Revelation in how to think about coping with divorcing exAH...
I thought about this last night, & it just seemed so...concise. Why didn't I begin thinking this way a LONG time ago?!
...when you remove the fact of your addict's addiction from the immediate situation as you cope with ending your relationship, it becomes apparent that your grief, stress, confusion, and back-and-forth desire to reconcile with them is just like any other break-up...
I think we can all safely say that no matter the stage in our lives, or the person with whom we were ending a relationship, the stages of grief, the want to just "forgive and forget", the temptation to call or text "I miss you", etc, etc, etc, were by and large the same.
Likely, every one of those moments was equally hard to handle-hell, in recalling some of my relationships before exAH, the break-ups were actually harder! (Mostly because there seemed to be so little reason that we couldn't work it out, as opposed to the cut and dry addict behaviors we've all experienced that no one should put up with...).
This has made it SO. MUCH. EASIER. to handle the day by day grieving. ExAH does still text or call on occasion to tell me he misses and loves me. I'm always fleetingly tempted to tell him the same thing.
...BUT-in viewing our relationship as just another one involving two people who, in the end, were not meant for each other, it's been much, much more manageable for me to ignore his messages...
Because that's it, in a nutshell, isn't it? We are two people who are not meant for each other, and moving on must become a priority sometime, so why not now, rather than later?