CDK wrote:

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Hello all. Good to see you. ExABF and I broke up June of last year. Have had absolutely no contact. Dont know anything about his life at all. Im slowly working my way thru the Steps. I attend CODA mtgs 3 timeds a week with some ACA mtgs thriwn in there. I follow the Fellow Travelor Way instead of sponsor b/c my group doesnt do that. Why do I still miss him? Some days it feels like he just invades my brain... Then my heart gets involved and feeels hurt and so sad. I figure this is not really about him...this is really about me. Does anyone have any experience with this? Got anything you can toss at me to ask myself or challenge these thoughts and feelings to see what is underneath? Please someonr tell me this goes away hahahahahaha. Sigh. I still love him in some weird way. Ugh. Why do I still miss him? Some days,

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 Do you have a recovery mate to talk with??? working the steps is good, its better if you have a guide, more experienced then you helping you.....what do you miss???  I learned about writing a LIST, all the reasons  WHY i left him....maybe u r just lonely???  he is A  not in recovery???  what chance do you think a life would be with an active A???  You left him for a good reason..... now its time to list all the resons why you left..........AND i would get on those steps.....increase meetings....bc if you left in june, u should be starting to groove in your new life.....program takes a while.....but i hope you give it a chance.....i always believe  in extensive step work, slogan practice, literature study and practice what I learn, AND getting w/recovery mates and co-sharing w/them.......we need each other in that it is always best to have folks you can share with

My VA counseling has brought me to these 4 letters which explain the situation.   PTSD  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Yeppers that is also one of the consequences of living withing the addiction.  It takes time and it takes work.  I'm working at getting the negative guys out of my head...the ones that bring the put downs and arguments and threats and love to take up my time justifying, blaming and trying to figure out what to do to win.  Win hell there is no win with PTSD...just noise and trouble.   I pray to my HP to "get them out of my life" and when they do show up I tell them to "leave"..."now".   I won't be crazy all the time forever.   Keep coming back.  ((((hugs)))) 

Bettina wrote:

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I really couldnt answer the question. I was stumped. He told me, Betty, you can bundle it up and put it in a storage bin for now and paint it grey. Think of it as grey matter. You don't have to have any emotion about it. Because these emotions were so immense, they could have eventually killed me. I did just that. I chose to paint it grey. It worked for me. But you have to choose it. Finally all of that anger and hate and frustration and vengence disipated. Gradually, eventually I had no emotion for him.

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 WOW...thanks for this really powerful experience and share.....gives me hope on my "project" of my step 7 i posted here about......i visualize me taking all the bad emotions and walking up to a fire and tossing them 1 by 1 in the fiames and watch them go up in smoke...i keep doing that ------OR ,

another picture, and this is my favorite   i see myself wrapping up all the bad emotions in hefty trash bags, toting them to the feet of a great angel or maybe Jesus and dropping all that stuff, bag by bag at his feet and giving thanks for helping me be willing to do this and  i say "please" when i ask to be cleansed of this.....i will do that until i see me walk back to my spot w/out grabbing those bags back and taking them with me...........i do feel lighter.......i do feel progress...........

my recovery friend and school mate told me that SHE put hers in a box and stuck it on the shelf in her closet....she said that yea, the box falls down and she has to go through it ,then sticks it back up on the shelf and she said little by little the box stays up on the shelf a bit longer ea. time............i liked her picture, too....i like candles so I light my candle, talk to my angels and my guides and make myself focus on my breath and do the hefty trash bag thingy..........my closet is too cluttered that box with as much as I HAVE????  wouldn't fit if i dumped all my closet at goodwill............JUST sayin, LOL

OH and here is another one my sponsor taught me....my older guy, my dear "R"....he told me i was making my offender bigger then he really was....like he was a human, albeit a real bad one, still no bigger than anyone else.....he told me to imagine him in a cage and slowly turning into a fly.....slowly shrinking, and sprouting hair on his body, with delicate wings on his back, and shrinking  shrinking and finally when he is REAL small,  lifesize of a fly,my inner child, the one who thought he was so big and bad and scary would  get a big fly swatter and       SMACK!!!! hes all squished and defeated........

 that was when the anger i had was exploding......it helped me a lot doing that exercise....and it did shrink him down to a real size......it also helped me see people, even authority figures or hostile people or angry people who used to cause me to freeze in flight or fight mode, as no bigger than any one else and not the big giant godzilla figures i once thought of them as.....