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Post Info TOPIC: I've gone over to the dark side...


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I've gone over to the dark side...
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I'm really finding it hard to let go and let God.  I'm filled with grief and sadness at the loss of my relationship with my partner.  He is deep in his recovery and seems to be doing well taking care of himself, and making time for friends and family.  I feel like I've lost a leg and am having trouble getting across the room.  My head is whirring with projections and fear based fantasies about what he's doing/not doing, who he's with, feeling totally abandoned, feeling so lonely and alone.  Each day I am having to tell myself how to take care of myself.  I wake up in the moring and start with the serenity prayer and then hand it all over and keep handing it over as the day goes on, but I feel like I'm going to explode, scream, and I keep crying at weird things.  I finished a book yesterday and sat in the garden crying.  The neighbours were out doing a bar-b-q and did their best to ignore the sad woman sat in her garden chair having a whinge.  I was out there in my pyjamas and just couldn't hold it together...  Not my finest moment.     

Yesterday and today I went over to the dark side, messaging my partner and popping round to see him unannounced. Twice.  He hasn't replied to my last messages, and I cannot believe I am this person.  Clingy, needy, frightened, unable to focus on myself.  I've totally lost perspective, I cannot see anything good about myself, or understand why anyone would want to have a relationship with me, I feel completely rejected and abandoned.   The one difference is that I haven't lost it in front of him.  I'm just losing it here on my own.  In the past I'd have gone round there and made a total idiot of myself.  I've done the "going round there" bit  but have managed to hold myself back from the "making myself look an idiot by losing  it in front of him" bit.  Now I'm doing that on my own and in the semi-privacy of my garden where only me and my neighbours get to witness me losing it in my jimjams.  

This feels so sh*t.

Freya      



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Freya



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I've been there and it's not fun. Here's what worked for me. I realized that my feelinqs for that person, particularly when I felt abandoned, were the same feelinqs, that I've had time and time aqain, with various relationships. I stopped and I asked myself, durinq one of the maqically introspective moments, why did I feel the same way about several very different people that I was in romantic relationships with? I compared it to how I feel about several different people, who are just friends of mine. I feel completely different about each and every friend , each family member, each co-worker.... So why do I feel the same abandonment qreif about these different people? How could that be? The answer that I came away with, was that it had Nothinq to do with them. This was my stuff. I had placed my emotional security and self esteem with them (what a responsibility that they probably didn't ask for). They are not to blame. It was a misconception on my part. I was seeinq the situation, completely jaded, from a perspective of decades earlier. It was a strinq of unresolved previous relationships all emeshed into one continuous drama, like some soap opera for decades, where the drama is the same, even throuqh the actors have chanqed many times. I had to put an end to this, by qoinq back to my very first relationships and look hard. These where with my parents. Then in my childhood , I clunq to one friend after another, then my first qirlfriend. I was totally obsessed with her. That set the tone for the next 15 years, 6 or 8 serious relationships and a failed marriaqe. I was able to break that down and throw out my operatinq system in favor of a healthy one, but it took qettinq sober and 3.5 years of beinq sinqle and workinq various proqrams. My outlook on romantic relationships chanqed completely, and now is strickly one day at a time. At the beqininq of each day I express my qratitude for my relationship (marriaqe #2 18 years) with the thouqht that this is only for today, as one of us could wake up tomorrow and say "It's been real and fun, but I wish to be elsewhere now". I accept that and am prepared to make a peaceful, cheerful separation, thankinq her for our time toqether, and wishinq her well. It's the total opposite of "we're qoinq to be toqether FOREVER". All relationships will end sooner or later, as one person will likely die before the other. There is no "forever" there is only today. If I'm not qrateful for today because I'm afraid about tomorrow, what kind of value am I brinqinq to the relationship? Am I even present for that person (or myself). Aren't I perpetuatinq my own abandonment? The worst feelinq in the world is thinkinq that you love someone that doesn't love you and beinq terrified about the end of the relationship. If we accept that it's only a one day relationship then we are always ok with that possibly not continuinq tomorrow.

I qet asked, from time to time, "What should I look for in a siqnificant other". I say choose one that you can live without, because eventually you'll have to. And for myself, If "I'm crazy about someone" I'm just plain actinq crazy. No one is worth our sanity. Most importantly, I learned how to love me and put the most value on that. I come first, then my work, hiqher power, then family, friends... A healthy relationship is when two independent people (emotionally, physically, financially...) decide to spend some of their time toqether for their mutual enjoyment. If I'm not "independent" do I qualify to be in a relationship? For 3.5 years I was not, thanksfully. Relationships are optional, our life, well beinq is not. We come first, second, and third.



