Tigger, you have absolutely nothing to apologise for!! What you're feeling is completely natural! I'm reading M Scott Peck's 'The Road Less Travelled' (well, re reading it. I read it a few years ago when I was still with XAH and didn't 'get' it). I read some of it last night that made me think of you:
The Healthiness of Depression
...the feeling associated with giving up something loved - or at least something that is part of ourselves and familiar - is depression. Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon....
...they frequently desire only relief of the symptoms of their depression "so that things can be the way they used to be". They do not know that things cannot be the "way they used to be". But the unconscious knows. It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that "the way things used to be" is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced. As likely as not the patient will report "I have no idea why I'm depressed" or will ascribe depression to irrelevant factors. Since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognise that the "old self" and "the way things used to be" are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signalling that major change is required...
This also struck a chord with me. I was with XAH for 18 years and for much of that time struggled with depression. I had no idea why! Guess I'm a real slow learner. Stubborn to change. Not willing to accept. But I'm learning now and my depression is lifting! A lot of me 'died' at the end of my marriage. But that isn't a bad thing. Something needed to die for me to be reborn. I'm rediscovering myself and creating the person I always wanted to be. I'm trying to change my patterns of thought and behaviour that hurt me. A few pages on, M Scott Peck says "this lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births...It is also clear that the farther one travels on the journey of life, the more births one will experience, and therefore the more deaths - the more joy and the more pain."
Sweetie you are in the pain part of the process right now but you
will get to the joy. Follow the 12 steps. Accept your depression. Accept your life is changing. Have faith that you can get through this. Keep doing all the right things. You will get to the other side, don't ever doubt it.
