Opus2

Hi everyone, been gone from the forum a while - but not forgotten all of you. Thanks to your thoughts and advice I decided I needed to let my divorce happen and let go, and I moved all my stuff out into my apartment this weekend. My daughter was over couple nights ago and she called it 'our house' meaning her and me, and I got very teary and knew it was going to be ok. So thank you.

These are strange days.. remember I was trying to figure out why I am an ACOA even though my parents were not drinkers? Learned some very intersting things .. apparently my grandmother (father's side) has a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized when my dad was young. (What 'nervous breakdown' meant in those days I have no idea .. possibly constant anxiety disorder, which makes a lot of things clearer ...) Even stranger is that my dad told me this. This is maybe the second time in my life he has mentioned anything about his chilldhood. He said his mother was 'sick' all the time when he was a kid and he lived in constant fear that she would be taken away or die, and it made him extremely controlling as he got older.

Then I found out from my MIL (who likes me more than my wife does - in fact I am realizing she always did), that she thinks my wife suffers from narccissitic personality disorder, and realizes that many of the problems in our relationship were my wife's doing, not mine. This is unreal .. you'd have to know their relatioship to understand but they are very very close and supportive, and this is the last thing I would have expected my MIL to say.

Finally my mom who has been very supportive, told me that my dad was verbally and emotionally abusive to her from the time I was a baby -- and worse than I realized. She covered it up for most of her marriage (and by default most of my life), and said she went through much of her life in sort of a daze because she felt there was nothing she could do about it.

As I've been recognizing all these things I told my therapist that I'm not the one who needs therapy. She laughed. In fact I've had some of my best days in memory during the last month -- I feel more empowered and assertive, and open to life and my faults. But part of me is clamming up again, I can just tell. I'm trying to be 'normal' but in my gut I'm just not ready. On the one hand I'm relived and excited, because I'm finally separating a lot of the emotional trash that I've swallowed from all of these people, from the real me. This is like a weight I never knew existed. Then again, I still have a lot of fears and a lot of muddle, particularly around women. In fact as I look back I realize I've almost never dated a girl or woman that I really liked and was attracted to. I've just been so scared, and I didn't recognize that feeling ... I rationalized it away. But there it is. I hate those feelings, I want to be able to open up and feel initimate and physical and strong. But they are not going to go away after 30 years, so easily. It makes me so sad and so angry to be this way -- I know I am a good loving person but my emotions and defenses are so strong ...

I'm not a religious person, I know some of you are, and if I said a prayer it would be to find a path that would lead me back to myself. I think you guys are part of that path and if I get away for a while, I hope and pray for the strength to come back and not give up.

Love, Opus

SaTiT

strange indeed.
I got done talking to my GF. We're seperated...again.
it'll been a bit rough becuase i had to move back to my parents.
I didn't get any surport so whatever. it felt like anohter dagger
jammed into me. It's not the first time my parent told me to stay
away from her. And my mother really, really let me have it.
but that was last week.

i just been keeping to myself for the most part.
I decide to visit my gf and she made me feel like , i was the one in the wrong.
She acts as if she's using again. She's hiding something but I'm not stupid..
I know she flirts with guys on the net, and somewhere alone the line she
crossed the line and off into fantacy world she gose. I lived with her
for over a decade. i know the real deal. I thought she would grow out of
it or was smart enough. I thought wrong..she just crazy.

I just had to look her in the eyes to see if something was still there.
She tells me, it's that time of the month or she had just taken medications
,but it's always that time of the month and she's always on medication
if we really needed to have a heart to heart talk. and off we going into
a decusions about how wacked out I am

I'm more bewilder than hurt...Anyway so I'm writing this to get it
out of my system. i can't belive that after all these years and all
the living hell she put us through and now that she's sober , she can
simply just blow me off like that.
I wasn't the one out on a run dystroying our lives...so wtf???
I should have known better when she had sex with one of my sponsee.
But i guess that's what makes me sick !

I hope i have the will power to say "NO" that next time the sheit hits
the fan, when she calls me.

I've been cutting trees, vines, braches. it's symbalic...I'm cutting ties.