-- Edited by Dean on Wednesday 27th of April 2011 12:26:42 PM

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Dean


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Absolutely wonderful response, Dean. 

That's it exactly for me as well.

I need to become whole and fill my "needs" on my own.  I need to become an independent, whole person who can be alone comfortably and then I can be a part of a relationship and get my "wants" met. 

It is truly One Day at a Time.

Big hugs, Freya.  Been exactly where you are.  Dean's description of going back and looking at the past - how I got here - how come I think this way - was so helpful for me as well.

I had to learn to love myself before anyone else could love me.

Linistea



-- Edited by Linistea on Wednesday 27th of April 2011 11:03:45 AM

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Linistea wrote:

Big hugs, Freya.


 

 Oh, I forqot to do that   {{{{{{{Freya}}}}}}}}}  smile



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Dean


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Dean, thank you so much for your response to my post. I have never thought of a relationship as being one day at a time, and have always freaked myself out by thinking of it as forever, the forever part then seems to have caused me to go into all sorts of weird, controlling behaviours as I try to control what I'm going to be living with forever, do you now what I mean? I could feel the lightness of how it must feel for you doing it one day at a time as I was reading your response.

My partner and I were friends for two years before we got together as a couple. Looking back I think I was doing our friendship one day at a time without realising that's what i was doing because I didn't lay down a long series of expectations, I took care of myself, minded my own business, was an independent person, and came to him with love and a kind of lightness. We had the best time when we were together as friends. My partner has said to me often that when we got together the label of "relationship" seemed to change something about how we saw it all and I became very serious about how to do things, I saw much of everything as having massive importance as if everything was a sign of something or other that needed dealing with or mending, and I lost the ability to let go of anything, seeing it all as a series of issues to be worked through. It was my fear of intimacy that led me to see my relationship as something to be understood and figured out so that I could be safe and not lose him.

I imagine that being in a relationship one day at a time is a very beautiful way to relate to someone. I imagine each person is present for the other, doesn't put themselves or the other person under unbearable pressure, and that one day at a time allows each person to be who they are. It seems to me to be a very compassionate loving way to relate to yourself and each other.

Of course, right now i have no idea how to be with myself one day at a time so being that way with another person feels like a bit of a stretch! Thank so much for taking the time to leave your response Dean, I feel like I've been introduced to a whole new concept of relating to people and if I can apply it to myself and then to others, I'll be freeing up a lot of energy and acceptance that will give me a new way of being in the world, do you know what I mean? I had simply never thought of applying one day at a time to a long term relationship... I've been applying it to me applying the programme but had never taken it that step further to apply "one day at a time" to relationships in the way you've explained. It never even occured to me that I could apply one day at a time to my relationship with myself. Even in reading your post it helped me to release some of the fear and panic I've been carrying.

Thanks for your support Linistea, I've been taking steps over the past month to think about what I enjoy, what kinds of things I like to do, what kind of people I like to be around. I've been eating better and losing some wieght, dyed my hair, that kind of thing, but I know it needs to come from the inside out rather than the outside in, and I'm finding that tough at the moment. It really helps to come here and know I've got support and friendship.

Thanks for the hugs, they're much appreciated! Sending some back!
Freya

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Freya



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I'm only just working out how to use the edit page...

Some hugs,

(((Dean)))  (((Linistea))) smile 



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Freya



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Your awareness is wonderful.

What I have experienced is that when I am friends with someone there is no fear of abandonment so I can be myself.  When I enter a relationship the fear of rejection and abandonment change me and I become hypervigilent to always do the right thing and not rock the boat.  Basically I am no longer me.  I am not honest.

I agree more than 100% that when we change these behaviors it frees up some of the energy (which is a LOT) we spend trying to control everything and keep these people from leaving us.  I had to spend some time looking at my fear of abandonment.  The weird thing is, I had this fuzzy victim image that I have been left over and over and had a right to be afraid.  A little digging showed that most of the time (not always), it was ME leaving.  I was doing the abandoning but had this horrible fear of being abandoned.

Yes, happiness is an inside job - but fixing up our outsides does help.  Sometimes that can simply be by wearing a smile.  Smiling when you don't feel like it really does help change things!

You are doing great. 

