he's going to get sick of me calling him

Doesn't sound like you are even getting close to calling too much. I would say call when you need to. What is the worst thing that you can think of happening if you "call too much"?

It sure feels like you are going to die when it's happening though, doesn't it.

I'm sorry MKAC . I know it's hard, and I think this is something that will be helpful to work through in T. I can't count the number of times I've gone over it with my T. I think he is going to get sick of me. I think he is going to start resenting me, and I won't know about it because he will still be nice to me, and the not knowing that someone has secretly stopped loving me is a totally unbearable thought to me. He will ask, what would happen if I got sick of you? And I will tell him that what I'm scared of is not knowing, his secretly resenting me and my not knowing. I'm just rambling about myself now, but I thought you might like to know you're not alone in this fear. Figuring out where it comes from can be really helpful -- for me, some of it is the way my husband behaves, and some of it is the way I felt growing up, that I was always doing something wrong and making my mother unhappy, but I didn't always get why, and I never knew what I would do next that would cause her to be disappointed in me.

That's good that you have a conversation with T to play over in your head. I'm glad your considering your husband's end of it, and I think it will be important to know why he holds onto this in particular. I don't know what it is, but I'm guessing your looking at his FOO issues as the likely culprit is probably dead-on -- still, there must be some reason why he points to that particular thing.

One of my H's things was my depression. As in, my depression per se, not how I handled it, not some refusal of treatment on my part, nothing like that. That I was depressed was, to him, the "reason" he withheld affection from me at times, because otherwise he said he would be "rewarding" my depression. Right, because all of us here with depression know how well THAT works. This ended up being related to a lot of things, but one key one -- related very much to his FOO -- was a total resistance to empathy. He still has a very hard time seeing things from others' points view, but it's much better now that we've done some work on it. He actually said to me one day, as things were improving, that "Honestly, I didn't really know to treat you the way I wanted to be treated. It really didn't occur to me that that would work. I need you to teach me that stuff." Like, seriously. Empathy issues. I was totally floored by that statement, and I'm still struck by the powerful message it sends about how he was taught to relate to others as a child. I can totally see it in the way his family interacts now.

Anyway, there was a reason he picked depression, and that was because his own experiences with depression were solved by a pull-up-by-the-bootstraps approach. That really works for him, generally. It doesn't work for me. But he didn't want to deal with how it might be for me, he just got hung up on why I wasn't pulling myself up; it was kind of a trigger for him. He thought I wasn't trying, that everyone should be able to get on in life with the kind of extreme emotional solitude that he has always experienced.

In any case. Just wanted to add that it's good to consider your husband, just as it's good for me to consider how my depression does impact my H, because of course it does. I just don't want you to totally let him off the hook here. Also wanted to empathize as the wife of someone who can be completely emotionally clueless.

Hope you can continue to keep busy. And maybe reconsider calling T. You won't die from shame or embarrassment, of course, and maybe it would help to see that your relationship with T won't die from a phone call?

Sorry things are so tough.

Thanks for saying this, mkac. I posted but deleted earlier (a couple of times), wondering how H had "processed" the info for himself the first time. In his mind, did he stick by you "like a man"? How did that play out - what feelings are being suppressed? You wrote earlier in this thread:
Partners of survivors are also survivors, and you say he is a survivor in his own right.

I have gotten to places of understanding with my T that I never thought I'd reach. Neither of us has changed or improved particularly; we are just less afraid to share, to say what we are really feeling, what can be really scary sometimes. But what have you got to lose at this point?