Getting Through ‘The Slog’

You can’t handle it all at once. You do it one day – one minute – at a time.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help everywhere you go. You need it.

And yes, not everyone will be kind, and yes, sometimes you’ll have bad days. But the bad days will become fewer, and you’ll gain more and more strength.

Happiness and good mental health are absolutely based in a relationship with reality. Chumps and addicts have a lot in common: we are confronting a reality that really hurts.

But fleeing that hurt instead of facing it doesn’t bring freedom. Facing it – slowly, over time – does bring freedom, and peace, and Meh.

You can do it.

You sound super together so keep at it.
I struggle with sobriety too and I’ve decided to stop shaming myself for slipping up, which I think is just part of the slog, but sometimes I just need to just not feel the constant pain, but it’s for sure on my list of spackle that needs to be removed from my own story. Such is the chump.
Have a good week.

It’s like in Finding Nemo where Dorie says, “Just keep swimming.” Part of surviving the slog for me was finding the smaller victories (teeth getting brushed, laundry getting done, attending teacher conferences)… bigger victories like going No Contact and getting a divorce settlement take TIME… and 24 hours can feel like a 100 when you’re in the slog. Get to your meetings (put your oxygen mask on first)… great wisdom in the rooms and the serenity prayer might become your best friend and letting go of what you can’t control! I have faith in you.

Nepeta, you are MIGHTY! Congratulations on starting a sober life. I’ve been sober 33 years and very active in AA. I love the concepts of taking life one day (or hour) at a time, striving to do B- work (just show up), praying to be inspired, meditating, asking my HP to help me be loving and tolerant (but not abused). Doing the next right thing in each moment. Realizing that it is always “now” and even in the darkest times “now” was ok- I had heat, water, children and pets to love. “This too shall pass” has been a mantra and helpful for me. ????????????. Maybe we will unknowingly be sitting in a meeting someday.

That is a lot!
Knee-deep in slog!

Keep pushing, way way way better days ahead

I too am in this slog, yesterday being a particularly bad day! I am three months out from D Day and most days I am on auto pilot. I feel like I am in marriage purgatory as he is dragging out the divorce even though he is happy living the single life with OW. I am so thankful to have stumbled into this group, nobody understands this pain like a fellow chump.

Six months is very early, as others are sharing. I went into the mental hospital at two months out and then spent another month working to get matched up to a therapist who could at least stand to listen to my screaming, crying rages. I had two counseling sessions a day for a while, then was able to graduate to three sessions a week. Baby steps.

I had two friends on speed dial who made life/death difference to me day after day. I would call, they would pick up, and I couldn’t even say words I was so raging, screaming, crying out of control. One used this response several times of: in a very calm voice she would ask me to look around. Could I find three red things? then she would stay with that until I found one thing and responded with a real word. Then she’d ask me to listen for two things I could hear. Then 1 thing I could touch. It’s a way to reengage the brain. My other friend knew that if I called and was silent, it meant she should chatter on and on about her day, about her wife’s day, about the weather, about the community meeting last week…..anything. Once every few minutes she would pause and wait. Then chatter on. Eventually, during one of the pauses I could respond, “Oh, I hadn’t heard that yet.” or something equally vanilla….but it meant my brain was circling back in to take over again and I was no longer in danger. She answered hundreds of these calls in that first year after D-Day.

I’m two years out. Just in the past three months, I don’t cry much. Sometimes I want to, but then I find I don’t need to after all. I can physically feel that my heart no longer has a searing hole in it, that there must be a tender layer of healing building up that keeps it from feeling like air on an open wound.

It’s over. I didn’t cause it. I can’t fix it. I’m not broken. Chumpnation is a very big part of this for me. I am grateful! Maybe I am in the slog now. It’s amazing to look back and see how far I’ve come. I wouldn’t have believed any human create healing like that.

Hi Lost,

I can only talk about what helped me so keep whatever’s useful and ditch the rest.

I started getting mystery autoimmune flares in response to stress after my third child. It would start as a feeling like my spine was stiff and I couldn’t easily turn my head, then it would become all over body pain and a strange sense of near tunnel vision with or without migraine. The first doctors I saw said it was somatic and I should stop breastfeeding and take antidepressants but I thought this was BS. Back then I wasn’t depressed, just in pain. Also I’ve never been suggestible, can’t even be hypnotized. I knew this was a real thing. The worst part is that I have a lot of old sports and dance injuries and all those old injuries would get worse and stay worse with every flare to the point I couldn’t walk without pain.

