Plop was a Barn Owl

And Plop was afraid of the dark.

And do you know what Plop used to ask more than anything else?

"That was nice. What's next?"

And, as "What's next?" seemed like it might be a pertinent question following my last post, I was reminded of young Plop :)
It is certainly not my intention to muddy the name of an innocent young barn owl (and especially not one who is afraid of the dark) by associating him with this story, but I felt it made a change from leaping straight in. It makes a change for me to ramble, doesn't it? ;) Well... Ish. ;) I have to say though, "Plop" is a fantastic name for a barn owl :) Well, actually, it's a pretty fantastic name for almost anything :) Although I don't think I'd consider naming my own child "Plop"... Hmmm, then again... ;)

Ooh, I's proper cultured, in't I. Talking about children's books ;) Does anyone else remember Plop? :)

But, as for what happened next... (Hello, gone a bit "Question of Sport" or something now)

We had a brief follow-up conversation later that night in bed. "You do make me happy," she said. But still, she's not happy in general. There's always at least one thing wrong, one thing worrying her, and a hundred things she wants that might make her happy. I think that's kind of the "point" of depression. But still... It doesn't really make it any easier.

Little was said on the subject after that until I brought it up again on the Sunday morning. She said that she had started trying to make more of a specific effort to try to think about things positively. I said that I had been wondering whether perhaps we had some individual problems we should try to look at solving ourselves, and that perhaps "our" issues couldn't really fall into place until we had made progress with them. I told her that I had been almost wondering whether I should move out for a bit to give us some space to look at those issues alone.
(See also: The irony of this compared to some of my earlier comments)

The next day, we talked about this, and all the thoughts and feelings over the last week, with Relate. Now, at this point, the Relate sessions had still been about trying to establish where we were, and how Relate could help us to move forwards, before seriously attempting to help get us there.
So, three options seemed to present themselves:
1. Continue with Relate into psycho-sexual therapy, as was our original intention
2. Continue with Relate into couple counselling
3. Get some space

1. Whilst this was our original intention when we first went decided to get some help and go to Relate, enough has changed that I (and RT) am no longer sure this is the most sensible action at the moment. I believe I have too much else on my mind to really concentrate on this at the moment.
(There we are again with the irony)

2. Now, something I learnt that I felt was interesting about couple counselling is that it seems you wouldn't "just" go to couple counselling. You go (or at least start) with a specific issue in mind to work on tackling. See, I'd always just assumed that you'd just "sort of go", but I can see it makes sense if you have a specific thing to focus on too. Examples of "things" you could "take into" couple counselling are the sexual issues ('though this would be less to do with the "physical" side, as with psycho-sexual therapy), or the fact that I think I want some space. I guess it's about equipping you with the tools to help communicate in general, as well as to do with a specific issue.

3. Not much more to be said, other than that we would get some space apart from each other for a while. I have a number of "reasons" to help "justify" this step. I'm not certain how many are actually reasons and how many are more... excuses... but that's my business ;) The main one is that I feel it would do us both some good. It would help give Mrs Monkfish some space to tackle her issues (i.e. depression), and I think would help her to be more aware of how she's doing than being together. For example, I think (hope) that it would largely solve the comfort eating. At the moment, simply my presence around her can stop her from over-eating. But I'm obviously not around her 24/7 (what with, y'know, working or, say, showering - little things like that), and its the times I'm not there that she'll eat somewhat more than she needs (it was this sort of thing that meant I did know I couldn't solve her food problems for her).
At the same time, I'm not sure that if she were to actually change her personality at the moment, whether I would actually see it, because I have got too caught up in how things have been for the last seven years (as of a few days ago we have officially lived together in this house for seven years, and there was a month or two before that of living together but with her parents) to see when they change. On top of that, I'm also concious of a number of issues I have with myself.
There's a lot of stuff that I do (or, more often, don't do), that I feel I want to challenge myself over. For some reason, I don't feel I can challenge myself with it together. I mean we're both terrible at cleaning the home for example, and I'm also absolutely terrible at just tidying my own desk and stuff. I want to take my excuses away and force myself to do some of these things, or accept that it's my own fault and that I can't blame it on anything else.
Blimey, it's a bloody good job there was "not much more to be said", or I could really have rambled on there ;) I could keep going, but for now, I'll leave that there.

So anyway, of those three options, we had to work out which one to pursue. RT and I were against 1. That was slightly surprising to Mrs M, as she had thought for so long that it was the only problem. As I pointed out, for a long time, it was pretty much the only one. It was only recently that things seemed to (d)evolve into more.

And what option did we decide on? We didn't. We ran out of time ;) So we were set the task of considering it amongst ourselves to work it out for next week.

I'd been hoping to get a bit more covered than this, but I think that'll have to do for now. There's always more than you think to these things! :)

Wait, what's that I hear you say? "That was nice... What's next?" ;)