[xyzcf]

Therapists often treat what is going on with us as a marriage problem and a grief response. My first therapist was a "talk therapist" and although it was good to talk and cry in her office, I didn't seem any better after several sessions.

After 8 years, I was functioning but I could not feel joy. I knew what joy was and I did all the GALing stuff, had friends, had a routine for my life..but I did not feel who I was anymore.

I found a therapist that does mind/body work and yes, the idea that I had PTSD started to be uncovered. I didn't quite understand, my father had PTSD but he had been a POW in WWII, I work with domestic violence victims and children who have been sexually abused and they had PTSD.....but I started to realize that my whole world had been blown apart, rejection, abandonment, betrayal in a way that was totally unexpected and shocking.

I was introduced to this chart that is being used in many treatment centers, Polyvagal theory, that helped me understand how my body was in fight/flight/freeze mode very often......and was taught many techniques to use to return myself to the green zone where my body was functioning normally.

https://theactgroup.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Polyvagal-Theory-Ruby-Jo-Walker-small.jpg

I was in therapy one day and told my therapist that I felt "overwhelmed". She asked me to look at this chart and see where I was at...I couldn't see it..it's there but I couldn't see it.

I had over 60 sessions and some of them were really tough as my physiology started to respond to my emotional parts...but eventually I started to feel more integrated..started to become aware of me once more, started to recognize parts of xyzcf and eventually feeling more like myself once again.

Without that therapy, I am not sure I would be as well as I am today.

However, not everyone has access to this type of therapy or the financial means to afford it.

Exercise really helped especially walking and especially outdoors.

Yoga and meditation were also very calming. I had been practicing yoga for many years so it wasn't hard to find that a good place for me. I preferred things like Yin Yoga, Yoga Nidra and restorative yoga for my mental calmness. Lots of yoga is very high powered based so it's important to find the right class.

Breathing, so very important. Massages since I never get touched anymore.

I also had a dog who stayed by my side throughout the darkest time of my life.

I never had any mental health issues before BD. I was as stable as you can get. I didn't have any childhood trauma and our marriage of 32 years was a beautiful journey......so I was shocked that I couldn't just shake this off. He was after all, only a man, and not a very good man at that.

Still, there remains "damages" that I am quite aware of. He is in my life, quite superficially but that is my decision and it is good for our family. I also feel a great deal of empathy for him, because no matter how difficult this has been for me, I would not change places with him and his "crisis".

[Raphael]

Thank you all  so much for the advice. My therapist does specialize in trauma- she has mentioned PTSD, but I will be sure to ask her about that specifically. I had the same response when she said trauma and PTDS, I wasn’t in a war, how could I have PTSD. I will take note of the chart and share it with my counselor on Friday.
I know I am much better than I was, but have more work to do. I have read your posts more than once and I will refer back to them. You are all so wise and explain things so well, and I am so thankful you took the time to write to me and help me.

[Raphael]

I’ve had a few days to process all of this information and I think I just need to vent. I know you all understand how unfair this all is.  I question if he ever loved me at all. How could someone who you were with for so many years do this to his family?  I look at people around me who are smiling and doing life with their family and wonder if I will ever be truly happy again. Is it worth all the hard work that I know I need to do to just be ok. I feel like I am jealous of my friends whose families are together and are celebrating graduations, going on vacations and just being together. I know I am in victim mode and need to grow, but right now I am just trying to get through the day. I felt like I had gotten so much better since all of this happened three years ago, but now I am back to being  glad when I can go to bed at night because I made it through another day. When I wake up, I have that same sick feeling and know I have to chug through another day. When he first left, I thought maybe someday he would regret what he did, but now that he is starting a whole new family, it seems hopeless and he will never truly be sorry. I know I need to let him go 100%, I thought I was doing a good job of detaching , but I guess not.
I appreciate all of your ideas of how to get better and I know I will need to get in a better mind set, but I just felt like I needed to get these thoughts out of my head. It is nice to be able to reach out to people who get it. Thank you!

[UrsaMajor]

The initial shock does wear off but it takes a while - longer for some than for others. One pundit says to expect 1-2 months of grief and recovery for every year of the marriage. Others say that the timeline is all rubbish and is nothing more than stage watching. The key here is to progress at a rate than works for you. Not everyone can just turn around in the phone booth 3 times and come out as Superman or Wonder Woman.

The bottom line is that there will be days where it feels like it requires superhuman strength to get one foot in front of the other and there will be other days when it feels like we are on the fast track to healing - Both of these are normal.

Take care of your health, both mental and physical and that will give you a good start on the rest

[Nas]

I think it just takes time and a concerted effort to shift your thoughts away from him and his life. I can't say when I stopped doing this, but I know it didn't "just happen." I had to work at it because I was in a bad place and if I wasn't careful, I could've gotten consumed with how "good" his life was compared to mine.  I didn't have a therapist at the time, which would have been ideal, but I started to face the thoughts when they arose and work on reframing them and continually telling myself that "his great life" was nothing more than a story I was creating in my own mind because I didn't know. And even if his life took a terrible turn, it would do absolutely nothing to change my circumstances anyway. And I couldn't ever be free to open myself up to anyone (platonic or otherwise) or anything else while I was still consumed with wanting him to acknowledge all the things he'd done to me and comparing my life to his and wondering about whether he knew or cared how awful he was. I had to very strongly force myself at first to actively reframe those thoughts, and little by little, day by day, I stopped thinking about it all the time.

