Letting people live their lives and GALing...

[Jack_Three_Beans]

Wow Antonia AMAZING realization.

I knew going in that he might never feel the same as I did about us.

The secret most marriage councilors won't tell the clients?

One partner is almost always more invested than the other.

What do you do...

You did this eyes wide open...

Your mom and your friends...

You never wanted to sacrifice...

All of those things leads to this:

I need to know how to walk the line where I don't sacrifice myself but I treat someone I care about with compassion and respect.

First off...you want not need.

It is a want.

The fact that you are aware of this problem is a great thing. Means you likely won't.

Do you love this guy?

If you do, then you'll be able to give him what he wants. If he loves you he will try and give you what you want as well. It's compromise when those wants...conflict. It's great when those wants...support each other.

Anyone who tells you definitively to drop or keep this guy is trying to live vicariously through you...and screw them.

What do you want...not need?

[dl443322]

Antonia, I'm sorry your find yourself in this situation.

Just a couple of things, if I may.

You might want to change your mindset regarding feeling like you can change someone or their behavior. It really is not for you to do.

And I do believe that you can put yourself first and still have compassion for someone else.

I think one of the ways you do that is to fully accept the person for who they are - warts and all.

So, you set some boundarties. Good for you.

That doesnt mean you cannot still have him in your life. It just means that you care enough to allow him to walk his own journey.

And that you realize you are still walking your own.

Follow your gut, A. Not what others in your life tell you. Your life, your gut.

[AntoniaB]

What do I want? Knee-jerk response: More authentic relationships with people. Openness, honesty, transparency.

I do think I love him. I don't think I'm "in love" with him because I feel kind of like he'd need to be feeling similar for me to get to that point. But I've thought a lot about love lately, and at times I feel like maybe "in love" only really means infatuation, while "love" is the deeper thing that endures.

I love my closest friends and that's kind of the love I feel for him...the love for a friend. I think my "deeper feelings for him" are more based around the physical chemistry I have with him. Now if he started seeing someone? That would hurt. I'd be jealous. I told him that's a part of his life I can't deal with right now if he goes that route and to keep me out of the loop. That's not a big deal as he is very private anyway about that sort of thing.

Bottom line is that if I take my desire to have him in my life romantically out of the equation, then I'm left with a person I truly care about as a friend and do want him in my life in that capacity.

[dl443322]

There you go, A. Now you know what you want and what you don't want.

That's taking care of you. Still plenty of room to remain friends.

[Walking]

I keep wondering why, why did I have this chance meeting with someone only to fall for him and find that he's not just unavailable but he's also so damaged. Was the whole point to teach me that again I can't always get what I want and I have to learn to live with what I can have and accept it?

Because the universe is testing you to see if you really do understand what is available to you and what you deserve ... you don't have to take all the deserts on the tray girl - the universe gives us the right to send some of them back.

A drowning person, can't save another drowning person.

V

[AntoniaB]

Wow Walking, that is interesting. I will say that while it was incredibly tough to be rejected by my XH and told I wasn't right for him in the end, and to feel the "void" the came from him leaving my life, it was incredibly tough for me to be the one to pull the plug here. I could have maintained a physical relationship with this guy which gave me a lot of comfort and closeness that I really missed after nearly 3 years single. To willingly be the one to end that was one of the hardest choices I've ever had to make. But I felt like I had to force myself to do it because it was less than what I deserve, and because the only way to keep it up was to be lying to him about how I felt. So I guess that's some measure of growth for me, that I could be strong enough to choose to be alone and not have that security of the physical closeness.

I hope something good comes of this, for me and also for him. Thanks Jack and Brookie also for posting.

[beatrice]

Hi, I only just saw these postings.

Do you know about the 'monkey on the shoulder'? Most of us have one, arising out of events that have happened to us in our lives. It sits there and whispers in our ear. First of all we have to identify it, THEN stop feeding it, It dies, within a short time, and we bury it.

At the risk of sounding very harsh I believe that bf at 40ish is continuing to 'use' his sexual abuse as a reason for avoiding intimacy. I have a good friend who was raped at the same age, and it is dealable with. Why would a sensible person contiue to allow one event to sabotage his relationship. I suspect that he actually doesn't want deeper intimacy with anyone.

