Recovery Nation

My partner has left me today. I can't say much more, it would be too long for now. For now, I need support. Hugs. Kisses. Smilies. Love.

To sum it up : I stood up for myself, and his reaction was to leave and break up our relationship.

As I told Coach Mel, I believe that the reasons for his leaving are :
- trying to shellshock me into becoming meek again but I don't want to do that.
- he was happy with the relationship the way it was, as long as I didn't stand up for myself. As long as he could eat his cake, and have it to. Now that I want a piece of the cake, he goes.

Please, for now, don't judge him. I don't judge him. Don't judge me. Don't judge the situation.
Just please, please hold my hand. I need my hand held.

I'll be writing on this thread. Sometimes at night. Sometimes when I wake up early in the morning. I'll write here anytime I feel pain.

I'll write my positive thoughts. I'm trying to think positive thoughts.

Or, if not positive, healthy thoughts.

I wanted to reply the other posts on the threads, but I can't right now. I'm too stunned and shell-shocked. So for now, I'll just post here. And later, I'll come back to the issues at hand.

In the meantime, I'll come here to talk to you.

How today went.

- I am totally stunned, numb
- I have had intense feelings of : sadness, love and grief : only healthy, normal feelings, that I am well equipped to handle, that don't scare me, that I'm not afraid of, that I actually let myself feel, that I don't avoid, that I know are necessary, that I almost appreciate feeling. I am not out of balance when I feel these feelings.
- I have had slight, occasional traces of huge anxiety / emotional pain (the void, the gap, the dark pit of despair). These are linked to the addict part of me that comes and tells me unhealthy things ; in fact, it doesn't have things to say, because perhaps my healthy part won't let it. It comes and manifests itself in the form of : emotions.

These glimpses of terrifying anxiety are linked to triggers, some of them so slight that I can't even record them.
These feelings are : not healthy, not normal, and they scare me, and it is not safe for me to feel them.

So what do I do ?
Coach Mel suggested I could separate my feelings into two categories : healthy / unhealthy feelings.

I have two boxes on my bed. One of them for "healthy feelings". The other for unhealthy feelings.

Each time I get a feeling, I either :
- let myself feel it completely if it is safe : love, sadness, grief, calm, hope, "numbness"
- if it isn't safe (there's actually only one feeling that is not safe : it's the overwhelming anxiety, the fear, the despair, the void), I look at it and say : is there any reason for you to be there ? I say : is there anything to fear ? Is there really anything to be anxious about ?

Today, I have managed to say : NO, each time. Nothing to be fearful / anxious about.
These aren't thoughts, they are just emotions. Almost physiological reactions, with no basis in reality other than trauma.

If I put these emotions into thoughts / words it's better. Because there are actually no words. My brain won't let these emotions dictate any irrational thoughts. I only have rational thoughts (today, 95% of my thoughts were rational ; the rest were fugitive thoughts that didn't resist further examination).

So, each time I get a glimpse of that overwhelming emotion, I ask myself : is there anything to be anxious about ? No. So what is it then ? Sometimes, it's linked to a trigger. Other times, it's linked to an underlying emotion that needs to get out : usually, sadness. So I say : ok, well, then : let it all out. And I let myself be sad. And it feels good. Cathartic.

Unhealthy feelings :
I have felt several surges of anxiety. Upon closer examination, these surges seemed linked to a trace feeling (a feeling that preexisted this relationship) : I feel the pain of all the break ups in my life ; all the unresolved emotion (I was a serial love addict : from the age of 17 to today - 34 -, I went from relationship to relationship, almost using each new relationship to avoid the pain I felt from the previous relationship).

It's 4 in the morning here. I just felt a lot of anxiety. And now I feel a little surge of anger. I called him names in my head. I stopped myself. This is not something that is aligned with my values.
And I especially don't want to have these words inside my mind.

Healthy feelings :

There are quite a lot of them already in my healthy feelings box (I write them down on pieces of paper, and if there are no thoughts to be written down, just feelings, I draw a little smiley).

1. So there are a few hearts and smilies. This is the love I feel for my partner, for the healthy man I love. I let him go with love. I said "good bye my love", many many times today (to an imaginary him that was flying away ; I kissed my hand, blowed on my hand, and let him go towards the sky). It felt good to say good bye in a loving manner. Today I have not felt any hate for him, no resentment. Just love or sadness. Loving sadness. That is wonderful. I am blessed.

