Wisconsin

My friends...I hope you are all well in this new year. I am writing for ESH on something that happened a couple of weeks ago during the holidays. I needed some time/distance from it to be able to write about it in a coherent way, I think.

I was washing, drying, and putting away some dishes over the holidays. I left a cabinet door open, and when I bent down to put something away I hit my head fairly hard on the corner of the open upper cabinet door. It hurt, but it was not serious. I was not bleeding, did not get a bump, etc. And yet, I started to absolutely sob. SOB.

My gentleman friend was in the kitchen at the time, helping me dry and put away dishes. He was extremely kind and asked if I was OK, asked if I thought I should sit down. He very obviously thought I was so upset because I had hurt myself badly. I stood there sobbing, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I was so upset. I pulled myself together for the most part after a couple of minutes, and then went into the bathroom to take a break from the busy-ness of the holidays. Then I was awash in a memory--not one that had ever struck me as even remotely close to the worst thing that ever happened in my marriage to STBXAH. Not one that was so upsetting that I wrote about it here. But something similar happened with STBXAH (I was in the kitchen, putting away dishes, and hit my head on a cabinet), and he was in the room. And he was absolutely apoplectic with rage at me. Screaming at me for being stupid and not closing cabinet doors, screaming at me for crying after I hurt myself. I honestly had not thought about that moment in at least two years, but there it was. The whole thing went away. My gentleman friend asked me a couple of times throughout the day if my head was OK, and I replied that it was (because it was). I did not want to go into a long discourse about why I reacted the way I did, and stir up all that emotion again after I was able to calm down. He is aware of the nature of my marriage to STBXAH, and while I have shared with him one or two specific incidents, I have generally felt that it's not really necessary to prattle on and on about every single solitary thing that ever happened during that relationship. He knows STBXAH was abusive. He knows that I was co-dependently crazy in my reaction to the alcoholism and the abuse, and that the whole thing was enormously toxic on both sides.

I am almost a year and a half out of that marriage. I am doing so well. My kids are thriving, I have a loving man in my life, I have resurrected my job from a very unstable place last year, and STBXAH and I generally co-exist reasonably well where our son is concerned. So my reaction, and the reasons for my reaction, really took me by surprise.

How do you all deal with things like this? The gut punches that show up out of nowhere. Would I benefit from focusing more on a certain step, or a certain area, in my recovery?