It's too hard sometimes

[ginab1966]

Mark: Hi..you posted to my thread yesterday and said you sounded a lot like my husband. I don't have alot of time to talk but wanted to tell you that before you even THINK about getting back together with this woman you HAVE to work on you. You aren't doing her any good and you aren't doing YOU any good. The one thing I want my husband to do is acknowledge that his issues are BIG and BAD and need serious thought and attention. This is a twofold message to me...I love myself to get help. I love YOU and DD enough to get help.

YOu need to understand that the way you behave sucks the life out of people. Your W is just where I was in May when I left. I came back but I've come back to the same selfish, childish, depressed, life-sucking, deaming man I left.

Just get help if you can and get as much of it as you can.

I'll chat more later....I just need to go to bed. I'll be praying for you and hoping that you are ok. YOu aren't a bad person..you just have some stuff you need to work on before you can be a healthy partner...thats all.

Gina B

[TooLateForMe]

Anniversary today. Pure hell all day long. Shouldn't the body/brain shut down at some point w/ this much pain? I realize that I'm choosing this pain, holding onto my love and the past. Can't there be a middle ground?

I would never wish this much pain on anyone, ever. Yet there are so many people here going through it. It feels worse than 2 months ago.

Venting. Somehow it feels a tiny bit better to spew my pain onto the internet. But only a tiny bit.

[bluerain]

You arent listening! You need to find things that are positive changes for you to make!

You mentioned that you needed a place to stay. Dont you think that solving that problem would be good for you? Craigslist has lots of roommate situations on it, a really affordable option.

Do you go to church? Pray? Talk to god, he can take your anger and sadness, and never gets tired of listening. Have you ever wanted to go back to school? Or volunteer at the fire dept? These are things that will help you establish an existence seperate from your married life, it will make your wife wonder what you are up to, and it will give you something to focus on besides your situation.

This is literally tearing you apart. You have the tools to improve your situation. Its your choice whether to use them,or continue on your current path. If you dont take control of your situation, no one else is going to. All of us have been where you are, and what you are doing obviously isnt working, isnt it time to try something different?

[TooLateForMe]

Thinking of going to stay with my parents. My aunt can get me into a job training program in wyoming. I'll be 2 hrs away from DDs and W. But maybe that will be good for the time being and motivate me to get back as soon as I can. I can get counseling and a lot of other things that I think I need if I'm going to survive.

I get what you're saying, blue. I have a tendency to wall myself in. Not healthy at all. I look in the mirror and I don't even look healthy. I don't want to lose my W but I'm losing myself. Time for some tough love for myself.

[Lost Rabbit]

Hi Mark havent posted on your thread before but you are right "tough love" for yourself is really the way to go! Look in the mirror and honestly ask yourself would you fall in love with you! I expect the answer would be no, certainly would have been of me when H first dropped the bomb on me, I was needy, self centred, co-dependant and cake eating probably in his opinion. Im sure the fact he is sitting waiting to chat to me on MSN at this moment is because I booted myself up the bum and administered some tough love on myself, as DB tells you time and time again, you CANT control your spouse but you can control what YOU do! Go to your aunts get yourself back on track, make yourself look a viable prospect for pursuing from your W's POV and if she isnt interested by then you will be fighting the ladies off with a stick! Keep your chin up and know that we are all with you and have been in the same position and all have our struggling days and good days.

[TooLateForMe]

Thanks, LR.

Going to stay at parents. It feels like a desperate act but I need support right now. Called W to tell her. I was to-the-point and I'm sure she could hear the pain in my voice. It was hard to talk to her even for that brief moment. It didn't even occur to me to act cheerful.

I feel like my life has been stolen. And I just can't get over it. I need outside help. My parents may never understand but at least they love me.

After I tried to kill myself (badly) they sent me to a short-term psych ward. That was the best I've felt the whole time since the bomb. Therapy every day. Someone cared and talked to me and met new people. People who had lives as bad or worse than mine and who understood what I was going through. Apart from this site, I don't feel anyone understands.

[bluerain]

Are there any support groups in your area? The churches might have something. You could really turn staying with your parents into a good thing. Do they need help with projects? Could you pick up something part time to help them pay bills? I know my parents could use it! And I think that having them will give you some more support. Dont make this the only thing that you talk about with them though!

Is the facility that you went to close to you? Maybe they could put you in touch with a support group.

You can get over this, but the longer that you let yourself wallow, the harder it might get to pick yourself up. So seek the outside help. If thats what it takes to get you through this, then thats what its gonna take!

You are setting an example here for your kids. They are going to learn to cope from you, so maybe its time that you learn to set a healthy example.

Getting involved in your own recovery from this will give you control over where you are going. And that will help you with some of this anxiety and helplessness that you are feeling.

