Wow Annette – what a powerful story! One of the problems i think we face in our society is the image that we were designed to be, well, perfect. We often strive for perfection in what we do in life and often end up getting down on ourselves when we fall short of acheiving it.
In truth though, many spritual disciplines stress that perfection is not “the way of this world”. Rather, this world is a staging-ground for constant growth and discovery. The illusion of perfection is, well, it’s an illusion, and many people chase it, unfulfilled, their entire lives.

You’ve learned some hard lessons and they’ve brought you face to face with the daylight between your values (honesty, commitment and truth) and your actions/behavior (totally opposite to your values). Psychologist say that when weact against ourown inner beleifs, it actually destroys our self-esteem, often causin us to engage in more unhelathy behaviour.
But this is no reason to get down on yourself. You are here to learn and grow and it sounds to me like you’ve learned a lot about who want and who you don’t want to be. Now you have the gift of being able to work toward becoming that person and creating the marriage that you really want to have.
Even greater, you are blessed that you still have a marriage to work on and you’re solucky that this is your struggle and that no one else got hurt! What a blessing!!

It obvious won’t be easy for you Annette, but getting down on yourself won’t help. Be honest with yourself. Accept the pain and loneliness you felt that originally drove you to seek external comforts in the first place and practice being accepting of yourself for your mistakes.

As i mentioned above, many say that this world was created as a staging ground for im-perfection ie. as a place to experience the endless joy of growth and discovery. In line with that tradition, in fact your perfection lies in your carrying out that mission – never giving up and always striving to become better and bring more love and goodness into the world.
Good luck to you Annette – we are here for you and we support you! Your work is to practice self-love and acceptance. Only when you accept your mistakes will you be able to grow from them.
“New Beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” Lao Tzu

The greatest benefit I received from learning Myers/Briggs and the Eneagram systems was that it helped see my “robotic” tendencies and thereby gave me a map through which to notice the limitations my personality was placing on me.
I find that using these personality typing systems is a tremendous tool for helping us grow out of old patterns and learning to achieve new goals.
Without these systems, many people stay locked in an invisible prison of personality, unable to notice their own habitual (and often times destructive, if not just limiting) patterns.
They can be a tremendous tool for personal growth!
(sorry, i didn’t really respond to the OP here. apologies)

• This reply was modified 10 years, 3 months ago by David Bederman.

Hi Eliza. Thank you for sharing and I’m sorry for your pain. It’s so great that you’re expressing it and sharing what you’ve been going through. After studying love, relationships and self-esteem for many years, the most valuable lesson I learned was the following:

“You can’t love anyone until you learn to love yourself”

One of the greatest challenges facing our generation is that many of us – most of us – have low self-esteem. We don’t believe in ourselves enough, we haven’t been tough to!. While love is a basic and fundamental need for all of us, many times the type of love we are looking from others is a way to validate our sense of self.

In other words, if we have a low image of ourselves, what we might be “hanging on to” when longing for the warmth of an old relationship is actually the feeling of validation that “I’m actually lovable!”. So many of us have grown up without getting all the love we really needed and our inner child concludes that we “must not have been worthy of love”, since we didn’t get enough of it.
This belief can follow us our entire lives if we don’t get control of it. I’m not trying to judge you and tell you you have “low self-esteem” here, I’m just speaking from my experience and sharing what has made a huge impact in my life.

In short, the more we learn to believe in ourselves – believe in how wonderful, how amazing and how special we really are – the more we are able to love ourselves, the more we will create the space for meaningful and lasting relationship to happen and the less we will need to hang onto to memories of old relationships.

Btw, learning to love yourself means building self-esteem. As author Nathaniel Brandon says -“Self-concept is destiny.”. He’s the one to read here. (Check him out)

If you want, a great first step you can take to building self-esteem and self-love is to spend time every day imagining yourself doing something that’s “outside of your comfort zone”. Scientists have proven that the more we see ourselves doing things that are outside our comfort zone (both in our minds and in real life!) the more our self esteem grows.
Try it. You’re awesome Eliza! (and so are you Kat!)

• This reply was modified 10 years, 3 months ago by David Bederman.