312: What if you believed your love could cure him?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I was feeling as if I were underwater and everything underwater is like slow and dark and heavy. I couldn't find the right words to convey. I'm under the water. I need somebody to pull me up.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 312. What if you believed your love could cure him?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. I had the good fortune of being raised by hippies. My dad came to Bloomington, Indiana for college, where I was born.

He was from a farming family, and he was someone who wanted to look at the world differently and live differently than his parents. And so really tuned in to the spiritual kind of hippie movement. He got all the way to his senior year of college and he dropped out. He had already met my mom at that point. They actually fell in love on an acid trip.

They were drawing circles on a piece of paper and their circles connected. And that's when they both knew that they were meant to be with each other. My mom also, you know, was kind of a similar background in that she came to IU for college, started a degree and then dropped out with my dad to go live on a commune.

My mom came from a very working class background. Her dad was a truck driver and her mom was a nurse. And she also had a just kind of deep seated sense of spirituality. And so my mom and dad came together and completely abandoned the dreams their parents had for them. And it did cause some fallout for both of them.

My parents kind of created a family with their friends, their group of hippies. So I often say I was raised by a pack of hippies because the people who my parents ended up forming an intentional community with ended up really raising me. There were so many people who were really deeply invested in me growing up. Overall, it was a really lovely way to be raised.

I was born in 1976, and I was born at home. My parents were living in this one-room house, and they ended up moving from this little house into a trailer. It was all pretty good, and then my mom had a second child, and I think it started getting harder to support us.

They were really struggling to get by. And so my mom ended up putting herself through an RN program. She had two kids when she started and she got pregnant with my brother, Sam, my youngest brother.

I remember times when my family had to rely on government food that was being handed out at the local fire station and times where, you know, all of us kids gathered our change jars and dumped them into a big pile on the floor so that we could count up the change to have enough money to go get milk and bread. That was one of the more challenging things that sometimes cast a pall over my family.

I definitely emerged as a caregiver pretty early in my life. In a lot of ways, my family's level of need kind of brought out the part of me that was like, I am the meter of needs. Like I am the problem solver. I'll fix it, which isn't necessarily a bad skill set to have in life. But I was pretty young when I started feeling like I needed to step forward and

Growing up, it was a very independent type of upbringing. And I think my parents' generation were coming out of homes where there was a lot of control, a lot of discipline and a lot of rules and sometimes even abuse. So I think they really were trying this thing where, you know, they wanted to see what would happen if there was just total freedom for

for themselves and their children. I started first grade at an alternative school that was basically like a school designed for the hippie population in our town. So I went to school with other kids who were getting raised by hippies and it was a really loving environment.

But there was a kind of extreme permissiveness. And I did start getting pretty heavily into drugs as a teenager. And sometimes even drugs that could have some really serious consequences for my brain and body.

And no one ever put the brakes on that. No one was really in charge or like really minding the store. That was a little bit scary in a way, not knowing where the boundaries and the limits are.

I was coming of age in the early 90s and I was considered overweight. I was like a size 16 in high school. And this is the era of Kate Moss and super, super, super skinny. That was on all the magazine covers. And there wasn't really much representation of curvy women at all.

And so the combination of going a little overboard with drugs and then also just being bombarded by our culture with this idea that my body was wrong and, you know, I was ugly and undesirable really messed with my concept of like my own worth and my own desirability. Yeah.

That led to a kind of challenging adolescence. And I think I really struggled to believe that I could be loved in a romantic way that I wasn't lovable.

When I left high school, I was able to secure a scholarship to go to Antioch College, which was really exciting for me. And so I did. I went and I had a really good year there. And I left all of that substance use behind.

And then my folks had made just a tiny bit more money than they had the year before. So I lost the scholarship. I left Antioch College and that opened a chapter in my life that was very adventurous and

I did go back to partying pretty hard. But I also kind of set my mind to like, okay, if I am not going to get an education in the traditional sense, I am going to get an education in the world. And so I work these low wage jobs, and I would save every single penny that I made.

And then I would take myself on these incredible trips. As I was settling down, kind of coming out of this time period where I had all my great travels, I was 23 and had a friend that had a baby.