Linistea



-- Edited by Linistea on Thursday 28th of April 2011 07:21:32 AM

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Dean wrote:

I've been there and it's not fun. Here's what worked for me. I realized that my feelinqs for that person, particularly when I felt abandoned, were the same feelinqs, that I've had time and time aqain, with various relationships. I stopped and I asked myself, durinq one of the maqically introspective moments, why did I feel the same way about several very different people that I was in romantic relationships with? I compared it to how I feel about several different people, who are just friends of mine. I feel completely different about each and every friend , each family member, each co-worker.... So why do I feel the same abandonment qreif about these different people? How could that be? The answer that I came away with, was that it had Nothinq to do with them. This was my stuff. I had placed my emotional security and self esteem with them (what a responsibility that they probably didn't ask for). They are not to blame. It was a misconception on my part. I was seeinq the situation, completely jaded, from a perspective of decades earlier. It was a strinq of unresolved previous relationships all emeshed into one continuous drama, like some soap opera for decades, where the drama is the same, even throuqh the actors have chanqed many times. I had to put an end to this, by qoinq back to my very first relationships and look hard. These where with my parents. Then in my childhood , I clunq to one friend after another, then my first qirlfriend. I was totally obsessed with her. That set the tone for the next 15 years, 6 or 8 serious relationships and a failed marriaqe.


This was my experience exactly, Dean absolutely nailed it
I was reading a book about how the brain works and learned that Love, grief, and smells actually are all stored in the same place, smells being scientifically proven to bring back memories more vividly then almost anything else, I think it's the lingam, maybe the cingulate, hold on, I'll go check, be right back....
Back, OK, it's the deep limbic system, the cingulate causes obsessive and recurring thoughts, for me, when I trigger the one, I trigger the other, OK, so anyway....when we sleep with someone, ie bond with them we store those emotions in our deep limbic system, that's why we can't sleep with someone for a long period of time without growing attached to them, and also why women get more attached more quickly then men, their limbic system is larger and more developed in most cases, anyhow, this is also where we store grief and pain, so when I "trigger" my abandonment during a break-up, I am re-living every break up I have ever experienced, and every abandonment I have ever experienced, this is due in large part to having made this person I am with fill that void and become an over-lay on that "gap" we call "the significant other", I am dating or married to an imaginary person, the person I WANT to be with, the person I THINK I should be with, not who the person actually is, so when I break up with this person I am losing all those fantasies, I am not breaking up with the person I am actually dating, but losing all those fantasies in my head, all those "if only this then that's" all those imaginary hopes and dreams
I remember once the first time I had feelings of "love" in sobriety realizing my feelings were all mine, they had NOTHING to do with this person I was "in love" with, the feelings came from inside me and I assigned them to her...it was very strange...like the love was real, but I realized I was assigning the feelings to someone I didn't really love if that makes sense, I mean I did love her but all of the emotions I was having were my own...so hard to explain
Anyhow, when I was in my 20's I met and fell in love with "the girl of my dreams", I knew it was her because everyone told me it was her...and I loved her, during the next 10 years in order to make it work with her I got sober, went to therapy, quit smoking, went to college, I went through an -incredibly- painful growing up process in order to make this thing work....and at the end of the day she left me for a married man...and I fell apart, I remember calling in to work just crying and sobbing and saying I wouldn't be able to make it that night and all I could say through my sobs was "it's not OK, it's not OK" and I fell apart, I lost 50 lbs in 30 days, I weighed 130 lbs, I looked like I was from Auschwitz, and this thing destroyed me for the next five years, now this wasn't so much from losing -her- per se, it was from me losing myself, I had put everything I had, everything I was into -making this work-, the quitting smoking, drinking, everything, I had put every ounce of who I was into having this thing work, every fiber of my being AS a human being, so in addition to the loss of the relationship, I felt like I was a failure as a man, that and I was young, and life and love are just a little more dramatic when we are young
Anyway, the point is, when I went through a break-up subsequently it triggered ALL of that, I wasn't just breaking up with THAT girlfriend, I was re-living my earlier break-ups including my abandonment stuff as a child...
just like my love was my own, so was my pain and grief, in many ways it had nothing to do with the person I was feeling the emotion towards, it was regurgitated and deep seated abandonment issues from my past and childhood, but in order to learn that, I had to learn the other end of it, that I had made this other person a three dimensional image in my head that met my needs, and fit my profile of love, and when reality differed from my image is when I would get upset...the truth was I was in love with a fantasy of my own making, I was in a fantasy world of my own making and I created my own emotions around this, so when I was going through the break up, the same was true, I was creating all of my own emotions based on past hurts, and unless and until I addressed those past hurts and pains I was going to continue to trigger them
In the Book of Job when Job is sitting on the pile of ash, he says "Lo, that which I feared has come to pass"
that to me is the single most telling sentence in the book of Job...
we CREATE our own reality and we become that which we fear, how many times have we seen people grow up to become the very parents they hated, how many times have we picked emotionally unavailable people because we ourselves were emotionally unavailable, how many times do we unconsciously re-create pain and fear and recurring troubles because that is what we are familiar with, how many times have we driven someone away and then staggered around with a knife in our back that we put there ourselves...
which, by the way, is exactly what my father said to me when I went to see him, broken beyond repair from a break up...he said "Son, you know you are my only son, and I love you beyond measure, but I have to tell you I derive some amusement from seeing you stagger around with this great huge knife in your back that you put there yourself, I KNOW it hurts, I KNOW you are in incredible pain, but the sooner you realize you put that knife there, the sooner you can pull it out"
So, as the years went on and I continued to work the steps I began to see the patterns and how they would repeat themselves, and it was like the other person was almost interchangable in some ways, I had a set idea about "reality" and I would get them to play out that role, whether it be "the lover" or "the villain" or "the abandoner" or someone who I just couldn't live up to their expectations...I was playing out the same roles over and over...
The book that helped me see the clinical reasons and offered solution was Change your Brain, change your life, it showed me that not everything was "in my head" or just a story I was telling myself that caused me to have a certain emotion, but an actual physiological response to a certain set of stimuli, when I addressed those I was in a lot better position to then address my "stories", the ones that caused me recurring pain...so for me I started breaking it down, I did the 4th step in the way suggested by AA by listing ALL of my relationships in a clolumn, seeing the patterns there with the aid of a sponsor, then redoing it again and again, and then I did the work out of the "please change the title of this book because it's actually really good brain book" to isolate what parts of my brain were causing me this trouble and it kind of breaks all this down into bite sized pieces, now I won't say I have all the answers now, or even any answers, except for I am learning what reality is and isn't, and 99% of what happens in this world isn't "reality" per se, but my reaction to it and my perception of it, and if that's the case, if I actually do "create my own reality" which I do, I have the opportunity to create a new and different one
Strangely enough another bit of information I found incredibly helpful was a new age-y film called "what the bleep do we know" that quite frankly is about 20% BS as far as I am concerned, it takes a lot of facts and then extrapolates some pretty far fetched ideas, but the way it explains those facts, like how we literally create our own reality and get addicted to drama made it clear for me, they dumbed it down and even made little cartoons...and that worked for me, I was like "OH!!, no ****!!!" and realized those things were true for me as well, that I got addicted to being hurt, I got addicted to not having my needs met, I got addicted to abandonment so I just kept recreating them in my life
Now the funny thing about this post is the title, "I've gone over to the dark side" which of course makes me think of Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, who went over to the dark side....
Why, do you remember?
in order to not lose the woman he loved, and he ended up losing her, himself, his friends, his soul, and ultimately his life
all on a fear based decision because he didn't want to lose his girl
there's a lesson there somewhere....
anyhow, I don't have to live like that any more...(((((hugs))))
sorry I took so long to respond


