I just feel so angry towards my wife for her affair. I know that this goes in cycles and I just wish I could get rid of this feeling.
One thing I learned from the book The Happiness Trap is not to try to fight your feelings, because if you fight or suppress them they just come back bigger and uglier. Instead it's best to accept that they're there, understand that they only control you if you let them, and instead of fighting them just let them roll through you and continue on with your life. Another great lesson from the book is there's no such things as "good" feelings and "bad" feelings. They all serve a purpose, and they should all be accepted.
Quote:
I look at my children and feel so sorry that my marriage is such a mess.
I understand that feeling. Eventually it'll be replaced with a desire to make the best of your sitch for your kids. Many of us find that we actually develop a stronger bond with our kids when going through this. It gives us new incentive to reach out to them and comfort them, spend time with them and demonstrate our love to them. It's important to do this because they are hurting too. We get so caught up in worrying about ourselves that we tend to dismiss what it does to our kids.
Quote:
I have to fight these feelings until I'm back on the straight and narrow.
Like I said above, it's unhealthy to fight feelings because they'll just return later in an uglier form. You might check out the book, I found it very helpful with the anxiety attacks and depression I was going through.
Quote:
At the moment I just feel like crawling into the corner of a room, locking the door and bawling my eyes out.
Then do it!! Crying is a form of grief recovery. I used to cry on the drive home from work, then lock the bedroom door and collapse in a heap on the floor crying, then pick myself up, dry my face and go out with a smile to spend time with the kids. The key is to do it in private, don't cry in front of W or your kids.
Quote:
I've ready 5LL and I'm not convinced by it. I don't understand how someone can be categorised into 5 simple sections (even with dialects).
It's not a way of categorizing a person, but rather of their preferred love language. It doesn't mean they don't respond to the other languages too, but most people have a main language that they respond strongly to. But the real lesson of the book is that your W most likely has a different PLL than you. So if yours is PT and hers is WoA, your inclination is to assume hers is the same as yours, but if you shower her with PT then she may not respond at all, or may even respond negatively. That's what you should take away from the book, that you need to learn to understand your W and her needs better and also to understand her needs are completely different than yours. That's a component of DB'ing as well, so in that respect they compliment each other.
Quote:
And on top of that it seems to run contrary to the ideas of DBing. Can they be done together or is it just one or the other?
They can be done together, but you have to pick LL techniques that aren't pursuit. IE, my W's PLL is WoA. But since I'm DB'ing I don't tell her things like "oh you look so beautiful today, I want to carry you into the bedroom right now!" Instead I focus on other things, like "Thank you for taking the kids to the beach last weekend, they were so excited about it, you are such a great mother to them!" 5LL is all about specific versus generic. If you tell your W every day "you are such a great mother" then the words ring hollow. But if you compliment her on specific acts, it has a lot more impact.