I went over to her house to meet her baby and she and her partner had a roommate and this roommate and I chatted a bit and, you know, he just seemed kind and funny. And pretty shortly after that, he asked me on like our first sort of official date and

We were kind of hot and heavy pretty fast. And it was so magical for the first couple of months that we lived together.

But within two or three months, Scott had an episode of depression and it was really kind of startling. I mean, it changed his personality dramatically and he was pretty irritable and he lost his sex drive and he could not name that it was depression.

A lot of what he explained to me about how he was feeling had to do with me. He'd say it was because I had done something, some small thing that irritated him. And when he lost his sex drive, he said that he just didn't find me attractive anymore.

So when we had only been together for six months, because this depression had dragged on for a bit, we ended up going to couples counseling. And after like a couple of months in couples counseling, he started to feel better. He started to come out of the depression and I sort of felt like, oh, okay, like we handled that. We tackled it and now it's better and we can move forward.

Eventually, we ended up deciding to get married. And definitely, I noticed that there were more of those periods of time. And because we'd been to therapy and it had been named as depression, like I knew it was depression, but it wasn't ever something that Scott could really like name and identify what was happening.

I would sort of just rationalize it like, okay, well, I've seen this and I know he'll come through it. And I just kind of have to bear with him during these times.

Also, I hadn't had anyone show interest in having a relationship with me, definitely not making a life for me. And I wanted to get married and have kids. I really thought this was my opportunity to do that because he always seemed really committed to being with me. And so I think I like the certainty of that.

There was a side to Scott that I didn't really have a name for or could explain that would come out every once in a while.

It tended to come out during times where Scott was actually in a really good mood and really energetic. And he'd be dreaming big dreams and really productive at work. And then his mood would kind of like ramp up a little more, but it would turn sour. And sometimes in those head spaces, he would really get angry.

This was just like a different level of anger. And it really did scare me sometimes. And it really threatened my dream of marriage and babies and this life that I imagined. And so I think I just wanted to shove that down and forget about it.

I had a very clear story that we were deeply in love and we were going to get married and the depression was woven into that story and something that I felt like I could manage. But there wasn't any room in that story for these rages. There was some part of me that knew that this wasn't healthy and

But that would have been so threatening to this story. And I was really invested in this story that I was going to have this life. And I couldn't let it in. In 2003, Scott and I did get married. We started our life together and it was actually really happy.

I got pregnant with our first child and he was born in 2005 and it was just a golden time. Scott was an incredible father during that period of time.

He did the night shift with me. And I don't know if I've ever seen a man so in love with his baby. He was great. He was supportive. And we were great. And we just had so much fun being a family. And as my first child grew, I applied to go to graduate school. And so I did my MSW first.

I liked the first few social work jobs I got a lot. So I was happy with my work. I was happy with my family. And everything seemed kind of perfect. Scott's depression even seemed like it had just sort of cleared up.

He had a really challenging childhood. His mom had bipolar disorder and was really significantly impacted and would have very long manic episodes where she'd become psychotic and violent at times. His dad drank heavily and was just not a very kind person.

And I remember even thinking to myself, you know, maybe having a family has done something to anchor him in a different way. You know, I think I really thought like problem solved. We got through it. We're good now.

Then I got pregnant with my second daughter in 2009. But Scott actually got pretty angry that I was pregnant. And he was also just mean.

I remember this time very early in my pregnancy. I had given up refined sugar to lose some weight. But I got pregnant and I'm like, okay, I'm going to have cravings. I'm going to eat refined sugar. And we were at a wedding and I was like, oh, I just want to have this wedding cake. And he looked at me at a table full of people. He said, well, you're going to get fat.

It totally floored me that he would say something like that in front of a whole group of people. And he was so cold about it. He almost looked at me like he was kind of disgusted with me. Like, oh, you're going to get fat again. That was the beginning of knowing some tide was turning that was not feeling very safe and secure and good anymore.

Things really deteriorated from there. Scott had become absolutely obsessed at this point with climate change. It was all he could talk about. And he was spending hours and hours and hours volunteering for this organization that was focused on renewable energy. At one point, he asked me if he could take two weeks off to really work on this event that they were going to host.

