So its middle of the night here. Literally, i just woke up from a dark and twisted and very realistic dream. My texting is bad and filled with errors to begin with, so please bare with me.now as Im half asleep.
So, my dream was dark. My son was there. Himself. A child in the background that i was aware of but with that laugh and hyperactivity that actually might be anxiety and nerves cause he knows something is up but is trying to laugh.
My ex's mother is there. And i am screaming and yelling at her. I am trying to get her to see my pain. I am trying to tell her how bad her son treated me and she wont hear me. She won't admit it. And i am yelling at her that she has been through this too. That her son treated me so bad. She is acting like i am crazy. Not letting go. Not accepting. She just wants to take care of my son. I am trying to find info about his current girlfriend from my ex mil. She tells me she new gf is not as patient as me. I say, "you meam shes trashy?" And she says yes. (I do not know anything about his current girlfriend. I dont believe he was cheating on me with her. I just know she has a young girl that they occasionally go on a trip with.)
Then there is a Group of people. Police detectives, my ex and a trashy looking girlfriend. (In my dream i am relieved when i see she is not better then me.) I am yelling at my ex and he looks so good in front of every one.. i look crazy.
I cant find the paperwork and everyone is doubting me. My ex is being really calm and seems so nice to everyone. Including me. He sees how upset I am and he tells me that he will answer all of my questions honestly. He decides to do this so I will have closure. He seems sorry in this dream. It seems like i am about to get all my answers and im not sure what to ask first. Then we go together and i find all the paperwork that prooves he was being shady with me.
For some reason me and the detective talk about females that were being murdered years ago. It involved a serial killer in the area i live.. I tell them one of my patients was murdered . That i remembered her many years ago from the beginning of my case. I told them I wasn't dumb. Thw detective said "yes. We put that patients story in your case" and they told me she was killed by an abusive ex. Not the serial killer.
We were all sitting around a table and i am about to ask my questions. I have all my proof. And then i decide i dont want to hurt my ex. I dont want to expose him. And i immediatly wake up. (As im typing i realize i didnt eant to expose him in the courts either)
Ok. Back to reality now...
This dream came because my ex has a girl friend that he took to a wedding this weekend. My son told me how his dad and this girl drove to the wedding in a separate car from him and his grandmother. My son hadnt spent the weekend at his dads in 2 weeks because his dad needed to switch. My ex told me he had to work on friday so didnt want son earlier.
My ex told me about the wedding and i asked who would be driving my son. (I worry about weddings and drinking). Ex told me his mom would be driving him and son. So ex lied to me and i dont really know why at this point. He could have just told me "my mom will drive son" and it would have been enough and honest.
When he dropped son off, he looked sad and upset. Hard time facing me. But that could also be because he did not have the child support check or the past 2 checks of his share of childcare. I sometimes like to think he is sad because of me, but its most likely due to having to give me money. Or not having money to give me. I probably project and i interpret it as guilt, but it might be sadness for himself having to give me money.
Why did him having this girlfriend bother me still? He doesnt put our son first. He just gets a small bit of knowledge about son and tells me or the teachers about it to feign involvement. For example, he made a point of inserting into a conversation with teacher "yes i notice that too when i help him with his homework" But he only sees him 1 evening a week.he cuts it short to about an hour and most of the homework is done by the afterschool program. Today upon drop off he made sure to tell me how proud he is of son cause son donated toy. But thats just being said to show me he spent time with him, when i know through my son it was his grandmother that spent most of the time with him.
Thats not someone with a good character.
I dont understand why i still am holding on. Im with someone that loves me. Someone that took care of his daughter by himself through some really rough stuff. He was there for her. He accepts me. I can be myself with him. I feel safe with him. I know hes different from ex. But i am still upset over ex.
Thank ypu. I lnow this was a long post.
But this dream felt so realisyic and was just very dark. I was shaky when i wole up.
