Minxxa Waves Hello

Minxxa

New member
Hi all!

I am new to these forums (have been reading and such for a few weeks, though), but not so new to the concept of polyamory, though I've been at times successful and at times... not so much. :)

A short introduction: I've known I was non-monogamous for 15 years. My ex-husband and I tried to make it work, however there were too many other issues with our marriage that couldn't be fixed and we divorced 11 years ago.

I met my current husband at around the same time, though we just dated for many years as I had just split up with my husband, had two small kids to take care of and wasn't really interested in any "formal" kind of relationship. Labels aside, we were very close from the beginning. He has always been a free spirit, has a very extroverted, ADHD personality and liked to take life as it came, which is something I love about him and never wanted to change. I introduced the concept of ethical non-monogamy to him when we went out because I knew he had a history of being less than honest in order to do what he wanted and I neither wanted him to stop doing his thing OR lie to me.

I will say that learning how to be honest has been a hard road for him, but he's definitely made a lot of changes. We also went back and forth between being "more" to each other, and then less... my version is that he had yet to envision a life where he had love and stability and honesty and could have fun and freedom as well. You'd have to ask him for his version, though...

We've been married for four years, most of them wonderful, but a few harder times, especially since he's been away a lot during that time (military), and I went through a period of time where my health was pretty crappy (thyroid and adrenal stuff-- basically exhausted all of the time.) We've worked through a lot in the last couple of years.

He got sent across the country recently for 7 months unexpectedly, and so we began yet another separation from each other, although at least there was the opportunity for conjugal visits! We had an issue come up right after he left which ended up getting us REALLY talking about things and making a lot of realizations about how we'd let our relationship suffer due to our own issues and some reactionary ones (i.e. we reacted to the other's actions by pulling away, which caused the same to happen to the first person.) Dumb stuff.

Anyway, we've talked much more in the past few months than we had in the year and a half previously, have come to some decisions, have realized some work needs to be done (both individually and together), and are in a much better place than we ever have been.

In that regard of self-work, one thing I've noticed is that I still to some extent have trust issues. Not that I don't trust what he says now, but that there's always a little questioning part of me that is suspicious and irrational. Some of that is due to things that happened in our past, and he's the first to admit some of that is very deserved. However, I'm thinking some comes from a general distrust of people to put my needs before what they want that I've had my whole life. (I hate to blame daddy issues, but there's something going on in that arena...) Anyway, I found a poly-friendly counselor and am going to start going next week for a variety of things, but that's the main issue I want to work on. First, figuring out where all of that is coming from, and secondly, learning how to deal with it effectively because right now one little thing will send me into a flashback of EVERY bad thing that's ever happened between us. It's ridiculous. But I think most of that is because I never truly dealt with the issues before, we talked and then swept it aside instead of dealing with it completely. It's like glitter-- you gotta clean it up completely or else you'll always keep finding it in spots you don't expect.

One last thing... I work full time, and am in grad school studying to be a Marraige and Family Therapist. I want to specialize in couples/sex therapy, but that will be somewhere down the line. Part of my therapy is because we're required to take 25 hours of personal counseling, however I've done counseling twice before for 6 months for other issues, so it's not new to me. I just had to wait for some new issues to come up so I had something meaty to work on.

So that's the overview. I guess it wasn't such a short introduction! (I tend to be wordy, you've been warned.)
 
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