DH, read the following carefully, I've been here 5 months dealing with my sitch and honestly I wish I had begun going dark sooner. But my emotions and feelings got in the way and I let them drag me down. I now remain quiet but nice and keep it friendly even with the few contacts her and I have. This has helped me tremendously and I dont really know how things will eventually end up.
"Going dark is the chance to work on you and to allow the spouse that left you to go through the journey they need to go through. If you start butting into that when they have made it clear that they don't want to be with you, then you come off as someone who is not honoring their request. You are short-circuiting the journey they have to go through to work out what is going on inside themselves.
There was obviously something very wrong that made them decide they wanted out in the first place. Oftentimes, it is probably the case that they are depressed and they have lost faith that anything can ever change. That patterns are set and are not reversible. It's a sign of depression to feel this kind of hopelessness.
One thing they knew for sure was that they did not want you in the picture. When people are depressed and confused about their identity like many people who request separations are, they become cognitively disorganized and impulsive in their choices. And when you are coming at them trying to make them stay with you, it just feels bad and like there's a pressure there to stay where they were.
And they don't want to stay where they were. They are wanting big changes. And if you stay the same as you always have been, and are unwilling to allow them to go on the journey that they need, or you are setting agendas about how they need to be, you just look like a controlling wench or [censored]. You become a representation of what they were trying to get away from.
As long as you keep pressuring them, you don't stand a chance. You will remain the embodiment of those bad feelings they are having. You will be something to avoid. You will make it very easy for them to continue to project or blame you for the bad feelings that reside inside of them.
If they are alone with those bad feelings still lingering inside, and you are nowhere in the vicinity, then perhaps they will begin to see that the pain they were feeling was really about something unhealed inside of them rather than something about you. You need to cut that link between bad feelings and you.
If you want there to ever be a future between you and your spouse, I believe you have to let your spouse take the journey that is rightfully theirs, even if they way they are communicating that to you [censored]. Even if it hurts like nothing else you've ever felt. If you love them, you have to let them go through that.
And you can't keep looking over to see if they are done yet. It's suffocating. Instead, this is your chance to learn new things. Walk around in your feelings and see what is unhealed in you that makes it so easy for you to feel crazy about this crappy situation in which you find yourself.
You have the gift of time now, and the focusing energy of pain. Don't feel all of this pain without getting your money's worth. Surrender to what is really happening. Face it head on. Summer in the MLC area says that you should stay dark UNLESS your spouse initiates a contact."
