Hi Hate the World,
I'm so sorry for your pain and have just finished a year of "firsts" without STBX.
A year and a half ago this week he abandoned us in the middle of the night and went into hiding and only OW knew where he was and we didn't know there was an OW. It's a long awful story that I won't bore you with, but I will tell you that over different periods in life there may come new meanings for things.
I don't know if it will help any, but my first experience with being able to breath on my own after he left for OW was to go back to my roots. This doesn't only mean immediate family and friends before I knew him, but things about my life I search for now that have nothing to do with him but I used to enjoy.
This is going back 20 years to being a kid, but is helping in small increments.
Today was hard here, too and for our daughter to learn to separate her time with each parent now and her weekends even though it makes her busier. She's had to have a year of "firsts", too.
I will tell you a trick I do in hope that it will help any, for I have lost much with the life I had built around being married. Every weekend and holiday had time spent with in laws, who I am losing as well as being a wife and it is crushing. I know now I put too much of my life and invested it too much in being a wife and in him. I lost myself.
So my journey now partly includes days like today and searching back to find their true meaning. I am going to live for the meaning in each holiday or occasion and not for the person I loved who betrayed me so brutally.
It doesn't mean I won't think of him, for I do far too often, but I also know he's changed and not someone I can even relate to (his driving makes me ill, lol, almost and before I just put up with it!)
So today was very difficult here but like the other posts are saying, it's time in our lives to pick up what pieces we can and live for us.
I was very codependent and also a mom of a young child so basically lost my sense of identity. But it's coming out, along with self respect and respect of other people that I didn't have before. Even he is seeing changes in me and to that I say...T.S.!
So today whenever thoughts of him crept into my mind, I did anything patriotic that I could...I played patriotic songs on my piano and I read some of my American composer biographies. I went to a picnic my dad had for DD and I and we made a big rucous at his house, where it's usually quieter than our house.
I'm finally realizing that too much of my life has been wasted in agony over a man who hasn't loved me for a long time but was never going to tell me and still doesn't tell life's hardest truths to my face.
Oh yes, he is all over facebook and the others and OW has claimed him publicly, over a year ago before anyone even knew they put their trash up there-they involved our daughter without permission and I reamed him out. It finally came down when we got to lawyers and may be there hidden, but so be it.
Yes, what I had to finally do was delete all my social network things because they really ruined it for me and I was like an OCD person always checking his pages. It was a long time before I found his alternative page and it wasn't even hidden-he put one married to me and one widower with OW's people and it was devastating. Our whole families have seen it and know what he's done.
It is in your best interest of healing to take the connection away, but I also understand how difficult letting go is-it's torture.
It took me a long while to realize that I was torturing myself, though and causing more pain and the images were triggers-it got so bad for me even the names on the computer for googling were triggers.
I know now that OW is a fool and the OW's in your Wh's life are fools too and messing up their life.
It takes many years for the hurt to go away but it does dim and so do the tears. Anything that you can do that's unrelated is beneficial to your mind and will be when your heart catches up. Mine were very disconnected for a long while, my heart not wanting to believe what my mind knew and my ears heard.
I wish you well and I wish you peace and the other thing that helps me in small ways is to appeal to my senses. Candles, baths and such, indulging slightly in a favorite food or watching a favorite movie again.
Trying Again is not alone, for that's often what I do when DD goes on her visits with him, that were agony and still are. I take myself shopping, get an ice cream or buy a plant or candle for myself just to get out of the house.
STBX here has supposedly one "OW" and it still emotionally wrecks me when he drives off, to know where he is going and he knows how alone we are. But now I've spent small periods of time with him and you know what?
He's changed so much, he bugs me!
I wish you peace.