.

[AustinPowers]

Then it was my turn to speak. I got about six words out and then she started interrupting. I was trying to tell her that I have a massive problem with how she interrupts me when I'm speaking and I end up not feeling listened to. I tried to explain that I felt like she openly defied me just to prove that she could. When I said that our daughter was not to sit in her lap, she said "I understand" rather than "okay" as you'd normally expect. It felt like she was acknowledging the request but had no intention of doing what I asked, and sure enough she did what she liked anyway, which she often does. It took me over half an hour to get these points across because of her constant interruptions. I would get about five words out only to be shouted down.


What I get from  that part , is she knows she is   In the wrong,  won't admit it , and when you try to tell her  she was wrong ,  she doesn't want to hear it .  Might as well stick her fingers in her ears shouting La la la.

Have had arguments in the past similar . Maybe I've been  trying to point out something , they flip it back on you, then give you the silent treatment or go  off in a huff. Best/worse of all  is when they turn on the tears ,  to try and make you feel guilty, and then you end up apologising to them!  Best thing to do when someone turns on the tears , is  walk out of the room .  Let them know you're not got be  manipulated by tears.

Anyway, a  lot to  digest there.  I hope things get better

[From the Bunker]

Eamonnca1 sometimes you have to remember you are now in a partnership. You don't make the rules or neither does your partner. Telling a partner what to do can be interpreted as nagging. There will always be compromises. I have been in your situation many times. The gas thing is it usually evolves from something rather trivial and you end up looking back and thinking to yourself what was that all about. These episodes are mentally draining and it is important when things calm down and both parties are rational to iron these problems. Issues not sorted out fester and raise their ugly head again.

[Rois]

Sounds like you're doing the right thing by looking for counselling - a skilled mediator will let both of you be heard.
Life with young kids is really hard. I'm definitely guilty of being really single-minded about the kids at times, and can get impatient and frustrated when the OH doesn't do what I think is obvious.