I feel my world crumbling around me. I have never been this frightened in my entire life – including during my abuse… My husband was taken by ambulance to the hospital and admitted… they say he will be in there for 3-4 days and I feel so helpless… I can’t see him except for strict visiting hours and can only talk to him for 10 minutes at a time. I feel so helpless. I talk to him on the phone and he wants to come home so badly and I want to rush to his rescue. I want to help him. I want to make all this ugliness go away. I want to make him all better…. and to make the whole ordeal worse we had a fight last night… an age-old fight that we’ve had over and over… one that we had been working through and moved past recently… I thought we were doing so well… but last night we were looking at some of my old family photographs and I just lost it… I went back to that place, mentally and when he was just trying to help me I snapped at him and the evening quickly spiraled out of control. I hurt his feelings so badly… made him feel like the enemy… made him feel invisible, rejected and unimportant…. and I don’t know if it is possible for me to live long enough to do enough good to this man to ever make that up to him. Time and time again in our relationship he has reached out to help me and I have hurt him over and over by going into my automatic defense mode. I don’t mean to do this and I am working so hard to undo all of these defenses… I don’t need them anymore… but I can’t seem to get them disarmed. I feel like my heart is a mine-field and he keeps trying to reach me there and just when we think the land-mines are clear he steps on one and I hurt him all over again. I am so scared. I feel like this is all my fault… I’ve stressed him to the point of hospitalization. I am the straw that broke the camel’s back. I am terrified. I am desperately trying to stave off the ‘what ifs’… What if he hates me now? What if I can’t recover from this? What if this is the thing that leads him to leave me? What if I am just toxic and he never wants to see me again? What if I have just ruined our marriage that we have worked so very hard to save? What if he gets home from the hospital and is so traumatized by me he just doesn’t want me to touch him anymore? Is yesterday the last day I will ever touch his face? Kiss his lips? See his special -just for me- smile? Is it the last day I will ever hear his voice telling me he loves me? Did I just ruin both of our lives? Have I finally become the monster I have always feared I would? I am so afraid… Please, God, help me. Anyone out there…. if you pray…. please pray for us….