WW is onboard with trying to save the M

[JGuy]

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts on detachment. It's good to know that it's normal for it to be a process that takes time. If that's the case, then I suppose I'm doing fairly well. Although I flip back and forth, If I look back, I'm definitely making progress on detachment as each week passes. It seems to be getting easier, slowly.

One thing that I identified which seems to be helping me over the past week is to just BE with whatever I'm feeling, moment to moment. As I have mentioned before, one of my challenges has been that I have a strong tendency to resist feeling my uncomfortable emotions, or even when I do, I have trouble feeling that my own emotions are even valid.

When it comes to detachment and moving through the process, my difficulty with processing and validating my own emotions doesn't help. IC and books have taught me that it's essential to feel the emotions before it's possible to move through them. So although I'm with you Azzork on the importance of moving past these melodramatic emotions to letting go and finding my mojo, my instinct is telling me that I'm just not there yet, and I need to work on accepting myself where I'm at first. My tendency to abandon myself emotionally is so strong that trying to move forward prematurely poses a real danger for me, of slipping into old patterns of self-abandonment. My IC has been helping me to see how this has to do with my birth trauma which caused me to form a deeply internalized belief that my own emotions aren't even real.

So, my guidance has been telling me that the right thing for me to do now is to focus on just feeling whatever I'm feeling. Whenever I do this, it's like jumping into a turbulent river in which I have no control. However, it always seems to carry me to exactly the right place in myself where I'm ready to take the next step. The detachment seems to come naturally after a phase of intense emotional processing.

All of this emotional processing is also opening me up to more emotional intimacy with friends and other people in my life. I have been finding that I am better able to empathize and connect with others as a result of this. Here is one example:

The other day while I was Christmas shopping, I had a particularly painful feeling that I couldn't even identify, which burned inside of me and wouldn't go away. I tried my best to stay with it and allow it to speak to me. I was holding back tears and fighting a very intense physical pain in my heart and throat as I was waiting in the checkout line with my stocking stuffers. While in this state, I felt a tremendous compassion for myself, which began to extend to all of the strangers around me. I found myself spontaneously loving everyone in whatever little way that I could. Looking people in the eyes, offering kind words, giving an extra big donation to the buskers playing Christmas music on the street... somehow this generosity was healing me in a way I cannot explain.

Later that day I attended my son's piano recital together with my wife. As each student performed, I felt tremendous love for them and for the beauty of the music. My heart was so open... I felt like Scrooge after his visit from the ghost of Christmas future! I felt like I was being lifted out of my personal pain into a bigger, open space beyond. It was so beautiful... it lasted a few hours, but I wish it could last longer. I wish that someone could see what I was feeling so that I could know that my experience was real and not just some dream. Again, so hard for me to validate my own emotional experience... I feel so alone sometimes, wishing that someone could be with me in that space to share what I'm feeling. I really need to know that the love I feel is real. Obviously it would be great if my W could meet me there, but I really don't care who it is. Anyone at all could relieve me from this aloneness.

I probably felt this way when I was a newborn crying for my mother while I was stuck in an incubator for 36 hours, and she didn't come. It's like I am still looking for some validation that my emotions are real because of that deep imprint of emotional abandonment during my very first moments entering this world. I sometimes imagine what I will be like when I finally heal from that... I imagine myself being such an emotional, compassionate person. Like I was that day, unconditionally loving every stranger that I meet...