And he took two weeks off and then he just didn't go back to work. You know, it was like a month and then it was like two months and I'm pregnant and the only person working. When I would try to talk to him about it, he would get irate and say I wasn't supporting him and that he had to do this. He was really focused on the apocalyptic side of climate change.

But he would talk about it in such detail and with such animation that it would be a little frightening and it would frighten our son who was only four at the time. And I would ask him to, you know, stop talking about it in front of our son and he would insist that our son needed to know that we're all going to die. It got real bizarre and he wasn't sleeping much.

I think at that point, I recognized that he was manic, but I could not talk to him about it. Any discussion of mental health would just set him off. And then he really crashed and he became so, so depressed, foul mood and irritable, kind of depressed where he would really lash out at me and my son.

And then finally, at the very end of my pregnancy, I think that was probably the first time that I really seriously thought about leaving him. But I had a tiny infant and we had no money.

I was back to work full time and it was just chaos. And I just didn't have the bandwidth to really even deal with what had just happened. And I just sort of put it in the vault with everything else and was like, okay, well that happened, but I got to keep moving forward. And it was just two children and working full time. You don't have a lot of space to contemplate things. It was just go, go, go.

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At some point, I just started focusing on myself and like I was just taking really good care of myself and I was enjoying being a mom and I liked my job. I got a job as a hospice social worker. Things with Scott felt manageable again.

Then at the height of me being strong and healthy and in great shape physically, I just all of a sudden started to feel really tired.

This was in the late summer of 2014. I remember thinking that my job was just getting more stressful and that's why I'm getting tired. So I scheduled a week off for the week of my birthday in October. And I get to my week off and almost immediately I start having the symptoms of a cold. I'm even more tired and I'm achy, really achy.

It was a type of tired that I'd just never experienced. My whole body was like lead and getting up from the couch felt nearly impossible. And I was dragging my legs behind me because they were so heavy. And I started having the shortness of breath.

I went to my doctor and she couldn't find anything that seemed particularly wrong, but I just was getting even worse. And the shortness of breath was getting worse. I couldn't catch my breath and I was getting really freaked out. So I went to the emergency department and it really took some doing to get my breathing under control.

Finally, after several rounds of steroids and injecting a muscle relaxer, finally I got to where my breathing was stable. And they told me I had an adult reactive airway disorder, which was odd because I'd never had any trouble with my respiratory health ever.

I went home and by the very next day, I was having these problems again. And then I started to get profoundly weak to where I was barely able to walk. I was feeling as if I were underwater and everything underwater is like slow and dark and heavy water.

I couldn't find the right words to convey. I'm under the water. I need somebody to pull me up. One night, my legs totally gave out on me. We called my doctor's office and they said, I think you just really got hit hard by a virus and you're really struggling right now, but I bet in a few days you're going to feel better. That was the first time that I had an internal feeling of like, no, no.

No, something else is happening. Like something is going on in my body that is really wrong. But I couldn't really give voice to that. All I said is I'm really scared. I ended up going to bed that night and then waking up in the morning to find that my legs just didn't work. I could not stand on them.

At that point, you know, we called the doctor's office again and said, something has to happen. And she said to me, I think that you might be having this rare autoimmune reaction that people can have when they get a virus. And it's actually pretty serious. And you do need to go to the hospital right away.

When we got to the hospital, my torso and my arms were starting to become so weak that I couldn't move them, at which point my whole body became paralyzed. Little by little, my ability to breathe began to wane because also the muscles that control my breathing were becoming paralyzed. The hospital staff decided that I needed to be on a ventilator

I was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is an autoimmune disorder that can paralyze people. And it's very serious. What happens is that the antibodies in your system, instead of attacking the virus, they attack this myelin sheath that we have around our nerves and they cause damage to it. And that's what causes the paralysis. And sometimes that damage is irreversible.

Oftentimes, people can come back from full paralysis, but they will always have problems. They gave me the treatment for Guillain-Barre, which is pumping good antibodies into your system. And they gave me this IV antibiotic treatment because they thought I had some kind of infection, but they didn't know exactly what. And I was better, like really better. They took me off the vent after three days.

