Eva,

I hate your going though this soul sucking, all mind consuming…stuckness. (ok,stuckness is what I’m rolling with, because to me it’s the proper word, even if it’s not.) and hoped something something I share helped it click for you. For me, I could hear this or that advice, understand why it should work, but struggle making it click internally. Here’s what helped my heart click to what my brain already knew.
•List 5 core values. I suggest googling the term and coming to your own understanding of what core values mean to you, so your able to define your own. Due to the vagueness this helped me:
•What did I consistently never regret doing, while also regret when I didn’t do it?
•Our sense of purpose that drives our choices to ensure we are in harmony with our true self.
•A set of truths of the inner most you, regardless of the emotional attachment we have towards someone or something, while understanding how this appears with a rational mindset, so we’re able to predict and notice how our emotional reactions, could potentially make us excuse the lack of ourselves holding such values to our standards, in the future.
•Looking back on a situation/argument that bothers you badly, while naming someone of great importance to you (for ex. Child/best friend/etc.) now how do you hope they would handle that situation, so they leave the situation with dignity. Now however you would hope they’d act or react, is how you hope to react to similar situations,going forward.

•When dealing with people we’ve known for years, we know the odds of their behaviors. This is a powerhouse of info, due to its ability for us to predict the worst case scenarios, analyze how we would typically react to it so we can determine how we want to react, then play/practice that reaction over and over mentally and even out loud, so we know and believe we know how to handle it.

•Doing this for me, allowed me to see that he intentionally said and done certain things as he knew I would react by screaming, yelling, etc .. and then could call me crazy, and have every excuse possibly to leave.

•The goal isn’t to get this right every single time, it’s to move forward feeling slightly better with how you handled situations, compared to your history. There will be times when you have complete control over yourself, but break the next time. That is okay, as we already proved we’re capable of doing so, and it takes awhile to break a cycle of reactions that we spent years being in.

•Watching them realize that their pokes no longer make you react, while you can see them building confusion and frustration, with more aggressive attempts to change the amount control you have over your calm, is by far the most free and powerful feeling, I ever had. This is also why you have someone else with or around you, as this will seem out of no where to them, and losing control of someone else, is a hard thing to accept.

In order for me to let go of the 18 years of proven potential, security, and trust, that my 20 year marriage had compacted over those years, I had to accept the past year and half’s reality for what it was.. This was difficult for me, yes we had struggles, but we had made it through everything, what could possibly bring on this type of behavior from him? It didn’t matter, what I learned was I had to understand the role I played, in the situation that bothered me the most, then determined how I hoped to act/react if it happened again. I had to rebuild my confidence, my intuition, my trust within myself. Be patient with yourself, be compassionate with yourself, but most importantly remember your worthy of the hard times that you may find yourself dealing with, all in an effort to be a better you.