You're doing the right thing in detaching from her venom and doing things that make you happy and/or help you cope with this mess.
I'm still making my way through Daniel Gilbert's great book, Stumbling on Happiness. Today I found a few nuggets that helped me and hopefully will help you and anyone else who's reading:
1. Most people underestimate the novelty of the future. In other words, we take how we are feeling at the moment and project it into the future. In fact the future often looks a lot different when we get there. I suppose this could work both ways. If we are happy now, we assume we will be happy in the future when in fact we may feel worse than expected. But if we are in pain now, we overestimate how much pain we will feel in the future. Our future selves won't see the world as we see it now; today we don't see the world how we saw it last week, last year, or five years ago, etc.
2. Most people are pretty resilient and recover from trauma sooner than they expect. Very few stay mired in a deep depression or are unable to function "normally." What looks like unending pain will, most likely, end or at least abate to the point where we are happy again. Negative events do affect us, but not for as long or as in severe a way as we sometimes imagine they will.
3. It is easier to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, and thus we underestimate the joy we may experience in the future.
4. When faced with trauma, a healthy response system allows us to feel discomfort but also enables us to do something about it. We are not too defensive about our own problems, nor are we too helpless to change.
5. The brain agrees to believe what the eye sees, but the eye also looks for what the brain wants to believe. This is the "believing is seeing" issue I wrote about earlier.
Keep up your good work. Not knowing whether to love her just as someone in pain but someone with whom we can never be again, or whether we really love our W to the point where we really would like to make a serious attempt to create a new M is a tough spot. I am there myself a lot of the time, still uncertain which way to go.
