Looking for Help

So there I was ignoring my bills and using every bit of energy I had to go to work and be effective, take care of my schooling, and be there for my kids.  I was trying to fake it to make it.  The first time my wife and I had a talk, because I was mostly a hollow shell, I talked to a peer support member.  They advised me to start with a visit to the doctor.  I went to the doctor and explained the past years events and how I was starting to get anxiety attacks when I went to work. (Later I realized it is likely because of triggers).  Since I can't do my job while taking any fast acting medication for anxiety my doctor put me on a prescription that has to build up in your system before it is effective.  This prescription, as many of them do, comes with its own side effects.  Now I am not against prescriptions and know that they have helped many people; they helped me, but they also compounded the problem.  My prescription helped with the anxiety attacks and made it easier for me to fake it, but emotionally I was dead.  Now this really helps in law enforcement because you can keep your emotions far away from the situation at hand, however it doesn't help with the family situation.  Plus I was so embarrassed about falling behind in my bills that the stress of that was making it harder for me to face those.  I mean I had almost perfect credit when we bought our house, and I had never been behind on bills, and now I was facing what seemed to be a mountain of them, and emotionally I couldn't give a shit.
The first time we got a letter from the bank about our house I snapped out of it a little and got got up, at the expense of falling further behind on others.  Then last year my wife's sister attempted suicide while she and her parents were visiting for Christmas.  This was a huge blow to me, but more so my wife.  My wife also was paying all of the bills at this time, but due to this she couldn't handle it anymore and she asked me to take over.  I knew inside that I was not in a good position mentally to do this effectively, but I stayed silent.  I could feel emotionally and mentally that I was spread too thin.  But I thought, "I'm a soldier and I was raised in a tough environment, I can pull myself together to take care of this".  I couldn't have been  more wrong.

I payed some bills and took care of some things until the second anniversary of R's death was approaching, I knew I would not handle it well and it was time to finally seek the help I should have two years ago.  I went to a counselor.  In my next post I will discuss how she helped some of the healing begin, and the  how with the help of my wife I have found more things to help.