Hubby and I had a very productive conversation the other night. Right after a steak-and-baked-potato supper, so I think he was feeling pretty good.

He can understand the difference between intellectual knowledge of something, and *feeling* it. For example, when I have to go to the hospital, although his brain knows this isn't the case, his heart is feeling, "Why are you running away from the problem? I don't want to handle everything by myself." I know he realizes, in his head, that I'm not going away on a vacation to a resort. But emotionally he feels abandoned and resentful, like I'm skipping out on him when the going gets rough. And then he has to pay the hospital bill on top of that. I asked him, "Do you realize how much mental torture I'm in, at the time I'm admitted to a hospital?" He didn't, but I think he does now.

I compared things to being drunk. I explained that there are different parts of a brain, with different functions, that intelligence has nothing to do with it, and sometimes certain parts of a brain just stop working right. For example, lizards have only very basic and rudimentary brain functions. They tell a lizard to eat, sleep, relieve itself, procreate, fight for its survival, etc. A lizard cannot socialize, think creatively, reason, and come up with new ideas like humans do. And when humans get drunk, it's been called "going back into lizard-brain." All but those same parts that function in a lizard, pretty much shut down when someone is intoxicated. That's because the chemicals in the alcohol interfere with the chemicals in the brain.

So far so good. He's understanding.

And then I delivered the big one: That with a mental illness, those brain chemicals are messed up even without the alcohol.

Ding!

Our discussion also included the difference between a situational and a biochemical depression. If someone were to die, and for months afterward I didn't eat, didn't sleep, cried constantly, and could only talk about wanting to go and be with the loved one I'd lost, this would be a situational depression. But I can be depressed even without having something bad happening. That's a biochemical depression. It happens all by itself, no catalyst.

More light coming on. He's starting to understand.

Hubby has never met anyone besides me who has ever been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, while I can name several just in my own family. Telling him that, opened his eyes to the possibility of a genetic predisposition.

One good thing has come. When he refuses sometimes to take me to emergency counseling *right away* during a crisis, it teaches me that I *can* get through it, I *can* wait until, say, he has something to eat, and I *won't* go crazy in the next few hours.