Last edited by job; 11/12/1801:15 PM. Reason: added link to previous thread
Hey JujuB....this is the beginning of some new shift...this is the beginning of letting go. The unconscious is attempting to resolve. Let it wash over you. You will find peace if you can let everything fall where is needs to, just for now. Breathe through it and welcome it, it has been a long time for you. I am excited about what comes next when you no long have psychological and emotional binds to ex. Be Brave. We are here for you xxx
So i dont know why my shifts seem to take so much longer then others. It could be because i never had definitive proof of anything other then that my ex left me. Dont even know for sure if he actually cheated. Although based on every other wayward he probably did. So maybe its because i just never had that knowledge of what really went down. Or perhaps i am a bit mentally unstable (you would never guess if you worked with me or of we went out for drinks though) or perhaps i am just deeply sensitive.
He left in the summer of 2015 and i still feel very deep emotions. So i guess i am not surviving as well as most on this forum.
But i did have another shift i would like to share.
I was thinking about how lucky my ex is. How he gets away with mediocrity. He knows how to seem involved in his sons life with minimal statements to me, or his mother, or the teachers and everyone things great things about him. I have mentioned this before... he would do great on OLD because he looks like a great catch on the surface. (Which is why i denounce the superficial stuff so frequently)
Anyway. I was revenge fantasizing (i know i should be beyond that) about the world discovering who he really is. Maybe he gets called out for a DWI or publicly hits rock bottom. And i realized, i dont want that to happen to him.
My son has it hard enough, dealing with a dad that is a bare minimalist. My son is already set apart by his issues, and living in a wealthy neighborhood with his single mom living with her parents. Why would i ever want my son to be subjected to that type of humiliation so that i could be validated???????
This was huge for me. It does not mean i will befriend ex and do things with him fornmy son's sake. But at least i am now wishing evil.
I know you guys are all past this and indifferent and on to dating and new hobbies and careers. But im carry these huge divorce weights on my shoulders.
I just wanted to drop by and let you know you're not alone with the deep emotion thing (and the revenge thing). There are a lot of things I'm still in the process of doing.
The other day I was starting on my tax return for the past year and going through the email receipts I needed to print out. For some reason it turned into a clearing out my inbox/filing old emails from the time XH left (October 2015) and just after. It was something I hadn't done yet, but had wanted to do.
Anyway, the feelings were awful, absolutely hideous, like I was right back reliving those first six months. Except I was also noticing just how many emails I hadn't responded to, including work ones. And I probably missed out on quite a bit of work as a result. Oh well, it's passed now. And I've sorted my emails.
The way I've dealt with it is just to train myself not to look backwards to my past life when I notice my attention start to wander. I've been very, very deliberate about it. It's not been easy, for sure. But it has got easier the more times I do it.
For yourself, I guess it's about keeping the focus on yourself and your children and your (plural) future. But not extending it as far as your X.
I don't know if that makes sense?
My ideas of revenge are limited to public humiliation of my XH via FB and letting the world know exactly what he did. Funny thing is, I'm sure that everyone in the industry that we both work in knew what was going on before I did, so it wouldn't be news to them...lol!
And if I did that, I would be giving him some of my attention, and that's not what it's about. The focus is on me now.
Thanks focus. It is true that i need to be better trained in learning to refocus those ruminating and obsessive thoughts.
There is always a trigger. There is also some safety in being reminded of what a horrible person he was, when i go soft. Or blame myself.
I found out about a woman running a daycare in my neighborhood who has someone living in her house with a very old criminal record (involving minors) and a psych history. I was reminded of how my ex was trying to push me to go back to work full time, even though it made no sense from a financial standpoint. And it certainly was not in my sons best interest. Son was 3 orn4 at the time. My ex actually told me i would be more attractive to him if i was more ambitious. His goal was to get me working full time so he would pay the least amount in child support.
This one act of selfishness regarding my son makes me hate my ex so much. He is a bad person because of that. I will never forgive that.
It also makes me realize what a great mom i am because i never ever considered doing something i thought was not in my sons best interest to keep my husband.
But the point of this story is that i am having trouble letting go of these triggers. Yes they are lessons and warnings that i should never ever trust my ex. But it hits me emotionally
I think you've made huge progress in recognising these triggers. You probably didn't even totally understand it at the time, I'm guessing? You maybe had a gut feeling, but couldn't quite put it into context?
