Welcome Home

Handsome made it home in the very wee hours of Monday morning. I heard him come in the door, promptly fell asleep again, and awoke sometime thereafter as he loudly brushed his teeth. He got into bed, we talked briefly about what Monday’s schedule looked like… and then he wept. I’m not sure why. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. (It seemed like the wrong time.) I just held onto him.

We still haven’t really talked about what he learned from the week or what strides he made or anything like that. He did tell me that he thought the intensive was amazing and if he had known what it was going to be like ahead of time he probably would have chickened out. Handsome is used to cognitive behavioral therapy. He’s not exactly comfortable with that process (intimacy disorder), but he’s grown accustomed to it.

His intensive was mostly experiential therapy. Think role-playing and acting out dialogs and scenes from your past in front of a group. It also involves other hands-on experiences to process and evaluate past emotional experiences. As Psychology Today says, “The client focuses on the activities and, through the experience, begins to identify emotions associated with success, disappointment, responsibility, and self-esteem. Under the guidance of a trained experiential therapist, the client can begin to release and explore negative feelings of anger, hurt, or shame as they relate to past experiences that may have been blocked or still linger.” Asking Handsome to do this is like asking a mime to give a dissertation. It’s more than simply “not his thing”… it’s so far beyond his comfort zone that I am reasonably sure that if Handsome had driven himself to the intensive he would have turned right around and driven himself home.

He hadn’t driven himself though, so he stayed and sucked it up and he says he tried to make the most of it even though it made him incredibly uncomfortable at first. There were 50 men and women there – all veterans of an armed service – but they were divided into smaller groups to make it more manageable. Handsome only had 8 people in his sub-group, and he seems to have bonded with most of them as well as with one of his roommates and a bunch of folks he ate with almost every meal. They all exchanged contact information at the end (including a woman who was in his meal group – a boundary violation for Handsome – but I’ll cross that bridge later). I’m incredibly happy that he has some resources to reach out to beyond his small circle of SA contacts.

We’ll debrief more over the coming days, but I’m glad he’s home. I missed him. I did not miss any of the baggage and BS that has accompanied him all too often these days, but I missed my guy.

I did have a truly wonderful week with my kiddos though. We watched movies in our jammies and did homework and we cooked and talked and joked about our days. I showed up with a smile on my face for work each day. I also managed to read two awesome books and I listened to my favorite music on the highest volume in the shower. It was great. I signed up for a glass blowing class (something I’ve always wanted to do) with a few other lawyers from our local bar association and I made two beautiful paperweights. (I toasted my right arm too, but it was well worth it. I just need to wear a thicker shirt next time.) I also met some cool and interesting people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. When I was growing up I always loved arts and crafts and sewing and different hands-on projects, and then I feel like I aged into being an adult and lost my creativity mojo. It was terrific fun to get it back, even just for an evening. And these lovelies can now serve as tangible reminders that when I take time to set my mind free, the results can be beautiful.