well, had third session of councelling yesterday afternoon on the road to target"complete break" , it quite an emotional roller coaster having to go over the good and the bad of mainly the last 3 years of stbx affair with best mate, however i am clear on my objectives - time to do things for me! so my objectives for next week are to come up with practical solutions to enable me to do what i want, rather than what she wants and start to get the control back to

What an emotional holiday. All these expectations of joyous family time together. Love and harmony. In reality of course we all fail to meet the marketing and social targets.

We spend money on getting everything the kids want when the biggest item on virtually any kids list is a loving environment. But we can't buy that and we can't afford the emotional investment in most cases.

I am so looking forward to my kids' Xmas but dreading my own.

If you can indulge me I just need to off load some of my thoughts and recollections of my actions over the last few days. So do feel free to read no

Well the long awaited couple counselling started this Wednesday. the counsellor seems to have lots of experience - trained by Relate and 15 years in counselling on her own. Easy to talk to and listens well.

There was a lot of apprehension on both sides I think. I have seen it as very important and my wife has finally bought in to the idea. She asked us how long we have been together, what we liked about each other in those early days, what each of us see our issues as and what we each hoped to gain from counselling. We were both very calm in our voice tone, there were a few barbs but