I'm still thinking of the A everyday and feeling overwhelmed and still struggling through work.
Like we talked about earlier, rumination is a tough habit to break. I would listen to all the methods my therapist would suggest for stopping and her advice would go in one ear and out the other. I felt like ruminating was a valid choice, like I was eventually going to figure it all out if I just kept working the problem. Having been there and done that though, today I would liken constant rumination to causing BRAIN DAMAGE. I feel like if I had treated it as a serious health issue, I might have given it up before I ended up so badly depressed. Of course, there's no way to be sure about that, what's done is done. But I would REALLY encourage you to work diligently with your therapist to break the habit of rumination.
I do think ACCEPTANCE helps. And there's lots of different aspects to Acceptance. We have to accept that this bad thing happened to us, that we can't change it, that we couldn't have stopped it, that it's NOT our fault. We have to fully accept that the cheating was about the cheater. They do it for their own reasons based on whatever the payoff is in their own heads. And of course, we argue back that they should have thought of us and they should have. But that too... is about them, not us. You really do have to pass every last bit of the cheating choice to the cheater. And once you've done that, you have to figure out if you can still love this horribly imperfect person.
I think it's okay to love imperfect people. In fact, I think if we wait for perfect, we'll never find anyone at all to love, right? What we're looking to reject is toxic. An active cheater is not only imperfect, they're toxic as well. So, as time goes by, we try to figure what our cheater has learned, if anything. Some cheaters are so disappointed with themselves that they pull out all the stops, dig deep, and don't stop until they feel like they can look themselves in the eye again. Others though, continue to cling to their blame-shifting and are really just giving lip service to taking personal responsibility. These ones are still toxic.
I think one of the good benefits of not concentrating on an outcome is that it frees up your senses a bit to really look at your cheater, to determine whether or not she's taking real responsibility. Most of us really do have a preferred outcome. If you flip a coin, there's a fraction of a second where, if you're listening closely, you'll find yourself rooting for either heads or tails. But it's hard to take a good reading on another person's character when we a) have that preference in the back of our mind, and b) are dealing with our shattered confidence. It's not like we haven't been fooled before, right? But this will all come clear to you in TIME. For now, just have patience with yourself and with the process.
