Couch 215: The Overcoming Couch

I can't sleep...too worried about waking up to H in my house again even though I made sure all the doors are locked. Worked on my paper that's due tomorrow night a little. Shouldn't be too hard to write. Really not feeling well physically tonight or at all today. Not sure if it's just stress or something else going on.

Hi couch,

T did ask me how much I could afford. I said 2/5th or 3/5th of her full fee which I've faithfully paid. I broke down crying because that 1/5th is a week of food. I said I've been crying over the cost of food and I tried going hungry just to save a couple of dollars here and there.

She told me at first she thought moving wasn't a big change in my circumstances. I told her it absolutely is. Here in our country, people don't move out until they marry and can access subsidised public housing. Even my discounted rent is expensive and it's actually hard even for working adults to move out. T herself still lives with her parents and siblings.

She said therapy shouldn't be worsening my mental health, and that I still need to see her twice a month. So she said I'll pay her the lowest tier 2/5th. I'm immensely grateful because it really does mean I don't have to stress so much about food.

I am so glad your T was willing to work with you on this matter, QM.
You deserve support, and I am glad that you will not have to go without right now.

I'm also glad your T is letting you pay the lowest tier. It sounds like you got her to understand about your finances--sounds like she didn't comprehend before. I'm sure she wouldn't want you to starve yourself so that you could have therapy.

I agree that the shared email account is weird and I wouldn't feel comfortable with it. Especially when it's so easy to set up multiple accounts on gmail (I have 3, though one I never use).

If one more person talks to me about 'safety' in the context of the pandemic, I am going to lose my mind.
Physical safety is important, yes, but emotional safety is even more so.

My parents share their email account. My mom uses it mostly, but my dad will read emails sometimes, though most of the time to tell my mom what the content is when she doesn't have the time to sit down. I also doubt my dad is interested in what my mom talks about with her friends and just snoops around.

I think it's fine as long as the address suggests that both can read it. If there's need for more private conversations, it's still possible to either have additional separate accounts or to text, but from my personal experience of being in a relationship for almost 10 years, unless it's a secret concerning something like a present for my partner, there's a considerable chance that I will share secret with him anyways (if I feel it might be interesting to him, not in general). I think it's like that in many relationships and if they have a shared email account, I'd be willing to bet that secrets might be shared among them anyways.

My in-laws share an email address. I do think it's a little weird, but they're totally co-dependent (sometimes in a sweet way, sometimes in a problematic way) so people generally kind of regard them as one unit anyway. It has proven to be useful as my father-in-law has started having issues with dementia and my mother-in-law has taken over the household matters he used to manage. I would probably use phone or video chat if I wanted to talk to one of them individually anyway, so maybe this is a different situation.

My spouse and I both had our own email accounts long before we met, so the idea of merging has never occurred to either of us. We do have shared passwords in our password manager accounts, though, in the event that one of us dies suddenly and the other needs access to the household accounts (electricity, mortgage, Netflix, etc).

We started watching Dirty John on Netflix last night. The podcast is riveting, and the dramatized television version is pretty good so far too.

Might be a skip for anybody with a history of domestic partner abuse, though.

I have a migraine. My work is done for the day unless we do some shipping. I still have like 5 and a half hours to go. I don't know if I just work fast, or there's not enough work. I haven't figured that out. I can do some electronic filing later which I might do. I did some this morning. I'm trying to do two months each day that way the project lasts me for a while. I have about a years worth of documents to transfer. I'm feeling so so. Maybe not as bad as yesterday. It's hard to tell. I got up around 4, then slept in the lazy boy until almost 5:30 AM. I was like, yikes!!! I gotta get going. Couldn't get Amelia to do anything more than nibble on her breakfast so I hope my Dad will feed her again if she comes in. Lately she has been hunting lizards. Yuck! Then either the dog or my other kitty brings them in the house. I'm like, ew, guys, stop. Esther when she was in her prime would bring in birds and occasionally lizards but lizards always made her sick. Amelia doesn't seem to eat them, she just kills them. Sometimes I do wonder what goes through the mind of a cat.

CPS came over yesterday. The worker made everyone (my mom, dad, and me) to agree to be with my sister from 8am to 7pm everyday if she has any of the girls. I don't know how we're going to do it. My mom works 6 days a week, my dad can barely stay awake for 2 hours, and I'm at a limited mental capacity.

I know nothing about cat logic, but it strikes me that the lizards may be a gift.
Is there any way you could put a bell on her collar?

Quote of the day from PHP: "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Profound thoughts in expression group.

Also, my work department's group text has been blowing up today. I'm ready to get back to work. I miss it, and I don't know that I'm getting as much out of PHP as I'd hoped. I feel like I'm on therapy overload. What is it called when a sponge can't absorb any more? That's what I'm feeling, between individual therapy, DBT group, and PHP for 5 hours a day.

That would be saturation point, Daisy.

My husband and I each have our own email account (I also have a work email), but my personal email is the one that we use most often for anything business/financially related. He rarely checks his own personal email and has a business email he only uses for business. We have separate social media accounts. We share a banking account.

My oldest son and his wife have a shared email for pretty much the same reasons. They only have one social media account - my son doesn't really do social media so it is really just hers. They share a bank account.

When my mother was alive, they had one email, one FB page, one banking account.

I think much depends on how people do their business. I rarely use email for anything personal like letters, etc. Neither does my husband, so it's not like there is anything much personal going on in our accounts. My son and his wife use their email the same way. My parents did a lot of personal correspondence via email in their later years, but they lived decades together before email was even a thing (well, now that I think about it, so did my husband and I). We come from a time of writing letters and putting them in the mailbox - our relationship with technology is probably a bit different. Our marriages are probably a bit different also - very much everything is shared and combined as was the norm and tradition. People just do things differently than what used to be.

As my husband and I are nudging closer to retirement, I'd say we are perhaps even more consolidated than before simply because the logistics of wills, living wills, possible medical powers of attorney, retirement accounts, life insurance policies, etc. is complicated enough - the more we can align, the easier it is to keep it all straight.

Hiking at a lake close to tonight’s campsite. I’m breaking in new Chacos so my feet hurt a bit but it was still nice.

It's perhaps because I'm in the UK, but I've never been certain of the difference between walking and hiking. Please can somebody explain?

Mileage may vary, but I think of a walk as on a simple path, whereas a hike is a walk through nature, either on a hiking trail or on no path at all.

Same here. In my area, I think of hiking as walking in the woods, though it could apply to, say, walking in a desert or something, too (no desert near me!) Though, I wouldn't think of taking a walk at the beach as a hike.

I am in the UK. I think a hike involves significant physical effort, like hill walking or walking long distances. By contrast, a walk describes me taking an indirect route (and thus kidding myself that I am all about the outdoor life) to the local shop to buy wine.