Detachment is the: * Ability to allow people, places or things the freedom to be themselves. * Holding back from the need to rescue, save or fix another person from being sick, dysfunctional or irrational. * Giving another person "the space" to be herself. * Disengaging from an over-enmeshed or dependent relationship with people. * Willingness to accept that you cannot change or control a person, place or thing. * Developing and maintaining of a safe, emotional distance from someone whom you have previously given a lot of power to affect your emotional outlook on life. * Establishing of emotional boundaries between you and those people you have become overly enmeshed or dependent with in order that all of you might be able to develop your own sense of autonomy and independence. * Process by which you are free to feel your own feelings when you see another person falter and fail and not be led by guilt to feel responsible for their failure or faltering. * Ability to maintain an emotional bond of love, concern and caring without the negative results of rescuing, enabling, fixing or controlling. * Placing of all things in life into a healthy, rational perspective and recognizing that there is a need to back away from the uncontrollable and unchangeable realities of life. * Ability to exercise emotional self-protection and prevention so as not to experience greater emotional devastation from having hung on beyond a reasonable and rational point. * Ability to let people you love and care for accept personal responsibility for their own actions and to practice tough love and not give in when they come to you to bail them out when their actions lead to failure or trouble for them. * Ability to allow people to be who they "really are" rather than who you "want them to be." * Ability to avoid being hurt, abused, taken advantage of by people who in the past have been overly dependent or enmeshed with you.
I think the key points in bold are areas you should focus on when thinking about detachment.
Goal 2 - do you have specific things that you're going to do to improve yourself, besides go to the gym? How often will you go to the gym? Maybe an interesting club or something to join? Or a fun activity to do with your son?
Hugging and kissing - as long as OM is in the picture or in her mind, it's cake-eating.
You say you don't tell her what to do anymore, yet you texted her and said "you can't change your plans..." Those TMs are not a boundary. You can only enforce boundaries for yourself. You can't place them on other people. I'm not sure what your boundary is in the TM about your W not being home to put your son to bed. You can't force her to do to anything she doesn't want to do. Also from what I understand, it was her night out, and your night in.
From the boundaries thread post #3:
An example of a boundary and how to enforce it.
Quote:
Boundary: I will no longer let someone yell at me on the phone.
Enforcing a boundary: When someone starts yelling at me, I will calmly end the conversation. "Let's talk about this tomorrow when we can speak more calmly." "I don't like the names you are calling me. We can talk tomorrow." Then you hang up.. you don't wait for the person to say, "O.K., fine," nor do you get into a debate. You hang up. The person doesn't necessarily have to understand your position or agree with it. This isn't about communication right now. This is about your boundary. Two different things.
Hope that helps you when figuring out what boundaries you want to set up for yourself. There's a ton of good information about boundaries in that thread. boundaries: cheat sheet