2. There are a few crying smilies. These are my tears for the healthy part of our past relationship, and for the potential this relationship had. This is grief.

If I look in the box and pick a feeling up, I can feel the pain I felt when I wrote it. As long as it is a healthy feeling, I don't mind.

3. On this piece of paper, I have written : good bye my jewel. I don't regret anything. I love you. Good bye. Take care. Be happy. These are all heartfelt feelings, that come from deep inside of me. I love him and I want him to be happy. It feels good to pick these feelings up. These feelings are nice, warm, sad, beautiful.

4. On this other piece of paper, I have written : it's your choice, your responsibility. This is not a healthy feeling, but a healthy thought.

Hang in there. It sounds like you are investing in letting yourself feel what you are feeling and breaking things down into healthy and unhealthy feelings sounds like a very healthy thing to do!

Don't forget to breathe.

All of this is so hard and we have no control over what anyone does. We can only control ourselves and make choices about what we do and how we respond to the next challenge life hands us.

Hugs and happy thoughts coming your way!
wamh

Unhealthy feelings I normally feel during a break up :

- why, why, why ?
- poor, poor me !
- I'll never survive
- what can I do to fix it ?
- what did I do, what should I have done ?
- I love you, I love you ! I can't live without you (fake, addict love)
- I need a man !
- Where can I find a man ? Anyone will do.
- I am unworthy
- I am unlovable
- I am unloved
- I hate him
- what a @"#!!
- does he realize he's losing a great girl ?
- he's so lame, he'll never find anyone like me again ! (this one is one of my favourites, I hadn't reflected on how unhealthy this one was)
- I hope he suffers a thousand deaths / or the opposite, very unhealthy thought : I hope he doesn't suffer too much (I felt pain and guilt when people left ME, I felt as though I was abandoning them).
- I hope he gets jealous when I have a new boyfriend
- I hope he doesn't get a new girlfriend
- I hope he'll regret me forever

I haven't had those (very unhealthy) feelings. I looked back on my attitude before he left and there's nothing I regret, nothing I'd want to change. I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I'm not. Kurt Cobain. Well, I'd rather be left for who I am, than tolerated as companion, as long as I'm not myself.

I'm happy that I don't react the way I used to. I hope I can actually go through this entire experience avoiding these feelings. But it probably isn't going to happen. Well, if I get those feelings, I'll come and edit this post. I'll try to find the same smile on my face I have now, when writing this. Good adult smile, smiling at a little girl's reaction.

Thank you Wamh for your hugs and happy thoughts.

Yes, the very process of breaking things down makes things easier to digest (it all seems less huge).



Excellent advice. I'm a little scared of breathing, I think my brain is doing all the work today, thinking, thinking, feeling, and I'm not breathing enough.



So true. I am finally learning my lesson. The hard way. But at least, I'm learning !

I'm sorry for the unexpected loss of your relationship, overtherainbow. Be good to yourself.

~~ Hugs and hand holding ~~

It's the middle of the night here. I had almost fallen asleep but hadn't really. Half asleep. Loops in my head. Not thoughts, half thoughts, half asleep. And then this pit in the stomach feeling. feeling sick. The fact that it's nighttime makes it worse. I feel I have been caught off-guard. When I am awake, I can guard my thoughts. When I'm asleep, my thoughts seem to have an autonomous life.
I don't remember what those thoughts were that gave me such a horrendous sickening feeling in the stomach. This has nothing to do with his SA. All to do with a deep-seated fear. Probably a fear from my childhood. Still feel sick to my stomach but this feeling has no reality, no basis on rational thought. What is it ?
This is huge anxiety. What is it linked to ?
I can't get to the associated thought.

I don't feel this anxiety masks another feeling. No sadness there. I don't want to feel sadness. Sadness is a beautiful, elevated feeling. So I can't replace this feeling with another feeling.
So perhaps I should replace the associated thought with another thought. And since there is no associated thought, it doesn't matter. I can still replace this thought with a comforting thought.

