Dear Matt:

I feel some empathy for him, as I read your recent post.. Still, he’s done you wrong and I feel more empathy for you for having been betrayed by the one you loved and trusted.. what a shame. I wish it didn’t happen.

When I had my first quality therapy, my therapist at the time focused on emotion regulation skills. He assigned me with homework at the end of each session (or he’d email me a homework assignment after a session). Homework included listening to one of Mark Williams’s Mindfulness audio meditation series, every day. These are available online free of charge. I wonder if you’d like to listen to any one of them, the “Befriending” meditation perhaps. Maybe it will help you with your heartbreak. Maybe it will help your ex.

You wrote that “he kept pushing it deeper“, it being trauma, you mean. And pushing it in, suppressing it fueled a state of elevated stress which he tried to lower with excessive eating and cheating, as… emotion regulation un-skills..?

anita