Ok, Frank, here is a bit from post from someone who posted on my sitch:
"Detaching" is also *not* about distancing one's self. I see lots of folks confuse the two. I read where some get themselves "detached" by becoming physically absent from their WAS, yet detaching is something that's done in your head and does not require being apart from the other person, rather, it's something you do with the other person present, and while the other person may even be pressing your buttons.
There was more and you can go to my thread and read it but it stemmed from my sympathizing with your detachment issues, namely how not to "do more of the same" in terms of being unavailable for her. When I read that post to me, I realized that what I was missing, and what you may be missing is that to detach is not to distance or put walls up. I truly thought it was. I thought it was getting out of the house, going into another room, etc. What it is, is not reacting to the same stimuli that cause you pain. I can understand if a new variable comes into the picture, like she says he's coming to visit her or something, but maybe you could just focus on not reacting to the stimuli you are used to; her email to OM, the R talk, her distance/closeness, etc. By not reacting, I mean you can CHOOSE to be closer to her if she wants to be close to you, but you don't just do it because you think it's the right thing to do. Choose to live within yourself and isolate your reactive thoughts somehow so they don't control you. I am working on that and it's getting easier. Oh, and one other thing, if it were me, and I was trying to ease off on the attachment thing, I would immediately stop snooping into her email, phone and IMs. I know the brief time I spent thinking about how to "catch" her or see them together, it was all consuming and I never thought about anything else. People have different opinions on this, but it seems to me that you have all the info you will ever need on this a-hole and the likelihood that you will get anything positive from knowing more is, well unlikely. Just my thoughts.
