Dear Witsend,

Well at least we have a couple of things in common. It really does help to see that you are not the only one and sometimes it even allows you a little bit of humour. What a bloody shambles!!! Kids certainly add to the stress, we have a little one 14 months old (ours) and Anthonys' 14 year old has just moved in with us. What a treat. A toddler, a teenager and a husband with PTSD! Maybe I am the one who needs the psychological help. The fact is that I do love Anthony but sometimes I could easily strangle him, it is the frustration and the fact that I just want some semblance of normality sometimes.

I am sorry to hear that in addition to your partners PTSD she also has hormonal trouble as a result of tubal ligation. Me, personally, I think that is a really nasty operation for the return of contraception. I can empathise again with these problems as I have had personal experience with ongoing 'girl' troubles. My saviour was acupuncture combined with herbal medicine (Traditional Chinese Medicine). I cannot even begin to tell you the difference that has made to alleviating, and in most of the cases getting rid of a lot of the problems I was having. In addition to all of the obvious medical problems associated with the tubal, I suspect that she will also be suffering quite severly from hormonal imbalance - this is enough to drive her insane and make you think that you have taken up residence with a monster. Really, if you can convince her to get some help for this problem and her hormones get balanced, it may make a world of difference to both of your lives. Don't get me wrong I am not pushing alternative medicine but I know from my own personal experience that this can help.

Good on you for sticking with her. PTSD is hard enough but hormonal imbalance as well .........what can I say. If you can help her sort this out first and then try and tackle the PTSD stuff. Also you may want to consider that she might be very frightened of having another operation. Those kinds of operations (anything to do with girls bits) take a while to recover from and are really hard to deal with emotionally. To make matters worse, if she is frightened, the PTSD emotional crazies will probably not let her admit it to you - too much feeling and too scary. I have seen Anthony from time to time ignore real emotion and cover it with alcohol or cigarettes or anger, worse still he is a blokey, bloke and his pride sometimes is so big he couldn't jump over it. Hope some of this helps you, take care of you, talk soon