-- Edited by LinBaba on Thursday 28th of April 2011 08:43:21 AM

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Thanks Linistea, Your comment about feeling abandoned, but finding that actually it was you doing the leaving really resonated with me. I have been looking really closely at my realtionships while I'm taking my 8th step, and can see that I have repeatedly felt that I was being abandoned when it was actually me doing the leaving, particularly in my relationship with my partner.  I have emotionally "left" pretty much each and every time I've spent time with my partner but it's been an automatic response and I haven't realised I've been doing it.  He has then not had anything to connect to, and I've felt abandoned by HIS lack of connection.  And when he's tried to connect with me I've rebuffed him in a myriad of different ways , and then have felt justified in feeling victimised when he walked away, even though I have pushed him away.  It's very hard to feel the pain I have around that now that we're not together.  I honestly believed he was abandoning me, but it was actually the other way round most of the time.

Thanks Linbaba, that information is really useful to me, I will order the book.  I know there's physiological stuff going on in my head that's contributing to the problems I'm having with what I'm feeling, but haven't known where to look for more information about that, so really appreciate the link.  

Yep, I was aware of the Anakin reference.  I feel very much as if I've been coming from fear for a very long time and that the fearful decisions I have repeatedly made have caused me to lose the people I value the most, including myself.  I've spent a large part of my adult life feeling very isolated and lonely, unaware that I was the person causing it to be like that for me.  The awareness the programme and MIP  have given me means that now I understand that, as an adult, I have hurt myself far more than anyone else has done.  As well as really hurting other people too.  It's very hard to sit with the grief I feel around that, but I tell myself that all I can do is learn how to love myself, and then other people, and so do it differently from now on, one day at a time.

Freya   



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Freya

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