ChamomileTea, I think my problem is rumination leading to resentment. I decided to start ruminating on it again because I also recently decided to open up to my wife more, both emotionally and intimately. This change has been a positive thing for us, but Ive noticed its had the side effect of increasing my anxiety, because I am afraid of being hurt again.
Rumination past the point of your stay or go decision is just wiring an insecure neural pathway into your brain. It's kind of like the way a stuck needle wears a groove into a vinyl record, right? Your preferred pathway becomes the ruminative one and it doesn't matter that it's causing you suffering, your mind will continue to default to the familiar.
I tend to think of this as like the parable of The Two Wolves....
A Cherokee elder was teaching his young grandson about life.
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil- he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt and ego.
The other is good- he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.
This same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too."
The boy thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"
The elder simply replied,
"The one you feed."
When we continue to feed this neurotic, ruminative pathway, we continue to be stuck there. And yeah, I get it, it FEELS necessary, and I think it actually is necessary up to the point where we've made our "stay or go" decision. After that, it becomes an unhealthy obsession. We tend to find what we're looking for in life, to hit where we aim. And if we're aiming to keep our pain alive, that's what will happen. If we're looking for happiness and contentment in our marriage, that can happen too... but that requires feeding a New Wolf. That new wolf has to represent the future we're trying to achieve, right? When we visualize our destination and start FEEDING that vision with optimism and positivity, we're creating a new neural pathway. And yeah, it takes time and our old wolf is always waiting to gobble up whatever we let slide on a bad day. But the longer we starve him, the weaker he gets.
Rumination has no purpose past the decision to stay or go. It's there to inform our choice, and believe me, I argued my ass off with my therapist, so confident that there must be more, some purpose I was missing, but all that got me was two years of deep, dark depression. If you love your fWW and you want to be happy with her, you have to stop ruminating, stop obsessing, and feed your new wolf. If you don't, get an attorney, file for divorce and leave. This ugly limbo stops when YOU stop it. It doesn't just magically go away on its own when you're feeding that bad wolf every day and driving that groove into your brain.
ETA:
I am afraid of being hurt again.
This part is about being emotionally self-reliant. When you can trust YOURSELF to handle whatever comes your way, that fear dissipates. Honestly, I think you'd get a lot out of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson. It's geared toward people who have split, but the author does a really good job of explaining how the Fear of Abandonment is hardwired into us from birth. It's why we cry for our moms as babies. Then later, we kind of transfer that emotional reliance onto our primary relationship. Of course, when that relationship breaks, we're defenseless. But we can learn to have that kind of emotional reliance on ourselves and then simply enjoy our relationship. At that point, we're bulletproof.
This book actually helped me more than any other title that I read, even though it wasn't about R. It turned out that getting into a primary relationship with myself is what allowed me to move past the trauma. I can experience emotional intimacy with my fWH, but it doesn't replace the emotional reliance I have on myself anymore.
[This message edited by SI Staff at 7:51 PM, Thursday, January 13th]