Hello CantMoveOn. I apologize for the delay on the post, I have the same problem of re-reading everything I’ve written.
While rereading your posts, I felt that there has been no space for real grieving because of, at minimum, having no one to really speak to. It can be that even when we communicate with people, it’s not healing. I’ve understood that throughout my life and I found myself someone that had an emotional presence with me. Someone who is emotionally present with you is someone who shares your moments with you without an agenda or plan and have no expectation of you, you are free to say anything with no fears of judgment. They are curious to listen, and handle everything with you. I told a client of mine to bring me to their Hell, and we’ll go through it together. Finding someone to go through my Hell with me was the only way I ever started healing from traumas of my life and allows me to do the same for others in my work.
I don’t know if these quotes will help, but you came to mind when I read it. This is from a book called Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis by Dr. John Madonna. It’s late in his book where he’s speaking about loss and brings up grief and two stages of grief that aren’t part of the popular stages of grief psychology speaks about.
“During the first, or impact phase, shock and denial are intense. One feels violently torn from one’s “assumptive world,” that is, from the fundamental sense of security enabled by the rules and beliefs to which we subscribed to ensure constancy and safety. So massive is the rupture that we become emotionally numb, fall into a state of disbelief and disorientation. We can feel alienated from others, ourselves and life in general. During the next phase, the chaos phase, when the numbness wears off, vulnerability to damaging emotional and physical repercussions often result. A feeling of powerlessness, anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, and depression can crescendo into disturbed perceptions, inordinate behavior and a perverse sense of dis-equilibrium (pp. 181).”
Every once in a great while, my Psychoanalyst I see weekly, will give me a framework for how I’m feeling. Such as the quote above. It’s to make everything that’s going on feel less chaotic enough to be able to speak and get just a bit centered. With the quote above, you can be in and out of both of the phases, being numb and then feeling very vulnerable and depressed and back to numb. It's not wrong to be severely disorientated after what happened.
Just ideas and quotes in the service of trying to shorten your pain by finding the root of why this happened somehow won’t work to create healing. Firefighter’s don’t run into a burning building and find the candle that started the fire and bring it outside. The building would still be burning and nothing would be fixed. My best advice is to find someone you are comfortable enough to talk with that cares to hear, listen and understand you as I had spoken about above. One of the problems with the pain of severe betrayal is that it rips you away from everyone because if we can’t trust the person we gave all of our love to, how can we trust anyone? The most destructive thing to do is to avoid finding a constructive relationship with someone. There are people out there who don't care what you bring to them, they'll be there.
Let me know if you have any questions about anything I said or specific ones.