By day six, I was up and walking the hallways and I was like back. I was walking staircases and doing all the tasks, all the tests that they had for arm strength. I was passing with flying colors. They just couldn't believe it. Like we never see this with Guillain-Barre. People with Guillain-Barre are here for six months at least. And I thought it was great news. I'm like, oh my God, like I'm a miracle person.

So we were all very happy and I got discharged home. And then I started to have these periods where I would become very, very weak again. I was just right back to barely being able to get to the bathroom. My husband and I had both read a ton about Guillain-Barre and we were like, this is not what happens. This doesn't make sense.

That's when I started to realize that I was misdiagnosed. It was so frightening because whatever that thing was that was wrong with me had caused me to be paralyzed before. And I don't know if that's going to happen again. Like, am I going to suddenly be paralyzed and not be able to breathe? I got so sick that I was hospitalized again.

I ended up for the first time having a neurologist suggest that I might have something called a conversion disorder. And that was a huge turning point in a very sad and bad way for me because conversion disorder is the modern day equivalent to Freud's hysteria.

It's where your buried trauma is, you know, like somehow your system just like can't face it and can't cope with it. And it's causing you to have these somatic symptoms, these symptoms that seem real to you, but they're not of physical origin. It's the fancy way of saying it's all in your head. I knew there was something physically wrong with me.

But unfortunately, the neurologist I'd been seeing really took that conversion disorder ball and ran with it and said the entire thing, the full paralysis where I was put on the ventilator, the respiratory arrest, the whole thing was a conversion disorder.

I remember being in the office with him and my mom was with me and I'm saying to him, but I didn't have reflexes. That doesn't compute. You can't psychologically influence your body to not have reflexes. That doesn't make sense. It was everything.

was extra frustrating because I at that time was a social worker with a master's degree and my concentration was in mental health. And I had done an entire semester on this diagnostic and statistical manual that this diagnosis comes out of convergent disorder because it's a psychiatric diagnosis.

I'm just like, no. And the other thing that I kept saying was like, prior to this event, I had really significant trauma that could cause a conversion disorder.

for conversion disorder, it's usually like somebody loses someone who's very close to them and they can't cope with it. And so they develop somatic symptoms or somebody was sexually abused as a child and they've repressed the memory and they just can't face it. And so their body starts to sort of tell the story, right? But I hadn't had anything like that. And when I said that part,

This neurologist actually said, with my mom sitting right there in the room, said, well, you were probably abused as a child and you've blocked it out. What? It was so frustrating. But beyond that, it was demoralizing and terrifying.

Because I had been home from the hospital and really, really sick for like about six weeks. And he's telling me, it's all in your head. There's nothing I can do for you. It was so scary to be that sick and to think that there was no path forward.

There was absolutely a part of me that couldn't shake what he had said. And I would have these moments where I would think about it obsessively. Could it be true? Could it be that my mind is doing this? That was awful because I already felt like I couldn't rely on my body anymore.

And now I'm being told that my mind had failed too and I couldn't trust my mind either. It just felt like such a black hole. Could this be true? It also induced it for me just a huge feeling of guilt. Like something that I did, me not taking care of myself, me not facing things properly,

I wasn't able to be a mom at this time. I could barely get to the bathroom. I couldn't give my children a bath or read them bedtime stories. I couldn't hold a book. There was an emotional part of me that was like, I did this. I brought this on myself and I'm failing my kids because of it.

And I think the most challenging element was the uncertainty. And it was like, what's the endpoint of this disease process, right? Like, do I have something that's going to kill me? And then not knowing how long I was going to be in that state of illness and how it changed everything about me.

I am an energetic person and I was like so physically impaired. I had been such a caregiver that had been such a big part of my personality. I took care of people and it felt like I lost me. I lost myself. I lost the things that make me, me.

It unlocked this relentless pursuit of health and myself. I had to get back to myself. I have to get back to my life. In the winter into the spring of 2015, I was experiencing still periods of profound weakness. My body couldn't hold itself up anymore.

That was my life for months. That coupled with a lot of moments where I would have involuntary movement. I had this one really odd experience where half of my body became paralyzed, like I couldn't move it, and half of it was tremoring. And then I would have intermittent pain.

