I have been reflecting recently on my own feelings of torment. It’s a sensation I've experienced over the course of the last 4 years on an ongoing basis. always there. the severity varying from being subtle to excruciating. I have been consistently living with the emotional sense of torment since I first decided I needed to get out of the marriage and it’s never fully ceased. And I've worked hard to overcome it. I understand the basis for it…. I feel a huge amount of guilt over having left the marriage. I am not fond of “bailing” on something I’ve made a commitment to see through. And I never considered doing so until things reached a point at which I could not imagine staying would be better for my kids, myself or even her.
In a recent email exchange, it was stated that I’d done great damage to them by leaving, and I pretty much lashed out in response. I called out that I didn’t think she’d still ever considered how hard it has been and continues to be, how to have reached the point of leaving meant I’d reached a point of being incapable of staying or I’d have done so. Duh.
The pressure of this recent exchange, the work yet to complete the divorce agreement… it’s all started to overwhelm me, to the point that I recently followed a positive morning guided meditation by getting irritated with my son’s pestering insistence that his interests and timeline were more important than mine. I ended up getting angry with him that I slammed my car door… hard enough that I’m glad it still works. Then, after dropping him off at school, after spending about 10 min wresting with a jammed USB extension cord that I’d put a good deal of time into installing within my console, I became so frustrated with having ‘yet another thing to have to deal with’ surfacing…. that I violently ripped the cord out, destroying it and the work I’d done getting it there in the first place.
I see a counselor from time to time, and I did after this. It’s been about a year, and it was needed. She’s been a recurring resource throughout all of this process, and it helped me to talk through and reconcile my increasing feelings of anger, depression, and guilt.
The counselor reminded me, once again, that I can’t hold onto a desire for my ex to accept a change that goes against her core belief systems and character. It’ll never happen. No matter how generous or thoughtful or considerate I might be. No matter how much I agree to pay in support, or how deeply present and engaged I am in my kids lives, or how I try to help out with household issues that surface. No matter what I might do, it’ll never be enough. In her mind I ‘ruined her life’, I ‘broke up her family’ and she’ll never be capable of stepping back enough to see how much better it is now than it had or would have been.
I have to be resigned to that. I’ve written about it here before. Yet that’s still difficult because it’s counter to my own way of looking at the world and at people. So if the guilt or anger arise again, I need to recognize it, understand it’s origin and context in the bigger picture.
There’s an interesting psychological theory called the “Inner Family Systems” that my counselor and I had discussed before that covers this sort of scenario. I went and found some audio lectures last week, and a book to read, and I’m hoping that helps me continue to work through this and manage it to the best of my abilities.
It felt good to be told by her that I’m doing well, that this is nothing unique, that divorce can be the most grueling experience of a lifetime, that it dredges up all sorts of inner conflict and emotions, and that I’ve been doing the right things with meditation and writing.
I’m still I’m putting myself out there.