Glad to hear that this week's session was a little better, but it does sound like your joint sessions are really "him events." Do you plan to keep going? It's commendable to want to help him, but at the same time it seems like you may be ending up depleted, or just plain frustrated.

Joshua Milburn of The Minimalists has written a few essays about how relationships are like an imaginary box between two people (this is going to be heavily paraphrased). Healthy relationships require give and take, back and forth. Each person has to be able to contribute something worthwhile to the box, and also be able to take meaningful things away from the box. When the giving and taking are too out of balance, it's not a relationship anymore. Resentments start to build. It's important that one person isn't always filling the box, while the other empties it.

A while back, someone told me something that resonated with me, I'll share it on the chance that you'll get something out of it:

All marriages eventually end, whether by divorce or death. Whether it's by choice or chance, and whether it's tomorrow, six months from now, five years from now, or twenty, at some point something is going to change. Who do you want to be when that time comes? That's the person to work on becoming. You should be able to be that well-centered individual, and still participate in a meaningful relationship with another person. Become the person you want and need to be for yourself, and let him decide if he's interested in accompanying you on that ride. You can make you about you without being a self absorbed narcissist type. I've struggled a lot with the concept of healthy selfishness- it's a real and necessary thing, and when we honor ourselves more, we tend to have more to offer others, believe it or not.

That's great that you can begin to see that his problems aren't your fault or responsibility. For someone like him (or my H), there can be a lot more comfort in shifting the blame onto someone else, rather than taking a hard look in the mirror. In H's FOO, they will have blame-shifting conversations that would be hilarious if they weren't just sad.

Anyhow, keep finding those boundaries, and learning to take care of yourself; eventually you'll know what the right move is, or what the answers are. There's a good story in Codependent No More where she talks about being scared driving in the rain because she had to get home and felt like she couldn't see where she was going. Then she realized that she just needed to focus on driving as far as she could see- and then she could see further. Even if you don't know what the future looks like, just keep focusing on what you can see in front of you, and let more become visible as you get further along.

I hope your H hasn't thrown any major curveballs at you in the last few days. I know how that goes, and there's something very wrong with having that Spidey Sense that tingles and warns you that it may be coming. That sort of thing tells you that you've been doing this pattern too long.

Mine has seemed to shift out of the predominantly hypomanic mode (which is predictable for this time of year, but again, according to the pros I don't know what I'm talking about…). So he's a little lower energy for the moment, but that's not necessarily much better, just different. As DD has said, "He's been like this for so long now, that even when it's not weird, it's weird." It's just always weird…

Hang in there and keep on keeping on.