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What do you do when the euphoria of being free subsides & the reality sets in?



What do you do when the euphoria of being free subsides & the reality sets in?

Old 11-09-2014, 08:09 AM
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What do you do when the euphoria of being free subsides & the reality sets in?

Hello all,

I was hoping to get some advice/support from the members who have made it through to the other side. I separated from my XAH in May with the decision to divorce made in late July. He signed the uncontested papers last week and it should all be final by early December.

Initially I was so relieved to be away from the pain and the drama. The cheating, the lying, the verbal abuse - it had become intolerable and while the pain of actually conducting the separation was excruciating, on some level I knew I would be better off on the other side.

And for a few months I have felt that way - relieved to not have to engage that way anymore, welcoming the peace and quiet at home, relishing the freedom to do what I want to do without having to jutify it/defend it or feel bad/guilty about it.

However, now I find myself extraordinarily sad. The apartment feels empty and lonely. The things that I use to distract myself feel trivial. I remember when he actually cared about me and I struggle with why I threw that away.

Less that 3 weeks after I told him I wanted to proceed to divorce, he had already introduced his affair partner to his mother. I know in my brain that is so messed up in terms of what it says about how little he actually cared about me, but somehow I still keep thinking about the times before that.

To make matters worse, the man who really broke my heart before my husband came back into my life after 7 years - saying things like he had lived in regret for forever over breaking up with me, that he got depressed when I got married, for years he imagined us married with our own family, he didn't want to move away from me, etc etc. Then he made a date to see me and broke it 3 days before hand b/c of a new relationship he had started. I asked him not to contact me but he will periodically send me emails about funny things we shared in common and then throw in a reference to what a good lover/kisser/athlete I was and how he wants to talk on the phone, then the next day when I respond with times he can reach me, he blows me off with a vague we'll connect soon.

I feel doubly rejected and my head can't let go that both of them saw something in me that they didn't like/couldn't deal with and preferred other women to me as when they had the choice they picked the other.

My family and friends all say both were trouble (for different reasons) and intellectually I can see that sometimes but I feel so empty and sad and I just can't stop crying as I feel like I lost something so very precious that I had (the marriage) and then just months later lost something that had been precious in the past which seemed to have the potential to re-ignite again (the ex-boyfriend). Yet neither of them sees me/it has having been precious or they still would want to be in the picture.

I just didn't expect that the euphoria/pride in breaking free from the marriage would then turn into these feelings of sorrow, remorse and regret. And even worse the feeling that both are just as happy if not happier without me which validates the feeling that I wasn't a good part of either equation to start.

For those of you who have been through all this, have you felt this pull backwards? And if so, how did you get back on track? I can't even imagine being able to love anyone again as the pain from both of these experiences is just so searing. And yet for them, it is just so effortless to love someone else which makes it feel even worse.

Thanks for listening.
Sally
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Old 11-09-2014, 08:35 AM
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You didn't throw it away, your exah did. Block that guy from the past. You deserve better. I am so sorry you're hurting. Hopefully you'll feel better soon. xoxoxo
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Old 11-09-2014, 08:37 AM
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Sorry you are feeling depressed. One thing that I did after leaving was to put a moratorium on dating/relationships. No old flames, no new flings. I was the type of person who used relationships to fill the emptiness inside me and I knew that was a pattern I wanted to break.
I have filled my time with Alanon service work, writing a novel, spending time with my sons, meditation, exercise and working extra jobs. Meeting true friends in Alanon has fulfilled my need for relationships for the time being and I rarely have the time or inclination to be lonely.
Some of that is the result of breaking my old pattern, but mostly it is because I have reframed my view of "alone time" as being something to be valued and savored because I am busy and fulfilled in so many other ways.
Hugs Sally.
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Old 11-09-2014, 08:52 AM
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mkay. So your entire database is:

1. A nasty drunk.

and

2. A olde tymes nutcase.

I vote you pull over, park the car, get yourself cleaned up and your stuff together (no one needed around for ANY of that, if fact it goes best alone, or with Alanon, groups, etc., focused on that . . .) and THEN see what is out there.

for some fun maybe take a look at this.

Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating - YouTube

When you get good with you . . . you will be good. Get going on that.

Enough of this drunks and nutcases, huh?
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Old 11-09-2014, 09:01 AM
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Neither of them treated you well, right? So they have moved on to other women to treat badly. I'd call that a blessing.

Take some time away from men and figure out exactly what you will tolerate in a relationship. Then don't settle for less, and take your time getting to know people or getting involved with them. I'll bet in both these relationships you had red flags very early on. That's when to solve the problems or get out.

*edit to say, that may sound a little preachy...but ask me how I know these things? I've spent too much time thinking "what did I do wrong?"
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Old 11-09-2014, 09:07 AM
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Well, this is a little crazy but....maybe you should get a pet? Crazy, but ours has added so much life to the house. And start on some things you've always wanted to do. And go to Alanon and/or therapy.

I know you feel lonely and like you wish you had settled but you deserve so much more than these self-centered guys. IMHO this is a temporary feeling.
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Old 11-09-2014, 09:11 AM
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You've hit the wall. I know it well. I hit it about 3 months after I served my STBXAH, and re hit it every few weeks. No biggy. It's just a wall. Walls can be gotten over or gone around.

For me, my "wall" is the harsh realization that I can't blame all of my troubles on my STBXAH. Try as I might. His alcoholism gave me a great excuse to lay all of my faults, particularly financial, on his doorstep. Now my life, my choices are my own. Gulp!

You're "wall" may be different. It sounds like you may need to think about the role that relationships play in your life, and how you choose your partners. Your picker may be a bit off, and may need to be adjusted. That's a fairly common problem on these boards.

For both of us the solution, I think, comes down to diligently working our own recovery. Learning to value ourselves enough to want to get through this. It's a process, just like what the A needs to go through, requiring introspection and dedication.

The walls that we hit aren't necessarily bad things when you look at it in that light. We feel pain because something needs to change. Something needs to be tweaked, or fixed, or maybe thrown out entirely. Tears aren't always bad. Though sometimes I wish I could bottle them and sell them for profit. That would certainly solve my problems.

Good luck moving through this.
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Old 11-09-2014, 09:19 AM
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Thanks so much SR Friends. I really needed to hear this. I think you all are very wise.

My take-away is to try to focus on the immediate needs I have to take care of myself and to try very hard to banish the destructive thoughts related to these men. It helps to hear the outside perspectives to remind me of this as I think many if not all of us on this Forum can relate to how our brains can lead us to very dark places....

I was also just reading the thread that SEEK started about what people are doing for themselves. What struck me was how other members have made it through to finding joy from the simple things in life like gardening, cleaning the house, getting a breakfast sandwich or an arugula salad. I wonder if many of us have gotten so used to the high drama and chaos that we've forgotten the art of appreciating the simple pleasures.

Thank you - the encouragement from all of you is giving me the boost I need to dry my tears this morning and put just 1 step in front of another right now.

The idea of a relationship moratorium is a good one - I think I will do that and just cut out the xBF and the haunting thoughts from the XAH.

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Old 11-09-2014, 09:45 AM
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I left my husband of 20 years suddenly when his abuse and alcoholism became so outrageous that I could not stay and endure the trauma anymore. Our marriage had been intense - intensely good and intensely bad. He had a wicked funny sense of humor and could make me laugh and was a brilliant thinker and fascinating to talk to. He captivated me, yet I let him devastate me and my sense of self. Perhaps that is why I say "captivated". It has been two and a half years now since I left and subsequently divorced, and I understand exactly what you are writing about.

For me, there is grief to this, and I have gone through the stages of grieving, back and forth through some of them. You might read about Elizabeth Kubler Ross' writings on the stages of grief about death, because losing a life partner is a death of sorts. The important thing to know here is that these are stages, not life sentences, and you will, in time, pass through the stages to a better happier place on your own, for yourself.

You appear to be viewing yourself through the lense of your former partners more through your own eyes. You feel unloveable because they didn't love you, not because of your own self worth or lack of it. If they left you, you must have been insufficient. This is where the opportunity comes, in my eyes.

