No more denial, time to get to work

[MRay]

Backsliding is real people! It's been awhile, but journaling may help so here I am. I was doing very well until just before Christmas. I hadn't thought about the ex in a romantic way in about 7 months. Of course the holidays are a rough time, and it was just after Christmas when the bomb was dropped, so I guess it's expected to backslide a bit. I was starting to become intimate with another woman, and then one night I dreamt about my ex. It wasn't a sexual dream, I just had a dream about living a normal life and it was back in my old house with my ex and we were happy. I woke up thinking wtf was that and went about my day as usual. Since then I feel like I'm back at the begining. I keep thinking about her. I'm angry again. I feel like I'm starting all over to a degree.

I'm happy with where I'm at in life, and I'm trying to figure out why this happening so I can get over it again. I've continued GAL like a mad man, and I'm just trying to keep myself busy. I'll give the reasons I think why this happened. The holidays are all about family, so that's an obvious one. The night before the dream I was with a woman, whom I broke it off with because I felt it wasn't fair to either of us if I was feeling this way, and we took a big intimate step in the relationship. My ex started sending me a lot of texts that were not related to the kids. She would send things like a screenshot of her computer playing a song she hadn't heard in years that reminded her of a time from our past. She also texted me from the movie theatre about a movie she was watching and said there was a scene that I just had to go see. Things like that that showed she was obviously still thinking about me. I wasn't quite sure how to respond.

One day I dropped the kids off with her at her parents, and her mom mentioned the basketball team for the high school they work at was going to be on tv later that day. OM is one of the coaches, and I just said I didn't care to watch them play. Ex gave me a strange look and said, "I don't care to watch them either" in a bit of an angry voice. So of course this made me think there were problems with them. A couple weeks later we were having dinner together as a family, and when she went to leave she noticed I had rented a movie for the night. She asked if she could stay and watch, so me being an idiot, said sure why not? While she was tucking in our son, her phone rang as I was walking past and it was OM. When she came out of the bedroom she looked at the phone and put it away without a word. I heard her phone vibrate at least three times while we watched the movie and she completely ignored it. This was not normal, as in the past she's been at my place talking to him on the phone or texting and I was completely okay with it. So of course the reading into everything too much had started again along with becoming attached.

When I say for 7 months I hadn't wanted her I meant it. I felt a healthy detachment, and just wanted to co-parent and do the best thing for our kids. It was actually starting to become pretty easy until this happened. I'm slowly working my way back to detachment (I hope). It's not an overnight process, but I'm just working on me. I'm considering putting up some boundaries, but I know I'm going to have to deal with this for the rest of my life. I do want to be as friendly as possible for the kids, and I was able to do this for 7 months, so I'm sure I can get there again and be better this time. I think I should limit the texting to just about the kids like it was before. There was always playful banter in these texts, but it never involved things like hey remember this nice memory from our past that I shat all over while we were breaking up? So in my opinion it's a bunch of things all coming together to make me backslide. Maybe I'm wrong and that's what I'm here for. One can always make more accurate observations from the outside, so let me have it!