The five stages of abandonment: 1) Shattering. When you first get the news. My experience: Every time you hear the news or think about it. It is as if my chest was ripped open with a chaiansaw and I have been left to bleed. I should be dead, but for some cruel reason I am not. Intense experience of betrayal of trust. 2) Withdrawal. The relationship sustained endorphins are wathdrawn from your body. Intense longing. Idolisation of your partner. Symbiotic regression: a pathological dependence on your partner. My experience: It turns me into a compulsive octopus that sucks onto my W. And then she tells me: I feel captive, I feel locked in, I feel suffocated, I need to get away from you, you are killing me. 3) Internalisation: It is all my fault. I caused it. I am unforgiveable. I am unredeemable. I am unlovable. I cannot change. I am sexually inadequate. I am ugly. I am fat. I am boring. I am not good enough. I would definitely leave me if I were married to me. It is an attack on the essence of my being, it completely destroys my sense of self worth. 4) Rage: Hello anger my old friend. From a small little knot in your stomach to intense violent berserker kill everybody in sight rage. I scream, I curse, I blame, I lash out and try to hurt as I have been hurt. It is destructive. It destroys whatever chance I have of reconciliation. It hurts the persons I love most: my wife, my kids. It is a normal part of post traumatic stress syndrome and not moral failure. I HAVE TO LEARN TO CONTROL IT! (I never had a single anger attack before the shattering.) 5) Lifting: When you finally heal. Personally I have no experience of this. I believe it will come (it hasn't, after 14 months) because that hope is all that keeps me alive. Sometimes I feel as if I am experiencing it, just to wake up from denial into reality, and I shatter again...
This book says that abandonment trauma is similar to the trauma of rape, because of the internalisation process, the attack on your sense of self worth, the core of your self awareness. I feel it in my body, and I see the destructive effects on my family. I tell my wife: Imagine you are raped. Now understand that that is what you are doing to me and the kids. It drives her further away when I say it, I know, but I feel at some point she has to know what she is doing.
She has to understand what sacrifice she forces on her loved ones.
Someone on this board said: The fool seeks happiness in the distance, the wise man makes it grow under his feet. And another one: The grass is always greener where you water it.
Me 43 W 42 M 1998 S16 S15 D7 D4 bomb 07/03/2007 OPA ILYBNILWY My Thread
