Perhaps you are right and this is some sort of happiness trap but currently I'm not so sure it is. It is hard to explain and perhaps saying I don't care is incorrect. I do care a great deal, about my wife, about my family about everything. But I don't really care about the outcome of this. I would certainly prefer if one day my wife came to me and said that she had second thoughts about divorce and wanted to work on things, that would be amazing. But I am at a point where I really know that I will be OK regardless of the outcome. It will be hard, especially on the kids and again not the outcome I would prefer but in the end I will be OK.
That's a great place to be and you are saying all the right things. Mainly I'm just trying to warn you that you are going to experience a lot of highs and lows over the coming months and to prepare yourself for it. I spent a lot of time convincing myself I was OK and that I had accepted things, and I really thought I had. Then about 3 or 4 months after BD I suddenly went into severe depression and started having crazy anxiety attacks, two things I had never experienced in my life! There was no trigger to explain the timing, it just happened. It took months to recover from that, and it was the roughest few months I've ever experienced, worse even than the months after BD. I suspect that my trying to convince myself that I was OK and burying all my feelings was what caused it. On the outside I thought I was OK but inside there was a massive storm brewing.
I can say now that with the benefit of time (years in my case) you are able to see your sitch much more clearly than when you are going through it. We tend to try and convince ourselves that we've recovered when we're still far from it. We tell ourselves we've dropped the rope while still clenching it tightly behind our backs. 3 Months post BD I would have told you I dropped the rope. 6 months post BD I would have told you I was a fool to think that, but that by then I really HAD dropped it. Then a year later, once again I would have realized that no, I STILL had not dropped it at 6 months. Realistically it takes 1 to 2 years to well and truly drop the rope and get to the point where you really are OK with the sitch you're in and know you will be fine no matter what. People who can recover from this in weeks or a few months were probably not fully invested in their M to begin with.
Quote
I am currently working on NMMNG and am working hard at it. I am a kind person and am going to continue to be but for myself.
Great! And there's nothing wrong with being kind. A lot of us here are recovering or reformed NGs and hey, we really are nice guys! But the point of the book is that a lot of "nice guys" are very passive/ aggressive, tend to hide their true feelings, and establish covert contracts over all things great and small. So the goal is to minimize the bad traits and keep the good ones.
