I'm not sure what will help, so I'll throw a lot into this post and hope something comes close to what you need.
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I think what follows is almost all metaphor. I use the ones I learned from therapists that I admire. (I've been in therapy and I've attended numerous conferences with my W, professional for her, interesting for me.)
If my metaphors don't connect for you, you just have to find metaphors that will.
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The way I look at the post A, post d-day experience is that immense amounts of grief and anger and lesser amounts of fear and shame were dumped on me. Those emotions/feelings came into my body. They became my feelings - even though I didn't 'cause' them or choose them.
Objectively speaking, my partner had abandoned me. She withdrew love. It was natural to feel as bad as I did. But human beings can heal, and I'm human, so I can heal.
Based on my previous experience with therapy, I 'knew' I had to process those feelings out of my body as much as possible or risk having them come out at bad times in nasty ways.
IOW, the feelings that came before and on d-day became my problem to deal with. I didn't cause them, but I had to deal with them. My W could give me emotional support, but she couldn't do my work.
Anger
A former therapist used to tell me that anger is just a desire for something to be different. She taught me to process anger this way:
1) Some things can't be changed. For example, my W conducted an A. When I'm angry about that sort of thing, the way out is to self-nurture/self-soothe with the goal of just plain giving up the anger.
2) Some things can be changed, but action is necessary to effect the change. For example, W lied during her A; I decided there would be no R unless she committed to no more lies (Thanks, SI!). I can resolve that type of anger by taking action or, if I don't want to act, by just plain letting it go.
Grief
I learned to feel the grief. I let my body take over and let the grief flow - sometimes crying, sometimes shaking, sometimes just feeling sad.
Fear & Shame
Self-nurturing/self-soothing/self-talk is necessary to resolve these feelings, IMO. One can ask for support, for the cure comes down to self-talk.
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I guess, at a higher level of abstraction, releasing feelings is a matter of accepting them and feeling them - letting them course through one's body.
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Believe me, I know that can be a scary prospect. The feelings of being betrayed are overwhelming at first, and I certainly felt I'd never process them out. I just kept going, and that's what I recommend to others.
Real feelings are relatively fleeting - the vast majority come and go very quickly, but those at the long end of the bell curve can last a long time. WRT to releasing the feelings from being betrayed, most of the releases go pretty quickly, too.
You've got to take some of this on faith - if you keep feeling your feelings, you will release them forever. You might feel like they keep coming back, but the 'returning' feelings are really newly discovered ones.
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The nasty feelings can't be completely processed out, because our brains apparently won't let us. But IME they diminish to the point of being annoyances.
Unless you trigger a feeling. Anything can do it - but triggers are, IMO, just newly found pain ready to be released.
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I admit that I've used myself as an example here and that I'm projecting that experience as relevant to more than me.
I do that because of the disclaimers at the start and because my experience, as I understand it, is consistent with lots of writing in humanistic psychology.
I'll close with:
YMMV, and
I hope I haven't said anything that is too easily misinterpreted.
[This message edited by sisoon at 2:27 PM, June 14th (Thursday)]