Chunking the week, coping method

[Bridget Jones Is Free]

I am organising my weeks by ”chunking” the days into work days, helping days, rest days, coffee time days…

I try to make my life enjoyable by organising my week, writing it all on my agenda. Tomorrow I am helping a good friend of mine. That will keep me busy for part of the day, then back at work. This week so far is well structured, I can cope with things because I ”steal” happiness and make it mine…I count the proportion of happiness I experience, even a few hours of sunshine are total bliss to me. Simple pleasures experienced at home alone or with my kids.

That’s how I was hoping to cope when I came back home. Sometimes it doesn’t work. That’s when he is there…Otherwise I do ”steal” time, it’s my time to be happy, focused, positive, waiting for the stupidity to start the second he is back home. Stupidity is silence, sulking, texts received, seeing him sat on the sofa mulling, sulking, thinking, looking weird. It’s trying to speak when I really have to and getting an abnormal response, all done to make me annoyed, worked up, upset.

But I control myself quite well and I do not respond to the stupidity. I am proud of myself and that’s one point for me, null point for him. That’s chunking too, time during which I don’t rise to his behaviour. If I manage to ignore, I manage to ”chunk” a piece of time won for me!

Stupid I know…But until something happens, and I hope it doesn’t, that’s all I can do. It’s actually successful I think. I wonder if abusers stop abusing when they see you in almost complete control of yourself? Or am I going mad? Am I deliberately making myself blind?

I feel like a prisoner, let’s say the librarian in the prison in the Shawshank Redemption film, the old man who has a crow as a pet, which he releases when he is himself released from prison. This librarian builds his life around being in a prison, doing his job distributing books and lending them, even finding a pet to keep, watching the sky through the small library window and eventually releasing his pet crow to its normal freedom. Simply catching moments in life, structuring a normal life in an abnormal environment. Chunking years…

[Lisa]

Hi Bridget,

Thank you so much for sharing your coping method with us. It is so helpful for others to read what may assist with difficult times in life. You are doing brilliantly and have come so far. I hope you are proud of your strength.

Best wishes,

Lisa

[Author]

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