What kind of a program is it? Does your state pay for the training? Those are great deals, and the things that they usually train for are pretty high demand jobs, so getting into a program like that would be great for you! Have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up?

[TooLateForMe]

This started out as a random, short post and evolved into a journal-type thing. It's messy, solipsistic, and stream-of-thought. It goes over the same ideas and folds in on itself.

I'm posting it because I want to look back on it down the road and I want others who are going through the same sort of things to see the thought processes. Sorry if it's confusing.


On some other thread someone pointed out that WAS are great DB'ers. It's the other way around.

I had a kind of realization that I'm going to have to turn into a WAS. That's the only way through it. Let go, move on and through it to a better life.

Then what? Two WASs. That's why I held onto the pain for so long. If I let go of the M then it goes away. Doesn't it? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe the trick (and quite a big one) is letting go without pushing it away. Because if the opportunity does come up, if I CAN actually save the M will I be able to recognize it? If I recognize it, will I WANT to save the M?

And that's the big thing, the WANT. I can't tell if that's where the pain is coming from.

The other problem is that being a WAS is ultimately a reaction against the pain from the M. Get rid of the M, get rid of the pain, right? That's bad logic and emotional thinking. Eventually, you wake up from the "fog" and reel from the damage you caused. I want no more confusion, hiding feelings or lashing out.

And this whole meltdown has been a reaction. I don't want to react any more.

I've made my decision to move forward. I had to in order to survive. The question is, now that I've committed to moving forward, would I go back if she wanted me to? If she called right now would I return? And I don't know what the answer is.

What about in a month, or four, or a year? What would I do? Who would I be then? I'm afraid of falling out of love with her, of losing that part of me that's still connected.

Does love go away? Real love? Can you strangle or ignore it into non-existence? She is. And if loving her is so painful, shouldn't I do the same?

See, I don't believe that love is magic. I don't believe in destiny. If you don't feed love (the noun), it withers and hurts you. If you don't do love (the verb), love (the noun) withers and hurts you. But does it die?

That's what we're afraid of, those of us in this painful "just-been-dumped" period. The spouse is moving on and turning off the love. Our love causes us pain and so we learn to turn it off, too.

But I've done that before. I've turned it off in the past, like she did. How did I get it back? Answer, it doesn't go away.

So, even when I didn't FEEL love (noun), it was still there. And, when I didn't DO love (verb), it was still there.

That's the secret. Love isn't tied to being a thing or a verb. It's a function of who we are, who they are. It's a function of existing. Yet you still have to feed it and do it or it withers and hurts you.

So I walk away, move on. How do I do that and feed love and do it? How to do this w/ detachment while keeping your sanity is the dilemma.

So it comes down to this:

I've got to move on and through this toward a better future for ME. I've got to show that the person she loved is still there and capable of feeling and showing love in return. I've got to be ready for her to realize that her love didn't just vanish, that she just stopped feeding and doing it and that it can be revived.

I've also got to be ready for that NEVER to happen. It may, at some point, be too late.

Because that lightbulb will probably go off in her head. If I'm not worth the risk of getting hurt again, then she won't take that leap. I have to be worth it. I have to be all the things I needed to be through the years. She has to see promise.

What will determine my choice if she wants me back? Will I want it, too?

Maybe that doesn't matter, because the person I'll be is not the lonely, desperate person I am now. I'll have better skills for making that choice. She'll be different. We both will. And that's the scariest part.

You just have to trust in yourself that you'll make the right choice to be happy in the end.

[robx]

I had a kind of realization that I'm going to have to turn into a WAS. That's the only way through it. Let go, move on and through it to a better life.

Then what? Two WASs. That's why I held onto the pain for so long. If I let go of the M then it goes away. Doesn't it? Maybe, maybe not.

Yes, strange as it sounds, that's how it begins.
You stop pursuing, you start moving in your own direction, detachment. It screws up the current dynamic, you're expected to pursue and resist this divorce, you change directions, move toward it and it screws up the logic at their end.

When you agree with them, agree with their feelings, in fact adopt their feelings as your own, they have nothing left to fight you on, you were against the divorce, now you're for it, they can't fight you if you're agreeing with them.

[TooLateForMe]

I'm getting it. The M wasn't the problem. We were.

We weren't us. We were the unit, not individuals. The M only exists when we're okay with ourselves.

There were problems, but they couldn't be solved as a unit because the unit isn't a person. We weren't looking at who WE were.

We can blame each other forever, but we weren't thinking as individuals. And now she is and that scares me. She broke out, finally. I have to, too. That's what's keeping me back.

If we could figure this out and still be together, then we would be great.

How do I communicate to her that the R isn't the co-dependence. By not being the person she's seen me as for so long. I can't be the unit anymore.

That doesn't guarantee anything, though. It's not magic.

It may be too late. I had to make a choice that would lock me into a place far from my family for a while. It's the best choice I could make, though. Move forward or drown.