Thanks IronWill and 97Hope. A bumpy day yesterday, but your posts and insights and suggestions and a session with my IC where we explored the old coping mechanisms and the childhood stuff about family rejection really helped. I feel a bit emotionally hung-over today - tired and vulnerable but okay.
I'm in two minds today. One is that I'm grateful, in a strange way, for all this triggering of old childhood stuff, because I was a very unhealthy and damaged adult, relying on my H to do my emotional functioning for me, and now I am forced to look at some very old stuff and seek some healing. I've never done that seriously before - never had to - and it is so painful and lonely that I know for sure I wouldn't have bothered if the sticking-plaster of a marriage and another person would have helped me avoid it. It is necessary work and I think I will come out the other end a more mature and healthy person.
The other part of me is really fed up that this old childhood stuff keeps surfacing. I am in my mid 30s and you'd think I could have left behind my unpleasant childhood experiences and toxic parenting behind by now. I have healthy children and a successful career. I can take care of myself and my kids financially, and I have good friends. So to have to go to therapy and have another cry over childhood rejections and the way more minor rejections in adulthood trigger that for me makes me feel stuck, and like I am making no progress.
I am trying to hold my two minds together today and just rest and wait it out.
I have a school thing this afternoon where I will be seeing H. It is appropriate we attend together for the benefit of Youngest. I am glad he wants to go and be involved - I know many WHs here aren't making that effort. We've had a few friendly interactions recently, and I doubt very much he'll be anything other than civil to me in public. But I also know he's extremely paranoid (or he was, the last time we spoke about it) as to what, if anything, I've told people about his behaviour. That paranoia makes him lash out unpleasantly. I'm taking my own car - not travelling with him - so I doubt there will be problems, but I do have concerns about what his attitude might be like.
