Hey folks. I continue to be grateful for your kind replies and concerns. I keep writing here because it is helping me heal and I believe that to be open and honest about my journey helps others in some way. Not everyone gets what I am going through, nor do they agree with the path I take, but I continue as it is my path and true to me. For those who have supported that and have found resonance, I write for you, however infrequently.
I find myself sitting at the computer with a couple of hours ahead of me before the boy comes home. So I am hoping to catch up. I can only ever create a drop in the pan on here and usually I write when I am feeling particularly down or find a point of understanding about the past that propels me forward. So today is a bit different in that I feel great and really can't think of anything to say of mind blowing-proportions.
A week or so back, I thought I was going crazy, the closest to crazy I have ever felt. When I say crazy, I mean out of control and so bizarrely weird that I thought I was going to drop off the dock of sanity into the ocean of losing my mind. Since then I have come to the conclusion that I might be suffering from PTSD. I have done some online study to see if there is such a thing as PSTD after a relationship where someone has cheated on a person and boom, yes there is. The profound nature of the cheating that Mono has done has made it hard for me to cope with the excessive amounts of information and memories related to that. I have moments where, without my control, I end up swallowed up by a sheer mass of emotion. My Christmas was consumed with memory after memory that left me incapable of coping, to the point where I was concerned for myself.
Yesterday the dear women of the (poly) women's group I facilitate helped me through that and I am hoping that more therapy, more counselling, more acupuncture and other forms of therapies will help me make sense of it all and help me pull through. All of this self care and all of the people that simply listen and respect my head space are the reasons why I feel so good today.
Here is some stuff I learned that helped:
Gaslighting! "It is also quite typical for a questioning spouse to have had his or her reality denied for years by the unfaithful partner, who insists that he or she is not cheating, that he or she really did need to stay at work until midnight, that he or she is not being different or distant, and that the worried partner is just being 'paranoid, mistrustful, and unfair.' In this way, betrayed spouses are made over time to feel as if they are the problem, as if their emotional instability is the issue, and they blame themselves. Eventually, faced with a web of lies and well-crafted defenses, they begin to doubt their own feelings and intuition. Their thoughts and emotions are denied so the cheater can continue to cheat; and as we have long known from work with abused children, being made to feel wrong when you are right – having your accurate reality denied – is a solid foundation upon which much trauma is built."
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/…/understanding-relationship…/
I wrote this elsewhere: "All that time, I was told that I was too emotional and needed to work on settling down, that I overthought and got too passionate. I was ITCHING with intuition and didn't know why! I knew for years something wasn't right and blamed myself. Now, this holiday season, I sit here blaming myself again because, frankly, I'm just weird. I don't feel like my skin is my own. I don't feel worthy. Strangely, it feels more comfortable to believe the lies I was told above than to figure out who the fuck I am. Sadly, in some moments, I would take him and what I had back, just to feel normal again. The abuser and the abused.... cycling around and around. No wonder women go back to their abusers."
This helped too:
http://www.survivinginfidelity.com/healing_library/reconciliation/stress_disorder.asp