2.5 years and still she haunts me

[emancipated]

I used to have a profile here and as my headline reads. It was indeed 2 and half years ago when well my world ended. Since then I have grown and matured but yet at least once a day I find myself thinking of her. Since then I am unsure of most  things.

My ex displayed many traits that led me to believe she was BPD, the abuse the constant shaming and guilt, the total blaming of the end us without any responsibility taken on her part and the instant rebound with a much more financially stable albeit much older and to be  candid much less better looking man. They are still together from what I can tell I moved 6 hours away and havent seen her since june 2014  she has never contacted me I am a blip in her past I dont feel I desire her as my partner any longer but admittedly I miss her kids and the kids were  a big reason I stayed as long as I did they were my redemption. I may have had a terrible childhood but I wasnt gonna let that be their reality. She has jumped from relationship to relationship and just like most of us had experienced had another one lined up just as they were stringing us along to put it in a football context I went from dak  prescott to tony romo in just under 2 years and the new guy was now dak prescott.  Can anyone shed insight into any of this? Id hoped to be long past this by now. And one final note the shari shrieber article that details ur bodies physical manifestation of stress from these toxic relationships giving u real. Medical problems im 32 rarely drink, dont smoke, watch what I eat exercise 4 days a week religiously I have a 10 inch tumor  on my liver and am constantly having a new ailment .

Any help would he appreciated.

[drained1996]

 

Hello and welcome back Unsure, I feel your pain on the still thinking about her issue.  I did that for a long while... .I think like you... .because I was attached to her children as well it made that issue drag on more than it should. 

I also want to say I'm sorry to hear about your health condition, and I'm sure that stress added on top of detachment... .is not the easiest thing to deal with in life.  Yes, BPD's can make our emotional, mental and even physical health deteriorate, and dealing with that is part of our recovery path. 
I'll ask, do you see a therapist?

Note the lessons on the right side of the page, and the five stages of detachment.  I'm sure you've read them in the past, but it might be a good review to see where you think you now stand as well as re-familiarizing yourself with some good tools for recovery. 

I learned a whole lot in my own process by reading others posts and stories.  I also noted that the more I posted and shared, the more I got in return.  You're back in the right place, and we look forward to hearing more from you on where you are in your process... .and anything else about life that may be on your mind.  You are not alone!   

[rfriesen]

Hi unsure,

I want to echo what drained said and tell you how sorry I am to hear that you're dealing with health issues. Good that you're doing everything you can to stay healthy.

Like others here, I can relate pretty deeply to many of the feelings you express. One thing in particular struck me -- you say that since the relationship ended, you're "unsure of most things". Same thing happened to me, and it is an extremely disorienting and unpleasant situation to be in at first. For a long time, I just wanted to go back to being the person I was before the relationship and feeling the way I used to feel about life. Some days I still get that longing. But eventually I realized that you just can't un-experience this kind of relationship. Either I was going to spend the rest of my life fighting the experience and trying to undo it, or I was going to embrace the strangeness, accept that this relationship changed me, and see what I can make of this new perspective on the world. So, yes, life is stranger, more questionable, filled with more uncertainty, wounds, broken desires, questions. But it's also richer, more interesting, more open-ended, less constrained and constraining than it was before.

It's not easy to embrace change, especially when it comes in the form of a mack truck of a relationship that runs you over. But what other choice do we have? Eventually I decided that if I was going to be dealing with unpleasant emotions, thoughts, feelings and carrying around a wound from my relationship, and that there was nothing I could do to change that, then why should I be afraid to try new things? I'll treat my pain like something that just happens to be there, like a dog that follows me around, and I'll get on with life -- it can be liberating, because I'm no longer trying to avoid unpleasant emotions in other aspects of my life. In contrast, most other pains and disappointments are minor and we can stop cringing and worrying that some action or activity or undertaking will end in failure. So what? Life's a mixed bag no matter how carefully we plan it out, so we might as well get on with what we want to do and not worry too much about failure.

I'm not saying that makes it easy to deal with pain or that it makes it go away. But over time, you might find you're able to carry that pain more lightly. And then, slowly it starts to fade. Maybe it never disappears. But it becomes more of a sore joint than a crippling headache.