Newby here, desperate for some advice (thread 6)

[JRuss]

DonH -- Did you actually read sandi's post? There wasn't any "advice" in it at all. But even had there been, yes, I'm going to politely reject advice I know to be poorly considered, especially if it is delivered rudely. Others might beg for that, I guess, and I do see some unfortunate groveling here, but that's doormat stuff.

And there's no "woe is me, my life is terrible and over" with me. Let's dispense with the strawmen. Strawmen are never helpful where the goal is to have a meaningful conversation. What there is "with me" is a relationship that I valued very highly that has died. I administered CPR to the corpse for a long time, in a lot of ways, some of them DB-approved, many of them not. None of those efforts were successful in terms of "busting" anything. There is a low-to-no-conflict living situation that, for the kids' benefit, still mimics happily married life at times, which delays healing but which also gives me more time with my children, so I go along to get along, rightly or wrongly. This makes full detachment more difficult, I think, than in the more traditional physical separation scenarios because it pretty understandably draws out the Kubler-Ross denial/hope stage. There is worry and fear for the future (mine and my children's). And there is grief that cycles between that denial/hope, sorrow, anger and (although still more rarely than I'd like) acceptance. All of which I try to own, and all of which I'm working very hard to address and manage, albeit not all that well at times.

Just a quick word on these "dozens of books on how" to "alter" thoughts "to a large percent": sorry, most are written by charlatans for gullible people. History is full of false gurus. This site has it's fair share of them. Again, the work, the effort, the practice -- and I've spent hundreds of hours on this by myself and in IC -- is in realizing the true nature of thoughts, what they really are, and learning how to mindfully manage the relationship between those thoughts, one's emotions, one's sense of self, one's identity and, in time (hopefully), one's overall mental health. Hell, it is a huge, huge deal just to have that initial breakthrough of realizing you are not your thoughts; that they have nothing to do with your Self. A huge percentage of world's population never even wakes up to it, and they live their lives none the wiser, to their detriment.

So saying that we can't control the raw output of our thinking mind for more than even a few seconds at a time (and it takes meaningful, sustained practice to do even this) isn't self-pity or me not accepting things: it's just accurate. For all but the truly enlightened (and you'll have to point them out to me, because I've never actually seen one), it's what you do with the thoughts once they arise. To some this comes naturally; for those of us with my particularly ruminative brand of depression (and yes, I've been "addressing" it since even before BD), it takes a $hit ton of work, therapy, (possibly) medication, exercise, rest, GALing and time.

Honestly, most of my posts here at this point are intended to give voice to how hard I find this journey and to hopefully feel supported in those efforts. It really stopped being about busting my divorce quite some time ago. There isn't going to be that happy ending we all hope for when we first get here. Some days I have very strong faith that there will be a different but still very happy future; other days, it feels like things are and always will be pretty bleak. It is what it is. On we go.