So : what comforting / healthy thoughts did I have today ?
- the first that came to my mind as I found myself stuck with this sick feeling was : you either want a healthy relationship, or nothing at all. Apparently he seems to want an unhealthy relationship, or nothing at all. There's an incompatibility there. This was reassuring. This was empowering.
- other comforting thoughts - that were still very embryonic yesterday : the idea of freedom. The promise of freedom. That was an exhilarating thought.
- for now, the SA issues haven't caught up with me. I am thankful for that. I feel he has hurt me so much by sleeping with other women when we were together that I don't care about what he does when we're not. This is fortunate because I could otherwise be feeling very jealous or anxious at the idea that on the very same day my partner leaves me he has sex with someone else. Perhaps I'm lying to myself, but I don't think I am. I feel quite ok with him having sex on the very same day, this doesn't rob me of anything, it doesn't "take" anything from me.
-actually, none of the things he did, or does, can take anything from me. I feel whole.

There's a baby crying in the night. I think the night is one of my weaknesses. Coach Mel asked me to identify my weaknesses. This is one of them. Falling half asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, feeling sick, hearing a baby cry. Anxiety.

Ok, positive, positive thoughts. Nurturing thoughts. Back to the thoughts I had today (not feelings, healthy thoughts).
One of them was :
1. I feel I'm going to be ok either way, whether he leaves me for good, whether he comes back.
2. I don't feel abandoned, unlovable, unworthy of love. I don't think he doesn't love me. I believe he loves me as best he can. I believe he doesn't love himself. He hasn't abandoned me, he has abandoned himself. And I don't want to abandon myself.
3. I am out of the loop. If he wants out of the loop, he knows where to find me.
4. I am totally aligned with my values.

I can still hear the baby crying. This makes me very anxious. The silence of the night makes me anxious. The fact that it is nighttime is making me anxious. The fact that I am awake and not asleep makes me anxious.

But this has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

What is the issue at hand ?
My partner has left me.
This simple idea scares me less than that baby's cries.

I think my problem is inside of me, not inside my partner or my relationship with my partner.
So whether he comes or goes, doesn't change anything really.
I must work on myself.

That was another comforting thought I had : i am going to work on my lessons, do the work, make progress.

I also thought : it doesn't necessarily have to be hard, I mustn't tell myself : these are going to be tough months to come. There's no reason for them to be harder than the past 8 months.

I remember the other day I was describing how I was withdrawing emotionally from my partner when he was available. And how hard it was for addict me to withdraw. But I did it.

So, I now need to withdraw from him while he's unavailable (the greatest level of unavailability).

So : how did I manage that ? I just realized I needed to go about my day / my night.

I wish that baby would stop crying. Ok. I think I understand what's going on. I think it's my PTSD. I think I'm hypervigilant. That's why I cringe each time the baby cries.

I met a goal I had set for myself : if I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm not allowed to switch on my phone or check my email. So that's for the addict me.

This quote will help me feel better : we are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral. We have already climbed many steps. Herman Hesse.

Although it may seem as though I've been there before; with this pit in the stomach feeling. The anxiety. The PTSD. This is NOT two months ago. It is NOT four months ago. It is July, 2nd 2012. I have grown a lot since the last time I felt that anxiety (when we were on a break last January). Things are different now.

The baby has stopped crying. The considerate father has come and checked on him. The baby is asleep.

I can go to sleep now.

Thanks a lot, Frost. I appreciate your kind words and validation.
Indeed, it is unexpected. And indeed, it is a loss.
I think the unexpected is perhaps the #1 here. I feel shocked.
I don't want this to retraumatize me.
So I keep telling myself I'm not in the same place I was 8 months ago (Dday#1) ; or six months ago (our break) ; or even just two months ago (Dday#2).
I won't let this retraumatize me.
I will feel it, I will go through it, I will work through it, but I won't let myself collapse emotionally. This is not an option !

Thanks Frost, take care.

A couple of hours later
Awake.
The loop has started again.
So I decided to come here and write.
Unfortunately I had to deal with a trigger,
and then I had a partial relapse.
The trigger : my external keyboard crashed. I could see it was a trigger. It filled me with anxiety because this (writing on this thread here) is one of the highlights of my action plan.
And so that very small trigger (technical difficulties that cause a slight imbalance and could become a pretext for me to delude myself into believing I actually need his help to solve this problem...) was enough to make me manipulate myself into thinking I could break the rules.
One rule I had was : don't open your email inbox after midnight. This is a rule destined to prevent me from resorting to / or even looking for immediate emotional gratification.
I opened it. I deluded myself into thinking that the keyboard crashing gave me "authorization" to break my rules.

Thankfully I had a nice email by a friend of mine who was writing : "ok, I hope this doesn't end like this. Anyway, you sound grounded."

But, what if I hadn't gotten an email ? My heart would have sunk a little and then what ? This is not reasonable.

