Time away from husband

Hi,
I would appreciate coaching on my thoughts around being away from my husband for a month.

My son and I have been staying abroad with my parents for nearly four weeks now. It’s something I agreed with my husband to help with childcare during the school holidays. We also agreed that due to finances and annual leave left this year, he wouldn’t be coming to stay with us during this time.
We’re due to go back in four days.

During this time we have been in regular contact but mainly in the evenings for my son and my husband, his dad, to see each other. We haven’t had a single one to one calls in this time.
I’ve downloaded a couples app to answer daily questions. To start with it was fun but we’ve both not answered on days with more contentious topics (intimacy and finances).

My cousin stayed with us for two nights last week and she was on the phone to her boyfriend every day and even 20 minutes one morning. I haven’t even felt the urge to talk to my husband for that long and don’t think I’d know what to talk to him about.

We have been going through a difficult time since October 2019 and have been to couples counselling for most of 2020. For me, separation hasn’t been on the table from the start but I have been thinking about it on and off for the last 18 months.
I have noticed that during my summer I had more loving thoughts and feeling towards my husband and our future.

I’ve been doing some models and feel this one the one that stands out the most for me.

C: at my parents away from husband for over four weeks.
T: I should be missing my husband
A: questioning my marriage
A: trying to understand the meaning behind my not missing him
A: buffering with social media
R: no clarity on anything.

 

Answer:

Having a should in the T line is always so interesting because it doesn’t always make for a clear R line and you kind of nailed that! However, I wonder if the true R is “I continue to avoid embracing or validating how I actually feel about my husband.” (speaking of feelings, a quick note: you don’t have an F line. I’m not sure if this was a typo or an oversight or a genuine Freudian way of saying that you don’t know how you feel about this situation, which is interesting…).
Why do you think that you should miss your husband more? When you have your answer/s, ask yourself, ‘Is that true?’ Why or why not? What questions or realizations arise? Bring anything you’d like to dive deeper into back to AAC so we can keep working with you on this.