two steps forward, three steps back (burned)

[burned]

Well I didn’t get the feedback I expected (righteous indignation!) but I definitely got the feedback I needed.

It’s easier to focus on what’s wrong with other people because then I don’t have to focus on what’s wrong with me. And I always have 3 or 4 fingers pointed back at me. The problem is, I judge myself much too harshly.

I don’t know if this is the right place to get into that really deep stuff. It’s Divorce Busting, not “free online psychotherapy.” I’ll bring it up with IC tomorrow. I have my fair share of pretty deep scars that I’ve always been good about keeping to myself. Except when I used them as excuses for the ways I sometimes acted toward W and others.

I will say that in a lot of ways my life is a story of opposites, dichotomies, dialectics, whatever you want to call them. And in her worst moments after BD (and even before) W was quick to point out that I always see things in black-and-white and that that’s a major problem. Actually the most recent time she said that was the last time I saw her, our last R talk, she said that the breakdown of our M isn’t black-and-white. Sounded like a cruddy way of saying “it’s your fault too” but it’s all true. Not my fault she cheated, but of course I contributed to the breakdown of the M. Maybe things got worse after BD because I was so defensive and so focused on the pain of betrayal that she didn’t realize that I was aware of my contributions, and blamed it all on her? She speaks cryptically sometimes, and I also remember her saying that she didn’t think it was fair that she was the one who had to make a decision on her own about whether or not to stay in the M. Maybe that was her way of saying “I don’t want to feel like this is all my fault”? So she was also right that I’m not a very good listener, but surely when you’re saying things that are THAT important, you could be a bit more direct when you KNOW the other person is a fairly straightforward black-and-white kind of guy? Like when she said we should do MC (before the A). But as several people pointed out, it’s not right to blame her for my own blindness.

It’s also why I’ve consistently second-guessed going dark. I think she saw that as more of the same, “He gets angry and shuts down when he doesn’t get what he wants, because it’s always either-or. He hasn’t changed.” The irony is that I wouldn’t have gotten to all of these insights if I was still frantically clinging to her. So going dark was both detrimental AND necessay and...hey look at me integrating two opposites!

So I guess I’ve hit the point where I’ve detached from her enough that now I’m focused more on myself. Stage 5 maybe? I was hoping the righteous indignation would help with detachment, and maybe it did, but now my own demons are staring me in the face and telling me, You’re going to go through this again and hurt another innocent beautiful creature if you don’t fix it. That’s what I’ve been told here, over and over, but I don’t think I was ready to hear it until now.

Kind of humiliating, though, that she cheated on me and dumped me, and not only have I lost her but I’ve also lost the blissful denial that I was able to perpetuate by “using” her. Allll kinds of messed-upness in that R. Also kind of annoying that just around the time that I’m calm enough and detached enough to be able to TELL her all of these realizations and SHOW her what I’m capable of, she’s tying up the last of the loose ends so she can move on. I’ll probably always be a disappointment in her mind, a “failure” in the sense that I wasn’t who she thought I was. There’s no going back. Someday I hope she’ll take a look at the new me (and as of today I’m still the same me) and maybe she’ll like that I became more like the person she hoped I could be.

But it’s going to be a long road.