Healing our marriage did not only mean fixing what was broken. It also meant building something new—something that had never existed before. Alisha explained it in one of our sessions while tapping her pen against her notebook.
"You don't just repair a house after a fire," she said. "You add rooms. You change the layout.
Otherwise, you'll always be living inside the memory of what burned.” She called it parallel joy.
A shared space where we weren't parents, partners, or patients. A space where nothing needed to be processed, explained, or healed.
Just enjoyed.
At first, the idea sounded simple. In practice, it was strange. We had spent so long defining ourselves by responsibility and recovery that pleasure felt almost suspicious. We sat at the kitchen table one night after the kids we
