Moved over from Newcomers...

[Chris73]

At first, my anger helped propel me through a lot of the difficult stuff. My anger made no room fro depression. As strange as it may sound, I'm very thankful for my anger during hardest parts of my separation and divorce.

Frankly, I regret not embracing my anger when the EA/PA was first revealed. From that moment forward I was all about "fixing" the problems, bending over backwards and walking on eggshells to show my ex that I was taking all this seriously. There was never any focus on how the EA/PA affected me. The folks on this board tried to encourage me to take a more tough love approach but I didn't have it in me. I was too afraid that she'd leave for good and sue me into the poor house. So she did a lot of cake eating over the next year or so. But I am thankful that at least I stood my ground and didn't move out.

I look back at the mistakes in my marriage and remind myself that I did the absolute best I could do with what I knew at that time.... However... If I can be compassionate and gentle with myself...then I have to offer the same perspective for what exW did and is continuing to do.

There's the rub. I'm always comparing the mistakes we both made and my reaction is always the same:

"Yes, there were times when I didn't contribute 100% to the marriage. I had long bouts of selfishness and introversion. I wasn't emotionally available at crucial times. But I never set out to consciously sabotage the relatioship by cheating. And when the real problems in the marriage revealed themselves I sprang into action."

I know there are flaws in this type of thinking and it's likely that my ex has a different take on what happened and how she got to her breaking point. But I still go around feeling like I was the one who was wronged, that our problems were never resolved, and that if she had just met me half-way we could have worked through our issues and stayed together. I think this lingering resentment is why I feel stuck and unable to move forward. It's easier to embrace this "poor me" attitude than rise above it and move on.