What I did was unproductive ; risky ; and it felt almost as though I was testing myself... almost experimental (or is this a rationalization, because I can't stand the idea that I was just plain irrational and dominated by my impulses ?).

Anyway, it was not a good idea. Especially since my keyboard started working again very soon afterwards...


When I look for comfort from my email inbox, I try to deal with emotional balance with an outside source. And that's not ok. Outside sources are so unpredictable.
I need to find my balance inside.

I called my partner yesterday morning (I slipped). This showed me how powerfully addicted to him I was - and thanks to Coach Mel's guidance I realized I had to deal with my own addiction to the relationship in order to heal. I will do just that.

I believe what happened with my partner is that he tried to shock me into becoming meek again - which I have. I am horrified at how well he knows me : he knew it would work. He said : I knew you'd call me. Also I believe that he knew exactly when to do it (when I was overwhelmed ; actually I'm overwhelmed all the time ; but he did it at a moment in time when I was growing thanks to the healing workshop ; and yet destabilized by various problems in the relationship - verbal abuse and outside trigger of a job implying a lot of international travel).

I also believe that part of him was honestly overwhelmed.

So he manipulated me ; and I in turn manipulated him, when out of anxiety I phoned him to make him not leave me.

I don't know how conscious he is of all this.
I know I wasn't conscious of my own manipulations before I started to work on myself here.

I'm not a manipulative character. But I resort to manipulation in certain situations.
This is a new, powerful realization for me.

Of course, this isn't aligned with my values AT ALL, so I will strive to examine myself and my motives for action all the time. And when I detect any form, even subtle, of manipulation, to rid my character of that.

I am still recovering from the shock of his departure ; and above all, of my own reaction to his departure (extreme anxiety, inability to refrain from calling him after just one night).

I don't hate him. I think he's largely unconscious of what he's doing.
But I don't want this life. So I'm going to strive and heal. I'll post my progress here.

Yesterday, I felt shame around my behavior (phoning him to manipulate him into coming back ; as a response to his manipulation). I'm trying to change and the unhealthy part of him doesn't like that. And my unhealthy part is still very much alive and always answers to him. I call this : entering the loop and I have done nothing else these past 8 months.

But today, I don't feel shame, at all. I'm doing my best to heal, to recover, to learn, there's absolutely nothing to feel shame about. I know myself a little better, I'm learning to face myself a little more : no shame, just : progress.

I have a new idea now, that could help me cure myself from love addiction to my partner : a therapeutic break (and I believe he would be in a safer environment himself, to cure himself of his addiction to sex, to his parents, and to me).

This was actually what I wanted for us last time (we were on a break for two months) but he reacted very badly to the break (refused to see it as an opportunity to recover : so he refused to speak to me, and I realize now that I reacted to that by being far too obsessed with him and his recovery !).

If I succeed in implementing this break with his participation, I think we could both make the progress we need to make to preserve the healthy part of the relationship from the vicissitudes of our co-addiction ; and his addiction.

I realize that upon writing this I'm still very much focusing on : us, rather than on me.

But I know that a therapeutic break is just what I need to regain my balance ; and then focus on me, me, me. regain my balance, make progress, get further insights into my behavior, put them into practise and further my healing...

I'm sorry for the unexpected loss of your relationship overtherainbow.

Journal away here if you need to!

_________________

"What day is it,?" asked Pooh.
"It's today," squeaked Piglet.
"My favorite day," said Pooh.

Hi Autumnrose,

Thanks for your message. Unfortunately I have slipped and called him to make him not leave me...
so I'm not out of the relationship.

That made me realize (with Coach Mel's help) how addicted to him I was.
He manipulated me and it worked.

I'm thinking of a therapeutic break with him to cure me of my addiction to him while he does (or doesn't) do the recovery work.

I try not to beat myself up over this. But I actually don't manage. I feel very misaligned. This was a huge violation of my boundaries (by him and by myself, violating my own boundaries)...

I feel I am suffering from this sudden emotional withdrawal...
And this despite the fact that we "reconciled".
Perhaps it's just because I feel so misaligned.
Or both.
Anyway, it's hard. I need to get back to work. !!!

Hang in there overtherainbow.

Hope you don't mind a song. Reading your posts reminded me of this youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlXISulA ... plpp_video
Poem by Hafiz.

_________________

"What day is it,?" asked Pooh.
"It's today," squeaked Piglet.
"My favorite day," said Pooh.