Sitting In Your Uncomfortableness

My latest version of therapy uses this phrase to imply using coping skills instead of escaping skills. To stay where you are when you're uncomfortable with your personal life pain. To find ways to deal with it instead of escaping it. Much of therapy in this third iteration for me is a different way of processing than the other 2 therapy, and it can be as simple as this therapist having a different point of view, a slightly different suggestion, a different phrase that resonates with me now. I have incredibly good escape skills when I'm with my husband. When the thoughts and memories of our little brother come barreling through I can not push them aside. But I can escape them. I can close my eyes and daydream of the day that I was introduced to the young man who would change my life. I can close my eyes and day dream of his voice, his smile, the way he greeted me when I came home. I can close my eyes and shut out the horrible reality of his loss. I can walk down the hall and not come back, break into quiet sobs in the bedroom and leave my husband. I can go to the back porch, I can walk across the land where his footsteps grew up. I have done anything except sit with my uncomfortableness. I chose Friday to stay at home, at my husband's house, where he and his brother lived. I did not make up reasons to go out, I did not make up errands. I did not when he got off work leave him, tune out like I do. I decided that I would stay with him the way we should with our limited time together. I would find a way. Saturday we drove the tractor and the side by side. The errand was to bushhog the horse pasture behind the home of the brother who lives 2 doors down. The day was pretty, the sky blue with lots of white clouds, there wasn't a lot of heat and there was a touch of breeze on top of the tractor pulling the mower across the field. It was a perfect day to mow. I cried. I held the steering wheel straight and i drove and cried. I talked to my guy, I talked out loud, and I cried and I drove. When lunch time came, we sat on the porch and ate homemade soup. I told him that I cried. I sat with my uncomfortableness. We talked about our grief, our loss. We talked about the going and the doing and the living. When lunch was over we went back to the field and back to the tractor and the side by side. It's a different feeling to ride with your uncomfortableness. It's different to talk with my husband about my grief when I've spent two years trying to hide it from him, believing he carries enough of his own. My therapists tried to tell me I wasn't sparing him any feelings that he wasn't already feeling, that it didn't do either of us any good for me to poorly pretend. I drove the tractor and drove some more.