Damage or no damage, I have come to believe that we choose to be who we are on a daily basis, and that therapy helps us to identify our problems, give us a toolkit, but it doesn't actually do the work for us. Many people make the mistake of thinking that going to therapy can solve problems. Yes, it can, but only if they put in some pretty heavy spade work!

You have come a long way. I suspect that what might actually cause your relationsihp with this guy to founder is that he is emotionally stuck, and we can't be with someone in an evolving relationship unless they also grow and evolve.

You know how some friendshps survive and prosper, and others, very close, fade away? i believe part of this is that one or other party stops growing. Of course interests change an so on, but there is a stuckness in some people and they keep going round and round.

[AntoniaB]

Well, it appears that my friend is pulling away from me.I haven't heard anything since Thursday from him and one email I sent and a text went unanswered and both were cheery and sort of in the vein of "how are you doing" and "this friendship is totally going to work, trust me."

So the upshot is that NOW I feel rejected and betrayed. I feel like all his talk about how much I meant to him as a friend just wasn't true. It's also making me sort of relive the way it felt when my XH left. Lots of old, bad emotions are coming to my mind and I'm not in a great place. I've been sort of sinking as it was anyway in the past few weeks, mainly because when I am off work for long periods, I seem to kind of lose it, no matter how many friends I maintain or contact or how much activity I give myself. The number of hours alone is just too much and I really feel the emotions of "this living alone far from family and my closest friends is not what I signed up for."

I think I really was looking forward to seeing my friend a lot this summer as it would help with the loneliness and now it seems like it's gone, and yet there he is, living right down the street. It's pretty torturous.

So I've felt myself fall very fast into what can only be described as depression. I really thought I was "done" with depression. I never had episodes of it till XH left, and I guess I figured once I felt mostly over wanting anything to do with XH it would be gone, but it's not. I just had it hidden a long time I guess.

I don't know what else to do but write so I took on a new writing project for a friend of mine who needs an essay for a book she is putting together. I'm concerned that my writing projects, while fruitful and productive, are a sort of escape hatch I go out of every time I get really down, and I don't know if this is a good thing or if it's just distracting me from ultimately healing. All I know is that the minute I started doing preliminary research and reading, this situation and the hurt I feel started to leave my mind FAST. It was like an instant relief for my mental ruminations to instead ruminate on literature and characters and quotes. It seems to be the only thing that works fast to stave off sadness to some extent. But like I said, I wonder if it's an unhealthy obsessive trait I'm developing to cope.

There is no reason professionally for me to write more. The only reason I'm doing it is to pull myself out of depression and give my anxiety somewhere else to focus for bits of time.

I'm going to ask my psychiatrist about all this. What I do know is that I feel sick to death that one person--XH--had the power to affect my life so deeply for so long, and to affect the way I handle new relationships failing--and I just keep saying to myself how many more years of my life does this whole mess have to take up? When can I just feel like I can rest again and stop trying to hard to "get better" and "get over this"? Believe me I am working myself to the bone in journaling and reading and GALing and I am angry as well at myself that I can't just leave all this stuff in the past and live my life without remembering and ruminating.

There are people who face much worse than I did with all sorts of things and I am angry at myself for not being able to just get over this all already and be a happy person. But I'm so jealous (another thing to talk about with my doctor) of other people who seem so centered and calm and happy with their relationships. I'm even jealous of XH. He's defied the odds about the success of affairs and is still with the OW, now living with her, after 2 years. The guy has still never spent one night alone since he moved out of his parents' house.

It's just a bad week I guess all around. Hopefully things will improve soon and my doctor will have some ideas, but I'm running out of strategies and energy.

[AntoniaB]

Well quick update and some interesting info about depression/anxiety that may help others: my friend needed time to process things. We had one lengthy email exchange and tonight I'm going over to his house for pizza and movies. I think things will work out after all as there seems to be a commitment on both sides to turn what was going on into a friendship. We've been extremely open with one another and I'd say we know the deepest, darkest parts of each other's lives now, which is not a place I get to with people quickly (nor does he). I think we might actually have a good basis for a friendship with this. Time will tell...one day at a time.