I'm planing on cleaning the pool again tommorrow. maybe I'll go
swiming in it someday , again.

there a tool shade that needs cleaning with some of my tools in it,
that i havn't used in a while. mmm...maybe that's symbalic too.

maybe i need a piece of paper saying deviorce too.
we been togther over a decade, that pretty much makes her my wife.

Thanks for sharing..i hope you make it.
this way it'll give me hope..becuase i not too hopeful at th moment.

GingerM

Wow Opus, that's a lot of skeletons to be coming out of a closet all at once. Sounds like a B-rate horror movie

I hope you can integrate all this new knowledge and help it frame your issues in a light that makes things easier for you. At least you were given positive feedback that you weren't imagining all your symptoms.

I wish you peace.

Opus2

Thanks Ginger ... I've got skeletons and Satit's hacking up the woods, we should make a movie. lol Satit I think you may have an idea with the paper saying divorce .. even if you dont show it to your GF, maybe putting down on paper that your relationship has ended will be therapuetic for you. Symbols are important.

I broke down at my therapist yesterday .. haven't cried that much in a long time. It's not what she said to me but how she said it .. I told her while I was crying that I didn;t want to be broken but somehow I am. I've felt like people were judging me all my life, like I'm defective and a charity case and they were having pity on me, and I can't be who I really am. I cried so hard. If it was that easy then I've been carrying these huge emotions around like it's nothing, and I can't do it anymore. I have to let everything out.

GingerM

I would like to reframe something you said: you said you felt like you were broken.

Have you considered that you are not broken, but that you were never taught the skills you would need in life? Instead, you were taught skills you needed for survival in a situation which does not occur outside the home very often.

This is how I looked at it (so I could let go of the feelings of fault, guilt and self-loathing):

When I left home, I had a tool box. It had a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver in it. Then I went into the real world, and needed to unscrew a nut from a bolt. Only all I had was the hammer and screwdriver. I spent a lot of energy and frustration on it, but eventually I managed to mangle my way through undoing the nut from the bolt.

Then I started therapy. In therapy, I got a crescent wrench. And a phillips head screwdriver. And a drill. And a level. And a saw. And a whole bunch of other tools. Now I have a really big tool box, and most of the situations I encounter in my life can be dealt with using one of the many new tools I have. Not all, but most. And for those I can't solve with my existing tools, I am learning how to accept that some things are just so broken they can't be fixed and aren't worth the effort. I am also still acquiring new tools.

You are not broken. You have a limited set of tools, and need to pick up some new ones. Lacking tools does not make you broken - it liberates you to go on a journey to see how many new tools you can find.

Just a different way of looking at the same thing.

Opus2

Thank you Ginger .. you're right about not having enough tools. I get it mentally... it's just that the 'broken' analogy seems to fit because of the feelings that come up when I'm in certain situations. You know, when you need to hang in and finish something (at work, in the house, etc) and every muscle in your gut and all the cells in your brain keep saying "Nahhhhhh its not worth it," and you've gone through this same thing 100 times and you just *know* you're going to give up again, it doesn't feel like any tool in the world would help at all. Or when you're so nervous around the opposite sex and you keep imagining how great it would be to just let go and enjoy the feelings, and then automatically the next thought is about how vulnerable you are and how you need to just book it and run, it doesn't seem like any tool is going to help me. Maybe a ball and chain to keep me from running :-)

But obviously I'm here for help. I'm in counseling with a really good therapist. We're not at the 'tool' stage yet -- I understand it, it's just hard to be patient. I'm reading books .. if you have any suggestions, links or anything with anti-fear tools or 'anti-analyzing-the-future' tools I can start to learn about, I think it would really help.

Thanks, O2

GingerM

This may or may not give you any new tools, but at the very least, it can help with changing perspective on how we frame things (remove the space to make the link work)

http://www.buddhanet.net/4noble.htm

Start with the first noble truth and really try to grasp what is being said. This isn't a tool, more a way of understanding that what you're running from you may never be able to get away from and therefore accepting it and working with it instead of fighting it can change your life.

Just FYI, I am neither Buddhist nor Christian, I just happened to find this a new a different take on life than our Western culture seems to give, and it helped me.