Inflammation is the enemy and I started to figure out this was the main problem I was dealing with. Because I have a child with a complex and chronic medical condition who’d been medically prescribed the ketogenic diet (it reportedly changes the balance of gut flora which in turn reduces inflammation) and I’d seen how well this worked with him regarding inflammation (symptoms and lab markers), I tried it with my doctor’s support. Now whatever autoimmune condition I have remains a mystery since I rarely have any symptoms and many of these conditions are diagnosed primarily by symptoms.

My son also takes natural supplements and is celiac so ultimately the two other kids and I all shifted into his regimen because it’s easier and because we were all seeing benefits. People were surprised that teens and tweens would voluntarily live without sugar and starches but I think the way it works is once you get off the blood sugar roller coaster, you no longer get cravings or even hunger pains. We have to eat on a schedule or we sometimes forget. Meals are pretty basic but all organic so I signed up with a farm share club to bring down the cost. Since the kids hate fish, we eat a lot of roast organic chicken and sometimes beef with mountains of vegetables and healthy oils like olive oil and avocado oil.The sugar free bacon is all for me since the kids don’t like it.

For me, no food tastes as good as living without pain feels. Good thing I’d gotten my health in order and had been doing this for some time before FW launched into his fuckwit-fest or I think my stress-crash would have been much worse and I wouldn’t have bounced back as quickly. I find it funny in retrospect that part of FW’s fabricated DARVO resentment was the “crunchy household” and so, out of “rebellion,” he and the AP turned themselves into bloated sodden pre-diabetic wrecks from all the booze and restaurant grub. They sure showed me.

Oh, and Halle Berry wasn’t lying that keto (for her diabetes) can be anti-aging or even reverses the aging process in some ways. That’s been fun. As FW looked worse and worse, I started looking better and better. But that was last I even sat in a room with him. Cutting gluten didn’t even compare to the health benefits of cutting FW.

Another step towards health and meh was that I don’t go anywhere near RIC-type pop-psych or “codependency” resources. I reverted to my training as an advocate for dv survivors and view FW’s behavior through the dv lens. Abuse is abuse is abuse. The psychological profiles of abusers and cheaters are virtually the same in some pretty startling ways and so are the effects on victims such as captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome, telescoping sense of life span, learned helplessness, etc. There’s no shame in initially falling prey since even trained intelligence professionals are never given whole parcels of sensitive information but only bits and pieces because they’ll all predictably crack, bond with captors and spill the beans if captured and subjected to stressors which DV expert Richard Gelles has compared directly to the typical coercive control methods used by domestic abusers.

The tendency to captor bond to the loudest monkey is hardwired in our species. The difficulty I have with the expressions “thinking like a victim” or “victim mentality” is that people who accuse themselves of this have usually fallen for the therapeutic myth that victims emit voodoo tractor beams that “draw” abuse too them and that they have difficulty leaving because of some inherent psychological deficiency. Meanwhile captured intelligence professionals are routinely deprogrammed after release to the extent the reaction to abuse is pretty universal.

Due to these myths and misperceptions, abuse victims generally aren’t seeking the hardcore dv victims resources that could probably benefit them. I include male chumps in this though this material is probably more difficult to absorb to the extent that, due to statistics, victims are typically described as female and abusers as male. But again, abuse is abuse is abuse and the model still fits. As clinical researcher Evan Stark writes in his brilliant book “Coercive Control,” one of the reasons victims are dissuaded from accessing better resources is because the public believes that abuse doesn’t fall under the DV banner without broken bones. But the latter is only one part of the equation. Most abusers would prefer to achieve the same paralysis in their prey through less athletic, less legally risky means (why virtually all batterers cheat). In any case, the first step to no longer being a victim is to fully admit to having been one and coming to understand things from that perspective. The books heavily favored by survivors when I was working as an advocate were the works of criminologist Donald Dutton who studied batterers like bugs in prison settings for decades; and books and studies on trauma recovery and victims of violence and abuse by founding psychotraumatologist Frank M. Ochberg (and his colleagues like Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft).

I’ve been where you are. My whole identity was him. See my post further down for more about how I “found myself” again.