It would just sort of come on all of a sudden. It could be pretty severe at times. And any given day I could wake up to a whole new bizarre set of symptoms, like weird buzzing sensations in my body. Like there was like an electrical wire that was buzzing. But the constant was this utterly debilitating weakness.

After trying to go to a couple of different doctors, as soon as people saw the conversion disorder diagnosis on my chart, they didn't want to do anything more. So I finally met with a psychologist and she ended up finding that I did not have a conversion disorder. And so we start looking at other options.

And then I ended up having another like weird neurologic episode. And I decided to go to the emergency department and a physician's assistant. She said, you might want to find somebody that knows about tick-borne illness.

So we went home and my husband was like researching tick-borne illness and he found the Columbia University Research Center on Tick-Borne Illness. And oh my God, it was like every symptom, every, every symptom I had had was on that list. And it was super exciting.

We found a nurse practitioner who had a small private practice, what she called Lyme Aware. And we made an appointment with her. And I talked my doctor into starting me on the medication for these tick-borne illnesses. And I had a really violent reaction to the medication, which happens with Lyme disease and tick-borne illnesses.

My brain got really inflamed and I started having these violent episodes that were like seizures. Like I was just like shaking all over, flopping like a fish. It was a very weird moment in time because I was like so excited. Like we found it, we finally found it. And then I start treatment and I am like sicker, even still more debilitated.

When we actually got to see the nurse practitioner that knew about it, she took me off the medicine and then I had to start back on a lower dose. And that really began my education about Lyme and bacterial illnesses that come along with tick bites. The next two years were just an absolute roller coaster ride with my health.

Sadly, after one year on that roller coaster, the stress of it really impacted my husband's mental health. And he began having a period of time where his rages became something beyond what they ever had been.

The level of screaming became really menacing and it wasn't short outbursts. It was long tirades and it was very irrational and it was triggered by the tiniest of things.

Not knowing what I was going to contend with day to day with my health and then not knowing if I was going to be frightened and scared by my husband. All of that made that period of time just so challenging. I must have had a really big vault.

Because I just sort of shoved all that ugly, hard stuff into the vault and tried to make our home happy for my kids. Because they had just lived through a really awful two years. We really tried to just launch back into life as usual and we were pretty successful for a while.

My husband went back to school and I finally got back to work. I started a private practice and I became a licensed clinical social worker. I loved being a therapist. I was enjoying being with my kids and I was proud of my husband for doing this thing that I knew meant a lot to him. And it seemed like we'd been able to reset.

Then one day, Labor Day of 2017, I came home. My husband was on his computer. He turned around and looked at me and he looked off. Something was not right. And he said, I need to tell you something. And he said to me, where's your cell phone? Are you sure it's not out here? And I'm like, no, it's not out here.

And then I noticed his cell phone had tape over the camera and the microphone. And then he like shoved it in this pile of camping mattresses that we kept in the front porch. I was like, that's weird. I sit down on the porch swing and he just starts to pace in circles. He's got this wild look in his eye and he starts telling me this story about

This group of women have targeted him and he calls them gander stalkers, which isn't actually a word, but it's what his word for it was.

He says these gander stalkers have targeted him and they're watching him through the computer and they're watching him through all of their phones and they want to destroy him. They want to destroy his life because he was looking at pornography. They found out about it and this is their mission. This is what they do. They find men who look at pornography and they target them.

I've worked on psychiatric units before. So I was like, oh shit, he is psychotic. Once you've seen someone in a state of psychosis, like there's just a certain look people have like on their faces and in their eyes. And it's kind of unmistakable once you learn how to recognize it. He was so clearly there. I immediately started to try to coax him into going to the hospital and he would not have it there.

It was absolutely terrifying. We're in this like tiny house. My kids are there and he's totally psychotic and I cannot get him to go to the hospital. He maintained this delusion about the gander stalkers the whole time, but the kind of pitch of his paranoia grew and grew. First, it was like they're watching me.