We have lived in certain ways, and have beliefs about ourselves that come from how we have lived, and we have not necessarily questioned those beliefs. Our lives become run-on sentences where we repeat and repeat what we have done before, with different players. This is a chance to insert a semi-colon into that life story, or perhaps even a period signifying the end of a pattern, the end of an era.

It takes a lot of work, a lot of introspection and courage to look at what you believe about yourself and why you believe it. For me, it involved looking at why I, now in my 60's, have chosen men like my husband - brilliant, commanding, dominant, narcissistic - throughout my life even though I had been a successful, independent and powerful business woman in my own right. I found an alcoholic abusive father in my history, also a brilliant executive, who as a child, I literally thought of as "Good Dad/Bad Dad" depending on which Dad I saw walking down the path home after work each night. Some nights were good; some nights mean furniture upended, and capture at the dining room table in a corner of the room with no escape for hours of abusive rambling and threats and worse.

With my husband, I gave myself up and let myself be subverted by gaslighting, Stockholm syndrome and terrible emotional and verbal abuse. With my father, I used to sit on the stairs just out of reach when told to go to bed without a peep, and say "peep, peep, peep." So that will to live as myself was still there, just deeply buried. The man I chose as my lover was an echo of my father's abuse. Yet when I met him, he was passionately in love with me. I just couldn't see when the path changed after we married.

For me, the way out of this has been going through it, and with therapy and support from my grown children and this SR forum, re-forming who I choose to be. You might read Melody Beattie's book Co-Dependent No More to get some clues as to where you submerge yourself in someone else's needs instead of your own.

If you let yourself feel whatever you feel during this time of transition, and get into a process where you can decode what you feel and the choices that led to this situation, you can grow enough to never choose a similar partner again. For me, that is worth the price of admission.

I read that during childbirth, women have a hormone (I believe it is pitocin) which makes them subsequently forget the pain of birthing a child. It is has been studied and found that people in trauma also have that hormone in their bodies. So there is an actual physiological reason that we don't remember the bad parts of our relationships as much as the good parts. And that leads us to longing for what we remember - the good parts of our lovers - even though that is only half of the package.

Here's an anecdote about Mr. Klopman. (Apologies if that is anybody's real name...) Mr. Klopman owns the most gorgeous, huge, sparkly, revered, famous, incredible diamond in the whole wide world. You can have the diamond, but the catch is, with the diamond comes Mr. Klopman, who, yes, is exactly as his name sounds - - slow witted, ugly, obnovious, punitive and unbearable.

In the beginning, I thought that there was EITHER good OR bad. So I either did the totally right thing to leave or the totally wrong thing to leave.

Eventually, the good memories come back in the context of the whole relationship. What I mean is that we are able to accept the good memories without that dictating that there were NO bad memories. In the beginning, for me, it was starkly "either/or". If if felt the pull of the good times, the laughter, and companionship and the love that my husband and I had, then I had made a terrible mistake in leaving him. I must have been wrong, and I must have ruined my life.

But that was not true. For every time I saw that sparkly diamond of our relationship, I felt the abuse of the terrible Mr. Klopman as well. The bad times happened, too. We did feel the pain we know we felt, and it was severe enough to leave.

This, for me, is where I got stuck in a conundrum of disbelieving myself. What I didn't understand, and then didn't accept for a long time was this. I thought I had the power to make our relationship good and whole. I thought I could make him behave the way I wanted him to. I was wrong. He didn't want to, and that was his right. His narcissism required that he be top dog, and that he work out his own emotional anger and angst by blaming someone else. Me.

And he was not about to change that emotional underpinning. I couldn't make him. This is where the Alanon saying "You didn't cause it; you can't control it; and you can't cure it" comes in. It was my own meglomania that seemed to me to give me the power to make him treat me like I wanted to be treated. Alanon calls that co-dependence, but underneath I believe is the dark side of myself, my surety that I was right and I knew how he should live.

