Confused and Lost II

[may22]

KG,

I know this is so, so awful and difficult. I want to point out a couple of things:

-- you did it!! You stuck to your boundaries, you were honest with yourself and with her, and you were incredibly strong in the hardest of places. Yay you!

--Totally with Yail on the fact that she's the one spiraling. You're strong, dealing with the inevitable emotional fallout of doing something incredibly hard but necessary.

--I think the fact that you can see her lashing out, gaslight attempting, flip-flopping behaviors for what they are AND were able to not get reeled back in by what she said is a huge step forward. I would expect more of the same in the coming days, maybe even with more vigor-- be ready for it.

On that last note, if you go back to basic reinforcement theory, when you're working on extinguishing a behavior there is often an "extinction burst" where the subject keeps trying the same behavior more and more, bigger and better before they finally give up (the rat who learned to press the lever to get the treat-- once the lever stops producing treats, the rat might press on it a ton, really hard, before it finally realizes it doesn't work anymore. And the less regular the reinforcement schedule is, the longer it takes to extinguish the behavior-- so the rat that got a treat every single time it pressed the lever learns much faster that it no longer works than the rat whose lever produced a treat after a random schedule of presses.)

Not that your WW is a rat, but... she has a year under her belt of getting you to give in, mostly by being nice and promising to change, but not really demonstrating that change in a meaningful way. So... I would expect that she's going to come at you pretty hard and try a bunch of different strategies like you saw the other night. Be prepared. Don't give in!! I definitely still recommend considering some of the things people had suggested you consider, like blocking her number, filling your days with fun, maybe getting out of town for a couple of days.

Is your new cordless vac a Dyson? I ridiculously love mine.

Also... toot toot.

Hang in there. I'll probably be where you are soon, maybe even tomorrow.... our kids are sleeping over at someone's house tonight and my guess is it will be time for an R talk and it will be my turn to set out my boundaries and extract myself from an unhealthy situation.

M.