I don't see a way out of this. I have knives in my stomach. I don't think anyone in my family understands what is happening. I feel like the crazy one. I don't know if that woman can help, she almost instilled more fear in me (how hard it will be to D him). What am I going to do, go on to therapist #6...I feel like no one can help me. My kids' little hearts are right in the middle of this...
First step, slow down, friend. This is a pattern in your sitch -- you make progress, you move forward, then Monsoor does or says, or doesn't do or say, something, and you slide baaaaaaccccckkk, all the way back, all the way back to looking at this thing, la cosa nostra, this thing of ours, in its leviathan-like nakedness, in its full monstrosity -- and you try to fight it, David versus an ever-expanding Goliath.
But "this" -- this is a Big Problem. It's Too Much Problem.
Around middle school, when we start learning (being forced to learn) algebra and the dreaded "word problems," one of the first lessons that is drummed into the brain-pan is that we have to break the problem into smaller chunks. That's what those stupid parentheses are for.
There's a similar dynamic in interpersonal conflicts. It's called "Incrementalism" in the theory of negotiating strategies. It doesn't always work, but it often does. And it doesn't require a lot of knowledge or training or anything other than common sense.
Because it's exactly the way instructions are written, exactly the way recipes are written. You can't have a peach melba, for example, until you first get a peach.
Quote:
No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
(Epictetus, Discourses, Book I, Chapter 15)
Break what you're facing into more manageable chunks. Break those chunks into even-more manageable chunks. Solve a problem. One problem. One teeny-tiny, itty-bitty problem. Reward yourself. Move forward.
I understand your frustration, believe me. I was every bit where you are as you are. And the thing that saved me wasn't mojo or the Spiers Doctrine -- but keep that under your hat, okay, I have a reputation around here -- but was simply recognizing that this thing was too much to take in that way. It was like trying to sip water from a fire hydrant.
And I understand the temptation, the desire, the drive, the internally generated demand, the need to understand why. Why? Why why why?
But you have to let it go. And it sucks, but yeah -- you're the only one who can do that and who can make the decision to do it. The why just doesn't matter at the end of the day. In a sense, it's like the difference between "organic" acting and the Adler approach. The back-story is irrelevant. What happened, happened. You have to confront the here and now.
One problem at a time. One day at a time. Or if that's too big a bite to chew, one meal-time at a time. One hour at a time. One minute at a time. One now at a time. Now. And now. And now. And now....
Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island (among other things), once wrote, "Life is not a matter of having good cards but of playing a poor hand well." Life dealt you a hand -- dealt us all a hand -- and the task, the challenge, the obligation, the need is to play it.
As @Coach says, you can handle it. But you don't have to handle it alone. That's what we're all here for. So your family doesn't get it. I had to put my foot down to stop the smack-talk about WAW in my family -- dig it? I'm DEFENDING the woman who is LEAVING me to my OWN family? Because I can't have loose talk like that around my (her) children. So the family....
You have us. All of us here, and we all have each other. And it's not a perfect substitute for real connection like in a family, but by the same token it has none of the baggage associated with family.
I'll close with another quote, this time from the Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer:
Quote:
Those who have learned by experience what physical and emotional pain and anguish mean are a community all over the world. They are united by a secret bond.
I'm one of Smiley's people. I live in the secret world -- the world of that secret bond. You are, too. And so are Thinker and AlexEN and SMW and Sara and Coach and Greek and Gypsy and and and.....
You're not alone. You don't have to face it alone. You don't have to struggle alone.
One second, one minute, one hour, one day. One challenge. At a time.
-- but was simply recognizing that this thing was too much to take in that way. It was like trying to sip water from a fire hydrant.