No one has that right regarding someone else. We all get to do what we want, and if our partner is unwilling to change to meet our needs, they get to do whatever they want, and we get to choose what is healthy for us. And that, for me, meant leaving and moving toward understanding who I am and what my boundaries are. That applies both to what behavior I will accept from someone else, AND how I now understand the limits and boundaries of my own being. I cannot choose someone's life for them. I can, however, leave and choose a healthier life for me.

So, after time and reflection, that knowledge gives us a gift. We can remember the good parts without denying the bad parts. We can own both the good and the bad, and understand that we didn't ever have the power to choose only what we saw as good. Eventually, we can accept that both good and bad happened, and we want to choose differently now. I still struggle at times, but more and more, that gives me peace and the impetus to move forward to what I want to create next.

My best to you on this journey; keep coming here and keep posting because the people on this forum do truly understand what you are living through.

ShootingStar1
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Old 11-09-2014, 10:57 AM
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Shooting Star - your post really touched me. Thank you for valuing the needs of a fellow passenger on this journey enough to take the time from your own day to share this with me and others. It is quite profound, and I plan to spend some real time reflecting and digesting what you've said.

Sometimes I feel like speaking the simple term Thank You is woefully inadequate to express to the friends on this Forum how much they help others. This is one of those times.

Maybe the ultimate form of thanks is how we pay it forward to help others in similar straights.

I thank each and every one of you for caring enough about someone else's pain to offer your own insights, learnings and experiences to help myself and others. I look forward to expressing my thanks to all of you by paying it forward to others as I become better equipped to do so.

With deep gratitude,
Sally
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Old 11-09-2014, 01:45 PM
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Wow, I can't add much to the wisdom already expressed here on this thread.

One of the things that struck me was what SeriousKarma wrote--the realization that it isn't ALL about the alcoholism. Leaving a relationship, no matter how right a thing it was to do, is similar to a "geographic cure," something a lot of alcoholics do before they are ready to quit drinking. We are still stuck with ourselves. So if we want good company on our future journey, we need to make our lives as good as they can be.

I've been on a dating/relationship hiatus for nine years now. My life still isn't exactly what I'd like it to be, but everything good or bad about it is on me. Maybe someday I will be ready to get involved with someone new, but for now I don't need the complications. It's been an interesting (if sometimes disconcerting) experience getting to know me. I didn't know how to be just with myself.
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Old 11-10-2014, 11:49 AM
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What I saw was a need to change myself so I don't continue picking screwed up men. By focusing my time and effort in Alanon I learned the problem was me and started addressing the issues that had been there all along. God bless!
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Old 11-10-2014, 02:57 PM
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Originally Posted by SallyTaylor View Post
I wonder if many of us have gotten so used to the high drama and chaos that we've forgotten the art of appreciating the simple pleasures.
This is really what I was thinking as I read this thread. That over time we all become slightly addicted to the drama, the ups and downs. The extremes. Even now you've called it euphoria. By definition euphoria is a brief state, not typically achieved during the normal course of human experience. It's not supposed to last. However through the course of alcoholic relationships we've learned to expect those heightened emotions on a regular basis. Whether they were good or bad. Is it possible you just haven't quite figured out how to just "be"? Is that why the pull of the old flame is there? He brings a little merry-go-round with him too right? The high of the contact, the low of the dismissal?

I hope that's not coming of harsh..it's really more of just a brain drain type of assessment that I pulled form reading the thread.

On the other side of this story I'm hearing you say.. you weren't enough for either of them. I see that another way too. Their actions seem to have little to do with you and more to do with them. So your XAH took the mistress to his mother. Isn't that more of an action of him trying to bolster his own self importance? Make sure he doesn't look alone? It's a perfect cover to keep his real feelings hidden. I might say the same thing about the old flame. You'd probably be better off letting that one burn out.

I usually try to keep my posting to something I have experience with instead of what I just did.. assessing. But I really saw it thought a different lens and I wanted to share that with you.

