Heather,

Just lurking along here Things are getting better here, but the journey by no means is over. Thanks for asking. Someone posted the link to Bill Ferguson's master of life site in hopefloats MLC thread: http://www.masteryoflife.com/

He talks about finding the inner issues that run your life and has a straight forward exercise that a person can go through to find the hurt and heal it.

It's interesting that Cobra said Corri was able to keep her H on topic by saying "yes, I am a B*tch, but that's not what we're talking about". If you believe what Ferguson says about our childhood issues affecting us now, you can see how a W's H calling her a B might be a trigger to bring all of those emotions immediately to the surface.. whatever the issue is from childhood "Im unlovable, worthless"... so instead of just dealing with someone thinking she's a B.. she's also dealing with all the feelings of not being loved or being worthless that she felt as a child but couldnt deal with then. By confronting "I'm a B" and making peace with that in a personal way, it loses it's power and control. The W can say "yeah, I'm a b*tch at times, but I'm a great person too, and btw I may be unloveable sometimes, but I'm also very loveable too and I can live with that.

I think working back to those core issues can definately be helpful. I've been working through some things myself so that I don't keep recreating the same patterns and reactions in my life. I've been surprised at how easily my fears and emotions can be triggered, but just having an eye on what the issues are makes it much easier to work through the emotions and see them as just that. I can think my situation with my XH is what has made me unhappy, but in order to heal and move on, I have to accept that it's not necessarily what he did/didnt do that hurt me, it's more of how I allowed it to define me that caused the pain. I.e., he cheated = I'm unloveable; he lied = I'm not trustworthy. Once I come to terms and allow myself to be loveable/loved and accept that I deserve that and that I'm worthy of being trusted, I can move on and be loved and trusted by someone. Until then, I'll keep interpreting my R problems to mean I'm all the crap I believed I was when I was too young to know the difference!

Stand tall GF

Sheila