I had appts with both my naturopath/counselor and psychiatrist this week and both have given me a lot of insight on things I'm still stuck on and areas I need to work on for myself. Both have said that I do not need any medication for depression/anxiety, that what I go through are normal blips when something triggers those states in me, and that since I seem to be able to recover in anywhere from 48-72 hours to the emotional state I was in before I plummeted, that's a sign that this is all normal with bumps in the road as expected.

I got some interesting advice from both about how to work through episodes of depression and anxiety, namely this great visual illustration: I'm in a blizzard, and the snow is all around, and my only job is to find footing. That's it. I should not attempt in a blizzard to fix things, to try to get out of the blizzard, but WAIT IT OUT. Just get my footing. That's it. I really like that visual as imagery sometimes helps me understand something that isn't concrete. I was also told "don't try to escape depression or anxiety because that tends to make it worse. Just try to breathe into it and tell yourself anxiety is your way of settling things down for later."

So I don't know if it helps any of you to hear those tips, but they are helping me.

[AntoniaB]

So I have a query. Let me set it up.

I feel like I'm "over" my XH. Feel like I don't miss him anymore, realize that he and I weren't going to work out anymore, and I just don't feel attached anymore. I do miss being "married" and the security I felt with that, warranted or not. But not him.

However, I'm SOOOO not over this whole thing. I believe that I went into an MLC as a result of the divorce. I think the main issue is that I am still having extreme difficulty coming to terms with being alone. XH and I lived here 21 years and never had people close to us locally. He took the mutual friends with him except for one couple who lives in FL so I never see them anyway. So when he left I had no family, no friends to just go hang out with or anything. I had to rebuild my life alone entirely. I work very hard to make new friends and I do have friends and people I can go see or have over, but I'm very social, and it's like it's not enough sometimes and I feel terribly sad being alone.

The guy I was seeing, incidentally, well we never did the friendship without anything physical, we kept the physical, and that went on for 6 months and I called an end to the relationship 2 weeks ago. One of the hardest things I ever had to do, but he just didn't want the same things as me and was entirely commitment-phobic in terms of a relationship and it wasn't going to change. So when I spent time with him I felt more "normal", now I'm back to a lot more time alone as we are planning to sort of take a break and reset things to a casual friendship only.

I guess that has made these "alone" issues resurface. And what it is is anxiety, more than anything, that I'm dealing with. It makes me anxious to be alone so much. Any time something happens that is difficult, things like having to put 2 pets down this summer, or me having health problems, I really fall apart. It's temporary, but the anxiety/panic can go on for days.

In the midst of the latest "crash", my sister got harsh with me and said that I "need help", "need meds", "need a second opinion" because my psychiatrist has said I don't need meds and I need to face these things down, and that I"m this narcissistic drama queen who makes my family upset with my mood swings.

I don't want my sister or family to coddle me. But I also think they just plain don't get it. None of them have ever lived alone for any length of time, let alone away from each other. I spend an enormous amount of time alone during which I write. Well I have to think to write. I have been more creative and produced more work than ever in the past few years. But the downside is that I do overthink things.

My sister said, "you can't research or think your way out of this. Get help."

I guess what I want to know is does she have a point? Can I not "cure" myself of this anxiety or ability to be alone so much?

I'm starting to feel like the people around me are sick of how my XH's ending the marriage could still have these ripple effects years later, and that makes me feel guilty like I should just be able to shut off these problems and be peaceful. But then I think my god, I have worked myself into physical illness trying to hold myself up and keep going up this hill. I've GALed like crazy, made new friends, better relationships, written a book, taken care of my home and cats as best as I could, faced having to euthanize two cats all by myself, gone through the first relationship since my marriage that has come to an end, what more do you people want from me? I just can't be perfect. Medicating me doesnt' make the problems go away by magic.

So I don't know, how do I deal with this? Do I have to make a conscious effort to hide parts of my life from my family if they are going to be angry with me for "still" having "issues"?

No one wants to be "cured" more than me. Sometimes I hate the way I am. But I know that nothing happens overnight. I'm so exhausted from the efforts, really. Mentally and now physically (I have mono/epstein-barr virus which is causing physical problems). My mom actually blamed me for having health problems because I "neglected to take care of myself these past few years."

I dunno...Just really frustrated, angry, sad, the whole gamut of emotions. Not a good couple of weeks at all.