Hi Lost
I appreciate that you are finding it hard to keep your emotions in check and I wonder if the following coping method, that I successfully used, would help.
I used was to write letters to myself, addressing my words to my soul; I typed all the painful incidents, committing each terrible memory to paper which I then filed. I found that by putting those thoughts in a kind of external hard-drive I stopped that particular bad memory swirling round and round in my brain with no outlet – the file held it so I didn’t need to. Whenever my thoughts were overwhelming me, usually once a day, I would go and bash it out on my keyboard until I felt it had left me. I wrote angrily, aggressively, tearfully – I didn’t care about grammar, punctuation, being politically correct or even making sense, I used capital letters, underlining, different colours and expletives that I would never actually say – I smashed the words out to clear my brain and stop it exploding. As each page was committed to the file I would say aloud that I was releasing myself from that particular pain; I remember feeling exhausted but relieved every time I finished a letter. I hid the file well because it was never meant for anybody to see – it was private, it was mine. The file was quite thick in the end. When I started my recovery I kept it for quite a long time feeling that if I destroyed it I would have to retake the memories back into my head. My CG did turn his life around sometime later and I gradually destroyed the pages without reading them BUT it was not his recovery that gave me the greatest impetus to ‘live’ without pain – it was mine.
It would be good for you, in my opinion, to keep a journal anyway, recording what your ex-partner has said or done so that a lawyer can see the events without you having to relive them.
I hope some of this helps – keep posting, you are being listened to and understood
Velvet
