6 months of MLC

[cardinal]

DnJ, Peacetoday, Ownit, thank you all so much for this support. It warms my heart that people I don't even know are taking the time to offer it here, especially during the holidays. I'm still re-reading and sitting with all of it.

Emotional detachment. It is the uncoupling of your irrational emotional reactions to H and his behaviours. Being detached stops the uncontrolled dragging your feelings around with whatever is happening, being said, or being done by H.

Seeing this intellectually can help with the process - which is to feel and acknowledge those irrational feelings. To rationalize your emotions, as counterintuitive as that sounds.

My brain seems to be so slow in grasping this. But as you said, I can see I've made some progress. I can continue to work on observing my emotions but not letting them dictate how I react. I know I've made strides in this, because I often have to remind myself H hasn't seen this anguish, since I haven't externalized it in his presence. I'm thinking of it like this: As in meditation, I can become a detached observer of my own feelings and thoughts—without judging them, which seems to be the harder step for me too.

Indifference is the numbness that follows detachment. A non caring feeling towards one’s spouse. I found it to be so very helpful to do this in a compassionate manner. Finding compassionate indifference allows one to still care (our spouse is still a person after all), and not. I know sounds weird.

I have sometimes observed this feeling of numbness in myself, and it has both felt okay and scared me a little—I guess it's because it's the opposite of what I felt before all this happened. I think it's key for me to keep in mind indifference does not have to exclude compassion. But! This is key for me too: compassionate indifference also means giving up wishing I could step in and fix things.

This next part about setting aside time to feel what's going on is a little fuzzier to me.

Really. It disturbs, and uncouples the irrational connection between feelings and event (or pending event in this case). It also builds the realization that the feeling/event is not cause and effect.

What does it mean, I am asking myself, to separate my feelings surrounding, for example, my H potentially filing for D, from the event itself?

For me, indifference is detachment without expectation. [...] We all know we should detach, but it is hard and different for every person. Like pain, there are layers to it (like an onion).

OwnIt, this is helpful to remember, too, because I know—as a person with perfectionist tendencies, as a person who very much does not see divorce as the answer in my marriage (it's certainly not going to fix the things H is struggling with, though it may push them to another relationship or area of his life)—if I am supposed to detach, then I'm like, okay, I need to do that right now, and I need to do it RIGHT. But I can only do it one day at a time.


All of this leads me here today: I can look back and see things I would have liked to have done differently in my M, and I have been working on what I can work on now, have spent a lot of time trying to understand my H's perspective in ways I never have before. I let him know I wanted to take the time to understand him (rather than respond defensively or dismiss his feelings). I took that time. I apologized for what I came to understand as my own failings in the M. H seemed to acknowledge that I am changing, but it's too late—that he's afraid things would go back to the way they were. And, as I mentioned in HopeCA's thread, though there isn't an OW as far as I know (or as far as our mutual friend knows), he's very much living a kind of fantasy life and receiving validation and appreciation from his new friends, who know nothing of his past.

So what more can I do right now for the M on my own? Isn't that where the letting go of control comes in? Where, as DnJ writes, I have to let my H take responsibility for his decisions and consequences? Isn't this the next step in what I do for the M and for the possibility of any future R with H (which I still want, I admit—I get a glimpse of how different things could be if he too can manage to continue to look at himself and confront his decisions and their consequences), which also happens to be what I do for myself?

That lingering fear: I don't want to look back on this time as I do now on my M and wish I would have done X or Y differently! But... I'm human. I at least need to feel like I'm doing my best right now—for H, for keeping any future possibilities open, and for myself.