I hope you can find some of those simple pleasures and balance for yourself.
Big Hugs.
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Old 11-10-2014, 03:04 PM
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I wonder if many of us have gotten so used to the high drama and chaos that we've forgotten the art of appreciating the simple pleasures.
That might be true -- and as you can see, that art can be recovered!!! When my now-husband and I started moving from friendship to relationship, he laid down the law on what he expected: No bull****, no drama, no games. I agreed to those rules of engagement and told him that my dream was rainy November Tuesdays with fish sticks for dinner. He nodded emphatically. That's when we knew it was love.

For me, the stage after "OMG I AM FREE!" was "OMG what do I do with all this freedom?" I think anyone who's lived in an alcoholic relationship needs time to rediscover what they love -- or find that they've moved on to liking entirely new things. I was extremely social and outgoing before AXH, and when I tried to "become" that person again, it was just uncomfortable. I'm pretty introverted now; I have few friends but close ones; my idea of a fun Friday night doesn't include cocktails at an upscale bar with business associates anymore -- it's more like a big pot of tea and Netflix.

Give yourself time to figure out what you want, who you are, let your wounds heal, work on your recovery, and trust me, joy will return.
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Old 11-10-2014, 03:19 PM
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So far, in my own journey, I've discovered (at age 58) that I love Green Day, punk rock, Harry Potter, and zombies.

My kids are so proud.
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Old 11-10-2014, 05:01 PM
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Lexie -- we should hang out. With our kids.
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Old 11-10-2014, 05:04 PM
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LOL, we should. My kids have been trying to get me to watch The Walking Dead since it started, and I am now all caught up with the episodes, and have read the first two compilations of the comic.

Oh, and how could I possibly have neglected to mention my MAJOR obsession with Breaking Bad???
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Old 11-10-2014, 05:08 PM
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I was hauled kicking and screaming into Supernatural.
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Old 11-10-2014, 06:51 PM
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You soldiers (I was going to say ladies, but not 100% positive all are female, and besides we are in/have won the war for ourselves so we are indeed soldiers) are an inspiration to me!

Before this latest depressive dip - I think SeriousKarma called it the wall - I started getting excited about taking ice skating lessons (even bought myself some skates) and considering getting a moped/small motorcycle. Things I would never have imagined myself doing. I missed the skating lesson yesterday b/c I couldn't motivate to get out of the apartment and was crying all day long. I'm planning to go on Wednesday and really trying to set up the next few days to ensure I feel up to making it happen.

LexieCat & LillAmy - it's kind of fun discovering these hidden selves, isn't it? I can feel the joy in your notes.

IsItme - thanks for those insights. I have to work to flip it around instead of using it to blame myself (funny how the As blame everything else but themselves and we blame ourselves at the exclusion of everything else....)

I did read something that might help those of us that struggle with depression/getting down on ourselves. As humans we essentially have a finite reservoir of willpower everyday that replenishes itself overnight. When we are depressed our reserves get quite low and we even start our day at much lower levels than when we are feeling good. Over the course of a day these reserves of willpower can run dry handling all the activities of daily life leaving us prone to be less apt to nurture/take care of ourselves later in the day (it also speaks to why we can binge on our diets so easily at night but be strong as nails in the morning).

So if we can recognize this and try to do the handful of things that are most important in the morning (like self-care or pleasurable activities) that can help keep us on track. I know I sometimes also get down on myself for being down on myself and once I start down that path I find that at the end of the day I can barely move off the couch. e.g., don't be so hard on yourself if you aren't able to keep yourself "up" throughout the day- there are natural ebbs/flows to our daily willpower/energy too, not just our overall moods.
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Old 11-10-2014, 06:56 PM
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Go for it with the skating lessons (and the motorcycle). I took a motorcycle riding class this spring. I unfortunately failed the test at the end (tight turns) and at one point in the class fell with the bike on top of me (and a resulting good-sized bruise), but I got up and got on it again. Not sure if I will take another class or hang it up, but I had the guts to try it. I also went on a vacation to Europe by myself last year, and am planning to go to MOROCCO by myself (with a women's tour group) next year.

I love trying new stuff, and there is nobody to tell me I can't, or I shouldn't.

Did I say I LOVE being single?
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