It has taken me a long time to detach and I have done a thousand and one things to try and move on. It doesn’t work for me just to disregard these things. I need to understand something first before I can let it go. I’d appreciate some viewpoints from those of you with experience!
I just wanted to write something about the "need to understand" part of your post. I too have this strong "need to understand" or "figure things out" before I can let something go. And that is what often keeps me stuck. A few days I go I read this post and it was a light bulb for me. Maybe this will help you like it is helping me detach, it is from another thread on this board.
Awhile back, I found something about the dynamics that exist between the lonely child and abandoned child that really resonated with me, and dramatically shifted the focus of my therapy/healing process.
You can find the whole article here (
www.dailystrength.org/c/Physical_Emotional_Abuse/forum/13391054-lonly-child), but for me, what caught my attention back in January was this line:
"Trauma for the lonely child occurs mainly because of perceived failure they cannot “understand” enough (essentially an obsession at this point) ... . "
At the point when I read this article, I'd already spent the better part of 2+ years trying to "understand" why my undiagnosed partner of 12+ years decided to have an affair, lie to/about me in order to do so with impugnity, leave me when he got caught, empty our bank accounts, destroy my professional reputation/business, sever all ties with the five children he helped raise, mount a massive smear campaign against me, enable/allow/encourage/help/reward my replacement for slandering, harassing, stalking, and threatening me as well as my children, family, and friends - and, in general, consistently making decisions and engaging in behaviors that kept hurting me over and over and over again on a variety of levels and in a variety of different ways.
After reading this article, and starting to explore some of the ideas it presented with my therapist, I started to realize that trying to "understand" how/why my ex could do any of these things was the only way I'd ever been
allowed to cope with the similar feelings of being hurt by someone I loved, trused, and depended on when I was a child and didn't have the power, means, or ability to simply remove myself to a safe distance from people whose decisions and behaviors were insensitive, reckless, irresponsible, irrational, self-serving, frightening, violent, and abusive.
"Understanding" may not have changed the fact that I was hurt, but it kept me from being further hurt for
not understanding by being humiliated, punished, shamed, and made to feel stupid/selfish/petty for being hurt by what was said/done in the first place.
It was - without any doubt - an essential mechanism for coping with the effects of being the oldest child of a single (and very resentful) undiagnosed NPD/BPD mother of six when I didn't have the physical/emotional ability to actually say enough is enough, and just leave.
But it became an automatic, compulsive and completely unconscious reaction to being hurt that I
kept doing, never really questioned or thought about it at all - even as an adult - until I found myself so obsessed with "understanding" why my ex would say/do all these things that hurt me so much over and over again - staying in contact with him to both get the information I needed in order to "understand" and let him know I did "understand" so it/he wouldn't have any reason to hurt me anymore - and not being physically/emotionally
able to stop myself from doing it even though it
clearly wasn't working - that I had
no choice but to address it in therapy.
Five months later, and many hours of writing/therapy later, I know that "understanding"
why someone would
choose to hurt me doesn't change the fact that they
did, I
am, I have
every right to be, and that it
does/should change the way I feel/think about them.
That all my "understanding" actually does is make me feel stupid, selfish, petty, vindictive, immature, and ashamed of allowing myself to feel hurt in the first place. That it forces me to reject, deny, marginalize, invalidate, question, repress and suppress a whole bunch of really appropriate, predictable, and completely justifiable feelings/thoughts/reactions to behaviors that are hurtful and/or frightening.
That it doesn't make me feel any safer or better.
That all it
really does is make it physically/psychologically possible for me to
continue to allow myself to be subjected to that kind of behavior.
That it's an inherently non-responsive, ineffective, and ultimately very self-destructive way of dealing with how it feels to be hurt by someone I love, trust, and depend on.
That there is
no reason that makes it "okay" for anyone to hurt me. Ever.
That I don't
need to let it happen anymore. That I don't have to stick around. That I'm not a child. That I
can take care of myself. That I
do have the freedom to walk away/not leave myself in a position where I have to be subjected to it/find a way to cope with how it makes me feel.
And, you know what, that works
exactly the way I always secretly believed, felt, thought, hoped it would: it keeps me from being hurt in the first place.
The compulsion I had to "understand" what happened to me, and why, is what got me into therapy and even brought me to this board. It helped me get through a really difficult period for me physically/emotionally again even. But ultimately, I had to shift the focus of what I was trying to understand to myself in order to really be able to make any kind of definitive progress/change in the way I felt inside at all.
Not like I'm perfect or anything. I still struggle. I still self-aggrandize. Still engage in detached self-soothing (ahhh, the hours I've lost to pinterest and Netflix!). Still find my thoughts wandering back to trying to figure out/understand what happened and why on occasion even. But less and less as time goes by, and I'm better at seeing all those things for what they are now so am a little more mindful/respectful of both what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, and tend to make myself at least try to do something different/better/more effective/less ultimately self-destructive to get the comfort I need.
And it seems to be working. For now anyway. Which is about all I can hope/ask for. One day, one step at a time.
