I am not sure you ever move past the "how could I have done this" part. It’s been seven years and I still shake my head at the stupidity, the desperation, the depravity of my actions.
I also think you can’t force yourself to process something.
Instead, I focused a lot on who I wanted to be and in that way it was kind of a reverse engineering of the whys. You are still new so I think it’s sort of normal to hope for these deep dark whys that might make it all make sense.
So here is a little of how that went for me.
Why did I do it? Because I wanted to. It felt good, I was down, this other person was willing to say the things I needed to hear. There you have the surface.
To get underneath it was more how could I be someone who would want to do that?
I felt entitled because I was unhappy.
And that one breaks into two:
Why did I feel entitled to extra intimacy and support?
And why was I so unhappy?
Oh because I relied mostly on others to make myself happy. Being happy was my responsibility but I blamed my h, this came the entitlement.
I wrote a mission statement for myself, and practiced it for a while and then more things revealed themselves.
I don’t remember the exact statement. I had it written down and I would look at it every day. It was something like:
I want to be a woman of integrity, one that does the right thing when No one else is looking. I want to learn to light myself up by focusing on healthy things that make me happy. I want to be consistent and reliable, and I want to be able to have true and deep connection with my husband. I want to show up authentic to ally as me in all situations, and I want to know myself more deeply.
It was longer and more detailed, and I added to it as time went along. One could really look at this and know that I wasn’t doing these things and I had to break down the pieces of it to get to their essence. I had to get underneath them and figure out why they are important to me. I had to practice them. But you can reverse engineer those to be whys.
I didn’t have integrity when it mattered most (though I also reflected on the ways I had great integrity- that’s important too- to realize that we aren’t all bad or all good, everyone is a mixture of light and dark. The goal is to expand the light and work as much in it as you can.
Over time, what will happen is you will discover who you really are. You will learn to have compassion with yourself over past issues and you will learn to accept the things you did in that frame of mind. It’s difficult to see it but healing is really just a path of self discovery to find your self worth, purpose, self love, and to be able to accept you are not now nor will you ever be a perfect person. You will learn that joy can only land on you when you stay in the present moment.
Therapy will help too.
So in other words, don’t make self forgiveness your mission. Your mission is acceptance over where you have been, where you are trying to go, and trying to keep the person you are today motivated and moving in the right direction.
I do think you are starting to focus more on what you need to do than the outcome of your relationship or chasing new relationships so in that way, perhaps change has already been underfoot.
