What are you working on right now in your recovery?
Me? Separating the past from the present. Teaching myself to interrupt my knee-jerk reactions to things that happen (reactions left over from my marriage to an A) and seeing things that happen for what they are in this new context -- not the old one.
Examples?
Middle Child has a temper. AXH could never calmly handle that but always tried to out-tantrum her. So I have this knee-jerk reaction that whenever Middle Child has a tantrum, I go into Defend-Her Mode. I caught myself literally backing up toward her and facing my New Man as if I would have to defend her against him. And then I realized -- wait, he's an adult who's actually acting like one; I don't need to defend her against him.
Or --
New Man borrowed money from me (yeah it was probably a codie thing to offer, but I'm working on it, I'm not perfect, OK?) and said "I will pay it back when I get back to town on the 18th." Then I talked to him today and his screwball employer had decided to change the schedule for paying their workers from weekly to biweekly -- and he won't get paid the Friday before the 18th. So he was asking if it was OK if he paid me back the following Friday, when he gets paid for two weeks.
And I Totally. Freaked. Out. Shut down emotionally. Because here's what was happening in my mind: JUST LIKE AXH, New Man was lying to me and changing his story as it was convenient to him. He's ripping me off. He's probably lying about the whole "changed pay schedule" thing. He's never going to pay me back. He's a jerk. He's a loser ******* I should never have allowed back in my life... HEY! Where did that "back" come from? Ha! I think we have us a clue: I wasn't thinking of New Man -- I was interpreting his words as if they had come out of the mouth of AXH!
So that's what I'm working on. Contextualizing what happens to me so that I know that I react appropriately, to what is happening right now, and not extrapolating intentions from the behavior of perfectly reasonable people based on what AXH's behavior would have meant, had it been HIM behaving that way...