DARK - how do you do it right? I need help BADLY

[adinva]

A lot of us in this place speak before thinking, and act outside of our best interests. In a lot of cases that helped get us into our divorce situations in the first place.

To change, first you must become aware. Then you'll catch yourself after the fact, many times, which is a good sign of awareness. Keep practicing and you'll find the awareness occurs closer and closer to the trigger, and then finally, BEFORE the point where you speak! Then you will have changed. And you have to keep working at it and you'll keep falling down all along the way.

So, each time you mess up, write here or in a journal what you did, why it backfired on you and set your sitch back, and most importantly, what you might have said or done differently. If you do something right, write what was right about it and why it was helpful. Reinforce what you do right, learn from what you do wrong.

Every single time you want to react emotionally, try to STOP yourself. Wait 10 seconds, one minute, an hour, use phrases like "I'll get back to you on that" and "Let me think about what you just said." Give yourself a chance to think before you speak. You'll get better at it. Each time you get a chance to think, realize that disrespecting her wishes is NOT going to make her love you...you CANNOT make her love you...you can make your sitch worse by pressuring and pushing your wants needs and convictions on her.

As I look back on my sitch, something pops out as a turning point for me. I had someone here trying to get me to agree that my H had a right to leave me. He had a right to be happy. If my son was in a bad marriage would I want him to stick it out for life or would I want him to do what it takes to be happy. This was very painful for me to read and think about and I disagreed strongly with it. After all my H was WRONG, what he was doing was MORALLY WRONG, and I expected my boys to marry for life and stick it out good or bad because it's the RIGHT thing to do. I really resisted this line of thinking. But it did make a turning point for me, where I could eventually have some compassion for H. This isn't easy for him either. Obviously he thinks he's doing what he must. I hate like crazy that I'll be divorced and that my kids are in a broken home, but that's life and it's my job to make the best of my role in it that I can. H's decisions, choices, behavior, limitations, all are completely out of my control, and wishing things were different does no good at all.

I think my turning point was letting go of the idea that H was WRONG, and turning my focus to how I was going to handle myself.