Two Punks In Love

Healing

Kat

This place really is amazing. They have turned the art of healing into a science. Within two days they had analyzed me from head to toe, inside and out, and customized a brand new lifestyle for me. Diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, counseling, detox baths, massages, aromatherapy, light therapy, and art therapy have filled my days. Colin of course, has his own completely customized program. We don't spend much time together. Basically just meals and a little down time in the evenings.

We have separate apartments—that's a rule, even if you come as couples, because the focus is on the individual. They want each person to have their own space. Of course, this place is a swank, elitist spa, not at all a "psychiatric facility." There is no enforcement of any of the therapies or guidelines here. A couple that comes together can spend as much time in each other's apartments as they choose.

Colin seemed a little surprised that I didn't invite him to sleep in my rooms, especially after our wedding night make-out session, but he gave me space because of the Trace Confrontation. On the third night we were here he asked if I wanted to co-sleep in his apartment, but I declined, saying I want to follow the spa's guidelines so that we can really get the most of their proposed treatment. That's true, I really do. He hasn't made a big deal about sleeping separately, so I think we are still on the same page with this "experiment."

Within the first week, I felt much better, physically. I've been so relieved by my increasing energy and the fact that my emotions seem more normal, that I've tried to stay in the moment of each day, drawing all the healing I can from this process. But in the last few days, my mind has felt clear and calm enough to thinks about other things.

First and foremost, what happens to me and the babies when I leave here. Can I maintain my new found vitality and clarity?

Battling depression has become a full-time job for me in the last two weeks. I love feeling better, but I want to do more with my life than simply use it all up not being depressed. I'm going to have children to raise and life-work to return to.

The experts here at the spa tell me the key is staying "calibrated." They tell me their program is intensively reprogramming my body and mind. That when I leave, my positive improvement can continue with a much more tapered self-care routine. They will design that routine and continue to support it. Basically, I'll leave here with a new diet and exercise program, and a few outsourced monthly visits to a high-end spas they will recommend back in the States to maintain my "equilibrium."

I'm worried that I can't keep this up, especially when the babies come, and I will slide back to sadness, but Ashlynn is my biggest cheerleader. She tells me intensive self-care seems daunting at first, but it becomes a habit that you don't have to think about. She assures me I will have so much more energy and capacity to do all the things I want to do that. She says if I choose I can come to fram the routine as necessary as sleeping or brushing my teeth or getting a monthly hair cut and color refresh. She tells me if I take all the weekly time I used to spend ineffectively warring with myself partying and trying to make up for it at the gym, plus add the futile worrying and overthinking I used to do? There's enough hours there to replace the self-sabotage with self-care.

That does make a certain amount of sense. The weirdest thing that's been happening during these conversations with Ashlynn? I've realized that she and I have much more in common than the boy next door who both gave us rings. We have a...vulnerability in us, that we both have to manage. We both have some serotonin/dopamine issue going on in our brain that makes us worry and overthink. She was pretty much born that way. I wasn't like that as a kid, but I became more and more like that with the onset of puberty. Ashlynn's trauma exacerbated that tendency in both of us. She turned to drugs for relief after her trauma. I turned to Colin and his rigid all-or-nothing approach to diet and exercise.