You are probably saying to yourself 'geez, I was fine until MY HUSBAND HAD AN AFFAIR' and if you are - I totally get it.
Sometimes the most well meaning advice is perfectly correct, but a little bit too early to hear. If that's the case with what you are hearing at the moment - that's OK. It'll still be here when you read it again in a few months. It's absolutely OK to go through this at your own pace.
There are some people over on the MLC forum who've been at this for over a year and still wouldn't be able to cope with some of the advice you've been given here - so you have obviously got the respect of some experienced posters when they believe you are ready to hear them.
The economist in me thinks of this as a simple matter of information asymmetry - we don't know what we don't know. We didn't know we had this dependence/low self esteem/need for approval thing before this marriage crisis hit because all our needs were met by our partner. Now that we do know we have an issue, we have to find out what it is and how to deal with it.
We go from being fine - a functioning adult human being, to being an emotional cripple with heaps of work to do on ourselves!! You know, some people never have this opportunity - and go through life absolutely unaware.
You might have seen literature around the "unexamined vs conscious life" or "living deliberately" - that’s what you have the opportunity to learn to do now and that is a great thing because it will open you up to so much more in your future than you would otherwise have had available to you.
I'm looking forward to how you react when you start seeing an individual therapist, because I think you'll start to cotton onto what I mean quite quickly then.
Sleep well my friend. You are doing a great job and you are learning and growing all the time. I think you've come an enormous distance since last November when you were kinda in denial ... You are winning ...
V
Never make someone a priority, who makes you an option.