He would get really, really scared if any of us pulled out our phones. He also had what's called delusions of reference. You can have delusions where you're looking at something from the outside world. And in your mind, it very clearly says, these people are out to get me. And as time went on, he began to believe that they were going to kill him. And he was absolutely terrified.

To be watching somebody who's in a waking nightmare and you can't wake them up, it was awful. I just couldn't get him help. And I did everything I would need to do to make that happen. I got a chance to call the emergency services therapist and she told me that there was nothing she could do.

that he didn't have a diagnosis on his chart of bipolar disorder or anything related to psychosis. And I was just gobsmacked. I have no idea what to do now.

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I remember hearing his footsteps on the stairs and they were loud. And he wakes me up and he tells me there's something that I have to see downstairs. So I just went ahead and I got up and my cell phone was sitting next to the bed.

I just sort of discreetly picked it up and pressed it against my thigh. And he, for the first time in our whole time together, like 16 years, he laid hands on me. He grabbed my arm and he twisted it. He twisted my wrist and wrenched the phone away from me.

And I was like, this is a new level. He pulls me towards a computer that grabs both of my arms and he is showing me the Craigslist Haiku page. He says to me, I know what you did. I know you're behind all of it. And I was just like, no, honey, no. Why would I do this to you? Why would I bring this on our family?

And he just goes on this tirade about how I am behind everything. And he figured it out from the Craigslist haikus. And I'm the mastermind. At this point, you know, we'd already done this like walk-in clinic. And they wouldn't prescribe him antipsychotics. And what they prescribed him was basically it was like a really strong antihistamine.

So then he tells me, and I know you're trying to kill me. I know that you had them give me this poison. And he picked up the pill bottle and he opens the pill bottle and he pours a bunch in his hand. And he tells me, I know these are poisoned and that I'm going to take these pills to prove to him that they're not poisoned.

And that's when he actually attacked me. He grabbed my arm and he started to try to push the pill into my mouth. And we're both standing at this point. I'm resisting and I'm trying to pull away from him. And so in that process, like we're backing up and we're backing up and then we hit the sink.

And I can't go any further away from him. And he's pressing this pill against my lips really, really hard. And I'm gritting my teeth. And I'm still just trying to get away from him. But I'm back up to the sink. So I start jerking my body side to side, trying to just get loose from him. And then we end up tumbling to the floor.

I don't have the strength to fight him off. He's a construction worker. And he quickly gains the upper hand and he gets on top of me and he pins my arms with his legs. And I clenched my teeth so hard that my teeth actually cracked. And I'm just crying so hard not to open my mouth under all the pressure that he's putting on it.

I don't know how long we were like that, but in those moments, I really thought that he might kill me just from the struggle because he was pressing so hard and he was so strong. Luckily, his own mind distracted him again. He thought of some other thing he'd seen in the Craigslist haiku that could prove that I was behind it all. And he actually got off of me on his own volition.

And he walked back over to the computer. As quietly as possible, I creeped up off of the floor and I crawled until I was just behind him. And then as fast as I could, I sprung up and I grabbed the landline and I turned around and I sprinted for the bathroom. I got in there and I locked the door and I called 911.

I was worried he was going to come through. And I think I said, you have to stop this because the cops are on the way. At that, he fled. He left the house and didn't come home until the next evening. Four days later, Scott had another violent episode with me. He pushed me down in our gravel driveway and he stole my car.

He drove my car to Southern Indiana. He really believed that this group of women were after him. I was after him. My brother had come to stay with me to try to help keep me safe. And he thought my brother was trying to kill him. Everyone was trying to kill him. So he just stopped the car in the middle of one of the busiest highways in Indiana and just left it in the lane.

He got out and he ran through the median for a while and he found a state police outpost. He went in and he asked the police officer for help because he thought he was being chased and he thought he was going to be killed.

And somehow that police officer talked him into going to a hospital down in southern Indiana that had psychiatric emergency department. And he had a moment of lucidity, remembered that he had pushed me down and he realized he had to get help.

He did want to be hospitalized in Bloomington, which I was all for. And he was not kept for a super long time. And he was discharged on a medication that takes four to six weeks to build up to a therapeutic level in your system. So of course he quit taking it. So it wasn't the end of things. The end didn't come until I moved out in May of 2018.