If you're anything like me, I have a very strong gut feeling about certain people/situations, but I also need the intellectual understanding that acts as a framework and validation for those feelings. That can sometimes take me a while and a little digging and thinking things over.
At least, that's how I've been in the past. I think now I'm more likely just to act on those gut feelings and move forwards without hanging around for the intellectual validation. I guess it's about learning to trust myself more? And also learning that not everyone processes things the same way as you do, and there are things you can learn from different ways of processing things.
I've noticed that I start to feel very down when I go over the alcoholic thing, again, hoping to gain some sort of further understanding and enlightenment. I can feel myself getting very down and energy draining away. And I can sense myself slipping into old ways of thinking/feeling/being. I can totally feel myself giving up my energy and power to my old way of being and my world feels like it's shrinking again.
Strange thing is, that world feels very, very familiar and somehow easy. Like I can let go of the almost permanent effort it's taking me moving forwards and sink back into...into nothing much.
When I'm here, I need to make a decision. What more am I going to learn at this point? Digging further into trying to find out stuff and gain some more understanding. It is what it is, as they say, and my future doesn't lie in looking backwards. I have to believe that I am worth more than what my old patterns of thinking/feeling/being taught me. I have to drag myself out of this...dunno...quagmire, for want of a better word.
And so it's about keeping moving forwards, outwards, upwards and not allowing yourself to shrink back. Because the price of shrinking back is high, too high a price for you to pay. So really it's about self worth, believing in yourself and trusting yourself.
So i dont know why my shifts seem to take so much longer then others. It could be because i never had definitive proof of anything other then that my ex left me. Dont even know for sure if he actually cheated. Although based on every other wayward he probably did. So maybe its because i just never had that knowledge of what really went down.
Yes he cheated - okay? A guy who just leaves because he's unhappy in the relationship doesn't do all that other stuff and doesn't stop being a good father.
Maybe it would help you to understand more about what's wrong with your ex if you did some reading. I know that my friend who helped me see my ex's narcissistic traits after the divorce really helped me to see my whole marriage in a different light. You might try reading The Sociopath Next Door, it's a short book and frankly, I think it oversells its premise a bit but some of the stories may seem familiar to you.
And as for moving on - the way to move on is to start doing things to move forward. I know you feel tremendous pressure, being a single mom and living with your parents and just generally not being where you'd like to be at this age. But your future starts today. I recommend you make a vision board of the life you would like to be living in ten years. Then start trying some new activities to make your life RIGHT NOW more interesting, filled with friends and energy. The more of that you have in your life the less you will think about your ex.
I only recently learned about CL and i wish I discovered her earlier.
A part of me really wanted it to just be drugs and alcohol that caused my ex to leave us. That I was about to discover financial craziness, so he bailed first. I could accept that from him more then infidelity. If it had been infidelity i would have sought intense crazy revenge. I know myself. He knows me. So yeah, it would be smart of him to keep that a secret.
My ex had erectile dysfunction. It was horrible. He had it maybe 3 years into our relationship when things were good as well. I remember thinking it was cigarettes or due to weight gain or work stress. But sex was never that enjoyable for me because it was all about making sure he was able to maintain an erection. And when he did get one he was like so friggen proud. I could never come out and say this because then it would have made it worse and he would have been more stressed about it. Sometimes it would be impossible for him to orgasm. i guess i figured if he had ed and sexual problems with me, less of a chance of him even being capable of an affair. The more i learned about opiates and alcoholism the nore i realized the 2 go hand in hand.
I trusted my ex completely. So infidelity is a huge huge blow and shock. Even to this day, when i think of it i become internally enraged.
But his actions were so similar to everything described in CL and here on these forums. I am completely in the dark about anything regarding women. Even the woman he is with now, she didnt see my son on my sons birthday and when they went to a wedding together, he went with this woman in a separate car from my son.
I know it no longer matters. I have my future to live. I am having a hard time figuring out how to have the future i want though. More then anything, i wanted another child. I feel robbed of that based on the timing with my ex. I think if i had another baby and family, i would still be mad, but not quite so robbed. If that makes any sense.