Now I don't think about him on most days at all. When I'm feeling very vulnerable or particularly tired, I have moments of "I seriously can't believe that all happened." But I truly, truly don't care if he regrets anything, I don't care if he misses me, I don't care if he thinks about me.  I just don't want him to do anything else (nasty, cruel or - worse - illegal) to cause me any more hardship  - beyond that, he doesn't matter.
You'll get there.  I'm not someone who really believes time heals all. I think we have to work at it until we don't have to work at it anymore, if that makes sense.

[forthetrees]

May be worth looking at this information on complicated grief: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/complicated-grief/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20360389

[Raphael]

Thank you all once again. I appreciate all of your thoughtful responses. I’ve got work to do, but you all gave me great advice and I will take it one day (some days one hour) at a time. I hope some day I will be able to help someone else just as you all have helped me.

[Reinventing]

Raphael,

I recognized every one of your points about the doubts, pain, and enormous change in our lives.

You won't always feel this way. It will get better.

Find what helps you and do more of that. Find what hurts or doesn't help and do less of that. As you heal, this will change. Some things I did for the first year or two and some things longer.

It is a rollercoaster so even as you are on the trajectory of healing, you will have up and down days.

With time, I was able to return to my normal level of happiness.

I started evaluating everything in my life on whether it helped me heal or not. I became laser focused on that. If it didn't help me heal, I didn't do it. If it did, I did more of that.

[Treasur]

I’ve had a few days to process all of this information and I think I just need to vent. I know you all understand how unfair this all is.  I question if he ever loved me at all. How could someone who you were with for so many years do this to his family?  I look at people around me who are smiling and doing life with their family and wonder if I will ever be truly happy again. Is it worth all the hard work that I know I need to do to just be ok. I feel like I am jealous of my friends whose families are together and are celebrating graduations, going on vacations and just being together. I know I am in victim mode and need to grow, but right now I am just trying to get through the day. I felt like I had gotten so much better since all of this happened three years ago, but now I am back to being  glad when I can go to bed at night because I made it through another day. When I wake up, I have that same sick feeling and know I have to chug through another day. When he first left, I thought maybe someday he would regret what he did, but now that he is starting a whole new family, it seems hopeless and he will never truly be sorry. I know I need to let him go 100%, I thought I was doing a good job of detaching , but I guess not.
I appreciate all of your ideas of how to get better and I know I will need to get in a better mind set, but I just felt like I needed to get these thoughts out of my head. It is nice to be able to reach out to people who get it. Thank you!

Vent away. We do get it. And I hope it is some small settling reassurance that there is unlikely to be one thing you are thinking or feeling right now that others here have not thought or felt.

Fwiw, try as hard as you can to separate out the reality of being a victim of someone else’s actions vs what you call victim mode. Why? Bc the first is a reality one needs to accept and the fallout effects are real. Bc they are different things. Bc the first requires a kind of inventory and prioritisation to focus on the active work of healing…bc how can you tend, heal and repair without identifying the damage?….the second is imho a kind of helpless whirling feeling which can keep us inadvertently more connected to what/who hurt us than we might need. Bc no one needs to add to their damage by blaming themselves or having self-contempt for the perfectly normal passage of being victimised by downgrading those challenges to being in ‘victim mode’. It’s true perhaps that others, including MLCers, find the reality of someone else having been a victim rather uncomfortable and can find it easier to blame the victim in a kind of ‘it’s not what they did, it’s how you’re reacting’ as the ‘problem’ - don’t do their work for them!

Lots of us here will recognise that strange mind hiccup where we long for a sorry or some kind of sign of a kind of universal justice that makes life feel more fair or balanced or predictable. We get it, it’s normal. With time, we usually each find our own way of shuffling that into a place that makes some kind of sense to us individually. There are some here for whom that karma - or even a sorry - did turn up further down the path, that’s true. But usually long past the point when it mattered in the way we once thought it would. So fwiw, my advice is to focus on trying to heal, recover and rebuild a different life that feels good enough to you regardless, acting on the assumption that both a real sorry and/or karmic justice won’t show up. On a very practical level, even if it does, truthfully the damage that has been caused and the way in which your life has been affected won’t change much either way with a sorry, will it?

So, you do you. Build from where you find yourself. Fight the (normal) impulse to make any part of your recovery dependent on the words or actions or feelings of anyone else, let alone the kind of human who could do what your h did. Be as kind as you can be towards yourself about why you find yourself here and the hard work involved in dragging yourself towards a better version of here. And vent away when you need to!

[Reinventing]

Fight the (normal) impulse to make any part of your recovery dependent on the words or actions or feelings of anyone else

Yes! I found a very small number of folks I could rely on for support (a couple of family members, therapist, a person at work, and members of a divorce support group).

My other pro-healing actions depended on me (and for exercise, the weather).

I felt like there was two parts of me--me in pain and then me as a manager of my healing. And I was a pretty protective manager of my healing because I wanted to be happy again.