A day at a time

[may22]

Thanks, CW, Sage! CW, we had a really cozy and fun Halloween with pinatas and scary movies and all the candy the kids wanted.

Hi Sage,

Oh yes, patience, keeping a lid on my bubbling rage (for aaaaalllll the things), and staying up late watching the election returns realizing that none of any of this is under my control... I guess I have had practice over the past year. So many things to worry about right now it is like my brain can't really keep up. And I also far prefer to get my checklist out and get some $hit done, so this whole letting go-patience-zen thing is hard for me.

Can I ask an existential question? Are you motivated to find loving-kindness because first and foremost you think that would be good for your R and/or H?

No, I'm really not... though it isn't because I am an enlightened human. It is purely selfish because I hate feeling this way. I don't like being motivated by anger, or having these feelings of rage and frustration and sadness inside of me. I look ay my H and I just don't know how to knit all the different feelings I have towards him together. He's a proven liar and cheater, though I do believe he isn't lying and cheating any more. He treated me like cr@p. He was ready to throw away our life together like a used napkin. He was ready to completely disrupt the children's lives and break up their family out of selfishness, though he told himself it was out of love. Which makes me want to vomit. And yet. This person is the man I vowed to love through thick and thin. The father of my children. My best friend. How do I reconcile all of those things? How and when do I open my heart back up? When will I know it is safe?

I read your thread's, and WF's, and IW and DnJ's, and I am so envious of that feeling of loving detachment. I guess I care less about feeling compassionate towards him than I do about letting go of the hurt and the anger inside of me. I'm also dealing with the feelings around AP, and the rage is much much more pointed with her, either because all I know about her is she's a wannabe homewrecker who did her very best for two and a half years to break up my family, or because it is easier to hate her than hate my H. Probably a combination of the two.

So, compassion and loving kindness currently take up no real estate within me. They are not authentically overflowing towards others. I just want to have those feelings take up residence and kick out the ugly ones. Not out of hope for my R, but selfishly, for myself.

I found that I had to experience a lot of other emotional releases before the authentic compassion flows freely. Anger? Frustration? Sadness? We are societally constructed to believe those are 'bad' emotions and must be swiftly executed. But when I really sat with my sadness, or my anger without judgement, just feeling those emotions and letting them take me where they will, I was able to let them move on naturally without a fight.

This was a huge part of my process towards detachment: I had spent so much time with each of those emotions, I was no longer afraid of them, they couldn't control me any longer. They gave up their real estate within me and that allowed the space for compassion to blossom.

This is really so helpful to me and Alison said something similar, about having to sit in the anger and process it before being able to move on. I think this is where I am, though the processing of it is so, so difficult for me. I didn't do so well on my IC assignment of feeling the rage and letting it move through me... instead it turned into an uncontrollable forest fire. I made the mistake of journaling on election night after my H went to bed, pouring all my ugly feelings out onto paper, and ended up waking up my H and interrogating him about AP, whether he was still in contact with her, whether he wanted to, etc. It was pretty bad and we got in a big fight, both saying things to hurt the other, and ended up with about 2 hours of sleep. Of course this was also all fueled by my election night anxiety (probably like your own rage bloom) and I should have avoided it... but it was not good. We had makeup sex and I felt icky about it afterwards.

In the morning, he woke me up and said a lot of really positive things to me, apologizing for going off the handle the night before, that he loves me, I'm his best friend, he is getting over AP, he knows there is progress and his feelings for her are fading. We're in this catch-22 where what he wants of me is to be his partner and best friend and to be building our M back up now, because that helps him get over AP. Whereas I don't feel I can give him that authentically right now, not until she's completely out of the picture and the thought of her embarrasses him. (IDK why that is the image I want, him grossed out at the idea of her, just like I am.) I told him I don't want to have sex with him for now. It isn't good for me. Not while she's still ghosting about our R, in his mind or mine. He said okay. I feel strongly enough about this that I don't think I'm going to have any trouble enforcing it. It isn't serving me right now and I feel strongly that I don't want to screw around with my fledgling re-interest in sex by sleeping with an H who hasn't fully extracted his heart from another woman. (And TBH I think all the discussion on this thread about it helped me to crystallize this, so thanks to all of you. I realized I care less about the previous SSM and his fear of going back there than I do about my own relationship with sex and desire, and while it was helpful for me for awhile to engage with him to prove I had it in me, I got through that part and no longer need to prove anything.)

My IC said she thinks it is a good thing I'm processing this anger and sadness, now, and that my anger is righteous and I need to own that and not apologize for it. That my H doesn't feel truly remorseful because he has been protected from any real consequences from his actions (beyond "losing" AP).

I think I want to hang onto my anger, at least a little bit of it, to use if I need it in the future. IC thinks it gives me a measure of emotional safety, the anger as a wall to prevent me from being vulnerable. And, the emotional trauma is part of that too. I love how you put it, Sage-- letting yourself process those feelings until they didn't scare you any more and they didn't control you anymore. I really really don't want to let them take up residence in my soul. I'm scared of that, letting this whole thing fundamentally change me for the worse. More to process, I think. I wish I knew when I could start to feel safe again letting myself open up to believing it might all really work out with H.