As hard as it is STOP TALKING TO HIM. Don’t text, don’t call, don’t see him. Understand that he doesn’t care how you feel. If anything it is feeding his ego to see how important he still is to you. My ex got off on seeing me in pain. It’s sick and twisted, but it’s the hard truth. You’re addicted, but he is the LAST person who will help you heal. A good exercise is to write out all the things that he did that hurt you. Cheating, yes, but stealing your identity and replacing it with what he wanted is just as abusive. When you find yourself missing him, look over your list and remind yourself that he isn’t the guy you thought he was. He’s not the person you deserve. That you are worth better.

I found a therapist and I would cry in our sessions. I ranted to my mom (bless her) and my best friend (bless her too). Putting on music and screaming along in the car helped me vent those feelings (there a lot of good “fuck you” songs out there).

Is there a way you can make some changes in your home so it is more yours? Paint, rearrange furniture, replace items that hold particular memories? I originally wanted to keep my marital home, but in the end I walked away (even though I loved it) because there was just too much bad juju. OW practically lived there during the lockdown (I was living with my mom). I just didn’t want anything to do with it, so we sold it. When I made that decision, a huge burden lifted off my shoulders. Maybe look into other options for your studio, so you can start fresh somewhere (it’s hard, I know – I gave up my huge garden I had worked so hard on).

Part of the healing process, for me, was just allowing myself to feel all the feelings. I felt so guilty about being angry, because I didn’t want to end up an angry, bitter person. My therapist reassured me that I was angry because I had every reason to be. I let myself feel angry. I journaled, with no filter at all. And after a while, the anger diminished. I’d still get angry if he did something stupid or hurtful, but it no longer dominated my thoughts. Feel the hurt. Cry. Listed to sad songs about loneliness and wanting him back. I had a playlist on Youtube, and it was really interesting to watch as it gradually changed from sad, to angry, to kickass. I named it “If only”. Later I changed it to “You got this”.

Come here and rant. We’ve got you. So many people here were once exactly where you are. We did all those same things (oh, I texted and texted with my ex, trying to convince him he’d made a mistake, for a very long time). Six months feels like a long time, but it’s not. I was still a puddle on the floor at six months. I don’t know if this is encouraging or not, but it took me about 2 years to start to feel like myself again. Don’t be hard on yourself. Your wounds are very fresh. You haven’t formed new habits yet (your whole life got upended – be gentle with yourself, it takes time to make a new one). It WILL get better.

Lost… please read up on trauma bonding… going No Contact takes a lot of practice and you’re in the early days. You’re also trying to get love from a barbedwire monkey, he will only hurt you. Practice new ways of getting the support you need… for me, it was reading the archives here instead. I also found Lisa E. Scott’s blog and a blog called psychpathfree.com. Highly recommend you investing time in you and your healing, its your best investment plan!

Lost, I could have written your post. I touched the hot stove and got burned over and over. I kept restarting the no-contact clock. I filed for divorce 13 months after Dday even though I wanted my old life back so badly I thought I’d die. XH wouldn’t stop the cruel discard, he wouldn’t (now I know he couldn’t) love me. I slowly came to accept that he did these devastating things to me and our kids because he wanted to- he liked it all. That sickened me. He’s probably a sociopath and I know I was trauma-bonded after 26 years with him and a cheater XH 1 before him and narcissist alcoholic parents before them. Even on the courthouse steps as XH was trying to destroy me, I still held out hope he would change. He hasn’t. It’s been 7.5 years. I’m still recovering but life is very good today. I’m at peace. I’m in acceptance most minutes. I’m really good at no contact even with 4 kids. When I slip and speak with him I’m reminded why no contact is for me, for my well being, and that I’m my own best friend and protect myself from him.

It gets WAY better after the divorce is finalized and time passes. Sending you a huge hug.

The heart literally can break: afib and tachycardia. I’ve had them both. I went to a cardiologist in my mid-thirties and she said I was too young, fit, and healthy for such ailments. She accurately surmised that I suffered from PTSD and these were the after-affects. These symptoms showed up about a year after.

