Trying to shake those habits and thoughts

[JustKeepTrying]

It's been awhile. I am not traveling currently. My son needed help so I rented a place and moved him in. He is doing well but it will be a long road to recovery. So I am back here at home in all the places that I find triggering.

But that is not what I want to talk about. I am 18 months into a serious relationship. We see each other monthly or every few weeks. We are at a distance and neither of us are rushing. There is no need for marriage at this age. But I have found a habit - or a reaction - that I am struggling with.

I look at pictures of myself from my previous marriage to a diagnosed OCPD. There were so many things that I did to cope - and this past weekend I was going through pics with my new fellow and found a funny one I shared and he noted how short my was. Out of my mouth came this line "well, my ex used to comment all the time on how long I was in the bathroom getting ready so I kept my hair short so I wouldn't be in the bathroom long." It was a completely unnecessary statement. I could've let it go and yet as I stumbled through it I felt so much resentment and anger. Not at my ex - but at myself for staying. For making those changes so accommodate someone else. He controlled so much of my life from the color of my clothes to how long I took a shower. At the end of the marriage, I wouldn't leave the house or take a phone call for fear of having to report it to my ex and what would happen if I didn't.

I struggle with that today. Leaving the house - I am amazed that I traveled like I did. I would leave then. But now, not so much. Being pulled back is hard.

So I am starting in person therapy again. I used an online counselor as it worked with my travel. But as I sit here and wait for my son to recover, I am going to take the time to work on these little things that cause so much resentment.

And I am going to see if I can leave more and make friends here. Again, it's hard. My ex would make so many comments on what I said to whom after a social event making me sound like a freak. It's hard to shake those habits and thoughts that I lived with for decades.

Other than that, I am doing well. A life coach once told me that my life will be a game of inches - slow and incremental improvement. But each inch will have a profound effect.

Wishing all of you well. Perhaps I will hop on here more. Now that I am in one place for a bit.

[notrightinthehead]

Reading your post reminded me of the nights spent furious, raging with anger at him and myself, unable to take my rage out by walking vigorously. In a few months it will be 7 years now that I am NC - except for letters through lawyers. I think I lost the rage about three years ago.
My daughter moved in with me about 1,5 years ago and that led to frequent talks about her childhood and her dad. But I can look at this quite detached now.
I don't know how many years you are free by now, I believe we have to work through the anger and feel it. It's most unpleasant to allow that anger to wash through you, but it becomes weaker every time you allow it to take its path. I found that writing helped me. I also drew and made collages and glued that in an album - my divorce album.
Hopefully you can find your swing and joy back in these aggravated circumstances.

[treesgrowslowly]

Hi JKT,

Totally agree with notrightinthehead about the anger being there to contend with after being in that kind of relationship.

I love how the life coach created that image of inches and each inch having a profound effect. I am over 10 years NC from my NPD parent, and the damage was profound and every inch was hard won but it often only felt like progress after some time passed and I could see oh, things are healing. It takes time to heal. A lot of life coaches / therapists do not want to tell us how long it takes to heal from relationships with a PD. It is a process of gaining an inch and trusting that you are moving inch by inch even though it doesn't always feel like it.

Having a therapist who understands why good people end up with PD partners, is very helpful to healing in my opinion. Being able to tell your story to someone in that therapy office is likely to help. I have learned that telling our truth to a therapist is helpful to us because out in the rest of the world, most people won't know what to do with our truths - the things that happened to us in past relationships. A lot of us here can probably attest to this. That once we have a place to tell our truths to a therapist we can process the anger at what happened during all those years with the PD partner (or in my case, parent).

Trees

[square]

JKT, you went through hell. You did what you had to do to survive.

And that process of survival included trying to make it work. And trying to figure out what was going on. Those things take time.

And then you very bravely left.

But I know what you're talking about. I know it. I feel disgusted with myself about how small I made myself sometimes. And how much I've lost that I'll never ever get back. My very best years. My last opportunities as a sighted person.

I'm not as far along as you, but I can relate to having to face some of this stuff. I'll sweep the floor and think about him telling me that my sweeping job made the floor look worse than when I began, and I'd wonder if there was any explanation that could possibly make that true. And I have to ask my daughter every few days how the kitchen floor looks because I can't see the dirt and don't know if I'm some weird freak of nature who can push a broom around and actually eject additional dirt from the broom onto the floor as I go. I even hunker down and feel the floor with my hands to check, now and then.

That's the legacy of living in crazy. We can leave Crazytown but we take part of it with us. I guess we have to, bit by bit, identify and strip away those parts. I think I need a little more time to learn for myself whether the damn floor is reasonably clean or not, because it's not as easy as just saying it's perfectly clean - it does get dirt and crumbs on it. I've got to decide based on my own standards and my own timeline. And you get to do that too.