burned again

[TJT]

You fear the unknown more than you dislike the hole you are in.

Yes, the above is SO true, and yes it's another logic vs. emotion thing that is way, way easier said than done, but burned this is a time when seriously you have to take things sometimes one HOUR at a time. I think you are still cycling in the past and future, and that's why you're still going back and forth so much. If you stay in the present moment you can level out a little bit.

Sometimes that means forcing yourself to stay busy, even if it's something mundane that takes your mind off of things like laundry or dishes or mowing the lawn or hell, get a coloring book! It sounds like a very menial thing but the smallest wins will start to blend together and you'll find yourself going longer and longer periods of time when you feel "ok".

When my H first moved out, I was terrified. Not to be alone, but because I had no idea how I was going to emotionally survive the fact that he was not coming back. It felt completely beyond my control no matter what people say about controlling your own feelings. But what I could control was keeping myself moving despite those moments. I didn't resist them, I let them happen, but then I FORCED myself to find something else to do.

It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and I had plenty of meltdown moments in those immediate days and weeks after. All it would take was half a second in between the activities I had planned for myself to get a flash of emotion through my body; once I was walking between rooms and literally dropped to my knees and bawled uncontrollably on my foyer floor because I just felt so bad. But it got better and I knew it was because I was so aware of what was going on, that even though I didn't know how to make it stop, I wasn't just going to sit there and let it take me without fighting.

I wrote recently in my thread that I am thinking of myself like an honest drug addict. Any time I start thinking about and yearning for my H, I stop myself as if I'm reaching for crack and about to relapse. It really puts things into perspective if you're like me and would never really have anything to do with drugs... since I know the answer to "do I want to be a crackhead" is absolutely freaking not, I replace that with "do you really want to keep this pattern with your H" and that keeps me motivated to keep moving forward.

Anyyywayyys, I sense you may also need to work on accepting your sad feelings and not fighting them in order to allow them to pass. The anger needs to be worked on, 100%, but I sense that if you accepted your sadness as part of the process and stopped trying to skip so fast to a "solution" (either reconciling or full on D) it might likewise correspond to your emotional swings and level it out more. Let yourself grieve in the sense of just being with your own feelings, not projecting them anywhere, but just sitting with them.

I know this is so hard, burned. But just think about how amazing YOU are in surviving something like this and try to turn the hard parts into something that you can be proud of. In my kitchen crying story, I was embarrassed at how I was reacting, literally on my knees for "no reason" in the middle of the room (i.e. I hadn't broken my leg, fainted, or some other physical reason to be on the ground). It wasn't that long ago but I am already proud of that moment in this story because I know how bad I was hurting, but that I got through it and didn't have a complete life meltdown in the process. To quote Ariana Grande, "How she handles pain, that $hit's amazing".

Many people (but honestly, NOT everyone) experience some kind of very painful or traumatic event in life. I can't imagine dealing with certain things that others have to deal with, but I now respect the process so much more than I could before because I can empathize much better with it. And the truth is that, likewise, many people have NOT experienced exactly what we have... so look at other people who have overcome a lot of hardship, take how inspired those people make you, and apply it to YOURSELF because it IS amazing that we are aware enough to be working through our pain and not turning to drugs or other bad behavior and completely sabotaging our life because woe is us. We are surviving, even if it's messy, and what I have noticed about that is that it actually gives us a tremendous capability to give even more in the future.