You don‘t Need a slap across the face. You experienced a very cruel betrayal. Seven(!!!) years of your life were not what you thought they were. Your husband stole your past from you. For a very long time he lied to you and to your daughter. What you feel is absolutely normal in my opinion. 6 months is no time to digest what he did and how that changed your past, present and future life.
I am very sorry for what this man did to you. Please don‘t be so hard on yourself. I think that before you think in terms like „slog“ or „meh“, you should give yourself time to grieve what you lost and what he did to you.
If you care for your daughter and yourself, ist is good enough for now❤️

I’m so sorry you’re going through this, Lost. I remember that crazy physical pain. I still feel it at times almost 5 years post DDay, but it’s much less intense. In addition to no contact, anti-depressants have helped me. Walking my dog daily and practicing yoga regularly have also been been helpful. Spending time with supportive family and friends is therapeutic, as well as learning a new skill (in my case, I became a yoga instructor). In the early days when I was struggling with acute physical pain I made a list of the activities that helped me manage the pain and forced myself to do them. Over time, with no contact and consistent self-care, the pain has lessened. You’re recovering from a traumatic event so please be patient with yourself. ((Hugs))

Hello Lost, I also felt my heart was damaged and went and had it checked out a number of times – I couldn’t understand why I was still alive, the pain was so bad. CL’s book and this one https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/cheating-in-a-nutshell/9990058595980-item.html helped me to get through the physical, mental and emotional damage plus the ongoing damage of lawyers and court dates. “What Cheating Does to The Victim” is so important to understand and learn aout. You are not alone. Please keep going. Your integrity is there, underneath it all.

Lost, if you are dealing with physical pain, take yourself to your doctor. You need to get checked for a physical cause. And if there is not one you need to know that emotions CAN cause physical pain and there are anti-depressants that can help. I know that it’s one more thing on your to-do list and doesn’t seem urgent. But you MUST care for yourself or you cannot care for your daughter. And if you haven’t been checked for STDs you also need to do that.

In “The Pilgrim’s Progress” John Bunyan describes the “slough of despond” which seems unrelenting. It was certainly an apt description of how I felt for several years after Dday. The good news is that it doesn’t go on forever.

Velvet you nailed that perfectly! Don’t believe I’ve ever even written the word “Meh” until now because even going towards five years out it is a daily target to feel, act, learn and process toward the goal of changing up my own patterns. Dam I love hard . But for those I should have left alone! My adult Daughter helped me through the split as well as adopting a rescue pup. I bought a home that required work and I love building . Building a new life and new ways in life is not without challenge . It’s like we are all on a six horse hitch and the team is spooked the driver bails and hands us the reins. I’ve been slowing the team down for quite a few years now with my aim to one day make them all contented pasture pets.

Such great insights, VH… yes, most likely by the time we reach d-day we are a shell of the person we once were. It is so important to be patient and loving with yourself and your thoughts. For me, finding an amazing therapist who was well-versed in detaching from the trauma bond of being with a narcissistic personality disordered fuckwit with a wandering d*ck and more personal ads on more sites than you can imagine (or even know existed) was the key to my healing. My son was in third grade at the time and my stepchildren living with us were a college freshman and a hs senior… their world went BOOM. Making sure I was getting well enabled me to make sure they were getting the support they needed. And, time… precious time. My son and I both cried on weekend visitations in the beginning, for example, but as the new routine took hold my son started to accept it/enjoy it… and I need the time to just regroup myself… I hadn’t had a weekend alone in over 12 years! It’s a slog, we all have to find what works best for us, and know… it will be ok.

I was going to comment congratulating the OP (I will still do so in another comment) and saying something about how I am still taking bad care of myself, almost two years post DDay#1. But I think what you just wrote, VH, sums it up perfectly.
“Learning to love and care for myself is a DAILY PRACTICE.
Replacing behavior and thoughts that are harmful TAKES TIME”.
Oh, it does. I am constantly tripping up and falling back into the (auto-)neglect autopilot mode.
Just never could put to good use the rule by which you put your own oxygen mask first before helping others. And the others are not the ones to blame, I do harm to myself willingly. I practically gave up physical exercise, I don’t have good sleep hygiene, I skip many, many meals and don’t eat at proper times when I do, and what is worse, I am still chain-smoking even though I am well aware that I am cutting short on my days with my kids, which are probably going to need me for still a long time. What the hell am I doing to myself? I think I called it a Tuesday too soon just because I don’t feel the sting of the betrayal, that painful jealousy anymore. But maybe I achieved this by drowning myself in work on purpose so that I couldn’t hear my own grunts anymore? Am I experiencing a huge setback right now, or just realizing my progress was artificial, a coping strategy? Things are better, of course, and I am still confident that I will eventually get there. Tuesday (for real), Meh and beyond.

TRU DAT☝️