I try to maintain self-awareness, but it's hard. I've got it good. I'm an able, talented person living in a wonderful city with a career I enjoy and great health. But then there's the voice: if that's the case, why doesn't she want me? If you have all of these things in your life you find fulfilling, why can't you stop thinking about the R? You've achieved so much in your life, how could you let this fail? How does anyone find peace with all of the things they wished they did differently?
I have such admiration for people on here who have done such a good job at detachment and dropping the rope. I just don't know how to do it. And I know it's rooted deep in me, all of my fears of abandonment from being adopted and my Mom passing away early, all of my co-dependency and NGS being the son of an alcoholic, and it just feels at times that I'm struggling against such a strong tide and it just floods and overwhelms me.
But I'm working on it. I'm working with my IC, I'm reading books, I'm posting here, I'm trying to figure it all out. That's all I can do, I guess.
SteveS ~ I suspect letting go is going to be really hard for you, given how you have described yourself here (and based on my own personal experience).
You are very success-oriented and accomplished and driven. Possibly that's connected to your FOA and NGS and co-dependency. I don't share the same childhood background as you, but I had a messed up childhood in my own way and I had full-blown FOA and NGS and co-dependent tendencies as a result. I also compensated by doing really well in school and finding self-worth through that route. I also struggle to accept failure, and think "if I just did X, Y, or Z differently..." and then I feel like absolute cr*p. I'm guessing you feel the same way. You didn't let things fail, they just did fail.
I suspect this journey for you may be really challenging. There's a saying about anxiety - "the more you think about your anxiety, the more anxious you get." In my case, I can sometimes over-commit to IC, books, podcasts, the DB forum, and other self-improvement activities, at the expense of living my daily life and enjoying it. I don't think in your situation I would have been able to drop the rope. It took some truly awful things to develop in my situation. So please grant yourself some self-compassion. It's not easy to drop that rope. Find the things that work for you, and discard the things that don't.
Yes, this is exactly right. I get it from a lot of places - my friends, my family - why can't you just move on? What are you holding on to? And it's not like they're wrong. WAW has been awful to me since we got separated, and from their perspective, why would I want to be with someone who treats me like that?
But I don't want to give up. Partly because of the work I've been doing; I am 100% confident that I'm not the same man I was six months ago, and that this time off has been a blessing in that I can now recognize a lot of the behaviors that I contributed to our sitch. And partly because I'm still very attracted to her, we still get along so well when we do meet up, and so on.
I'm working on it with my IC. As I said, you're right - I've defined so much of my life through achievement, and derived so much of my self-worth from that accomplishment. And it's hard to move on because this is my biggest failure, and there's just so many X, Y, or Z things I can point to that I wish I would have done differently. I know I didn't consciously *let* things fail; if that was the case, I wouldn't be so unhappy now. But I also know I didn't do all that I could.
Your last paragraph is interesting - I'm sorry of course that it took some awful things to develop - but I really do worry that this purgatory, this friendly rapport that I have with WAW is actually doing me so much more harm than good. But I don't know how to judge all of it. I want to reconcile, so how can it be a bad thing that we can make each other laugh to easily? I just don't know how to weigh it all.
