Post Divorce...Still Looking for Answers

[Husky]

So,

Still new here but wanted to share my experiences going through the collaborative divorce process.

The xW and I separated about a year ago, but attempted to work on things...I got extremely frustrated with the process (she was possibly going through MLC and didn't know about DB'ing) and suggested that we go see a lawyer together after a particularly nasty fight last Dec. The good (?) thing was her company offered insurance for legal affairs and she signed up for it and we made an appointment.

I should say that although I didn't want this under any circumstances, I was caving to her thinking that if I did what she wanted, it would "help". Well, I'm here to tell you that the past 8 months of my life have been an absolute living hell and the majority of that was probably due to the fact that we didn't get separate attorneys.

During this whole process I found out the following due to the fact that we had to share all our financial stuff at time of S:
-she was at the very least having an EA with a 22 year old before BD (found parking lot receipts through our bank statements)
-confirmed she was having a PA
-found out she was literally spending $1k's of dollars on clothes and future trips (with OM) before BD (again through bank statements)
-that she was lying to me about the amount of stock options she was being given (talking in the $100k range)
-that she was lying to me about the amount of money she was making at the time of S

In the process of all this b/c I'm incredibly task oriented and wanted her to make the final decision:
-I divided and valued all our assets
-Provided any and all precedence I could find in our state about the harder subjects (house, retirement, company stock)
-Started refinancing the house
-Got the quit deed for the house put together
-Got the dog signed over

This all sounds so obviously idiotic now. I didn't want to get divorced, so why in the world did do all this stuff? I think mostly b/c at the time it was literally the only connection that I had left with her. I didn't know that I needed to detach, give her space to live her life and figure out her MLC, and GAL. All the work left me absolutely obsessed getting at least the perfunctory stuff resolved.

All we did was fight about everything. In the beginning she wouldn't even respond (which likely should have been a sign for me to back off), and all it did was make me even more upset that she was ignoring all of this. The more I pushed, the more she resented me...the more she resented me, the angrier I got that she was ignoring me...and on and on. Finally, I think all of this just pushed her over the edge and completely out of my life.

I guess what I'm really getting at is, if you are new to all of this, just finding these boards...it will incredibly hard to utilize BD if you go the collaboration route. If I had any sense whatsoever and I could do this all over again, I just would have let her do all the work and we likely wouldn't be divorced yet, wouldn't have gone through long periods of absolutely hating each other, and there may have at least been the chance that we could have found some happy moments to build upon. I could have and absolutely should have got my own attorney and let them deal with everything...would have saved me an amazing amount of heartache and would have started to allow me to GAL.

I'm sure I'm leaving all sorts of nuances out of this, but it's frankly hard to remember...and even harder to think about the so many places I went wrong