I just finally decided I didn't do it anymore. So I asked for a legal separation, asked him to leave. Unfortunately, he wouldn't leave. So I ended up leaving our home with my kids and moving into a crappy apartment. I was really grieving the loss of him and our marriage, that I was finally finding some peace again.

And I just realized, like, I absolutely could not go back. It's still very complicated, the duality of losing someone and having that both be a thing that you grieve and a thing that brings you peace. I remember this one moment when we were house-sitting for someone, and my mom took my kids. I was alone for the first time since we left. And

I remember this wave of grief hit me and it was so powerful that it actually knocked me over. And I was crying for Scott because it felt as if this illness had been like a death. It just completely took away the man that I knew. And I was crying for myself and all that I'd been through and all that I had lost. And I was crying for my kids.

They no longer had, you know, a family, an intact family. And I couldn't grieve this with him. I couldn't even acknowledge that it was hard with him. There was no closure. That was something that just got taken from both of us. I've definitely still had struggles with Lyme disease. I had a really significant relapse of Lyme disease in 2020.

Lyme disease is going to be something that I'm always going to have to deal with on some level. And there's been something about coming through all this where it's kind of like, hey, you know, life is fragile and you never know what's going to happen.

After actually leaving and kind of getting settled in on my own new life, I bought my own home. You know, I lost my home. I just, I couldn't get Scott out of that house. And I decided just to give it to him in the divorce. But I ended up buying a home. It's really beautiful. It's, you know, little, but I love it. And it's really mine now.

Our divorce was final in August of 2018, and I started dating in November of 2018. On the second date I went on, after trying out the Bumble app, I met this man who ended up being kind and smart and supportive, and I ended up falling in love.

At the same time, I was still really grieving my marriage and also had a pretty terrible case of PTSD symptoms that was impacting me quite a lot. And like being wildly in love and like the euphoria that comes with that. That was another like roller coaster kind of a timeline.

But there was something about finding a new love that was a healthier love, a healthier relationship that allowed me to see the patterns and dynamics in my past relationship differently.

And I had this really interesting thing happen to me where, you know, I talked earlier about like there was this vault and I just kept pushing things into the vault. And there was this one night I was lying in bed and all of a sudden the vault flew open.

And years and years of memories of, you know, Scott being controlling or raising his voice at me or treating me unkindly just came flooding out. And it was totally overwhelming when it happened.

But I really did need to be loved in the way my new partner was capable of loving me to really reckon with the way I'd been loved before. That was so hurtful. One of the things that absolutely changed for me, having lived through all of this, is that I really believed that love is curative.

I thought love can conquer the obstacles. And so I think for years, I just thought I could love Scott out of his traumatic childhood and his mental illness. There came a point when I finally realized I had to leave him where I really understood that love by itself, no matter how much love I had, it wasn't actually going to save him.

I've really switched to like really consciously channeling love and compassion for myself and not being so much in the mindset that like it's my job to save people because sometimes you just can't. Honestly, I don't know how to make peace with that. It's a hard reality of life.

And it's important to know when it's time to take those kind of valuable resources and tend to yourself with them. I still do know my own worth.

And I still have that thing I discovered the first time I was sick, which is just this persistence in me to get back to health when I'm not in health, to get back to happiness when I'm not in happiness. And I have that for my kids too. Like I feel very dedicated for them and whatever life is going to throw at us, we're going to get through it and we're going to get through it together. Yeah.

Today's episode featured Mirabai Rose. To learn more about Mirabai, you can find her on Instagram at mirabai.rose. That's M-A-R-A-B-A-I dot rose. And on her website at mirabairose.com. That's M-A-R-A-B-A-I-R-O-S-E dot com. There you can find links to her own podcast, Badass, Tales of Resilience, which showcases authentic conversations about trauma and

and resilience. You can also find links to her memoir, Holding Hope, One Family's Odyssey Through Lyme Disease and Psychosis, which dives deeper into many aspects of the story you heard today and more. If you'd like to reach out to her, you can email at contact at mirrorbyrose.com or on Facebook at facebook.com slash m-a-r-a-b-a-i. Music

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