| As you are all painfully aware, I have been hugely torn over my marriage for the past several months. Every day, instead of feeling more confident and having a direction, I seem to have spiraled downward into depression and major indecisiveness. The problem is: I want a divorce. I know I do. BUT...I can't stop second guessing myself as far as is it the RIGHT thing to do. I worry about how it will affect our son, my H, my family, money, everything else but worrying about ME! When it comes down to it, I have a hard time with validating my own feelings. Today, thinking about a lot of issues in my life, particularly my marriage, I felt so stuck, so torn, so hopeless that I will ever be happy. Then I remembered something my therapist said about me having self-esteem issues. It has been said here on TAM also. At first, I didn't think I had self esteem issues...I am not ashamed of my body, my looks are better than average (I'm no model but I'm not ugly or even plain looking), I know that I'm intelligent, I am confident talking to complete strangers...so WTF am I lacking in self esteem? Well, it hit me: I allow people's behavior towards me to dictate how I feel. If my H is angry or sad, I instantly assume I'm to blame. If my boss is a b***h one day but the next day is very sweet, my emotions towards her change accordingly. If someone is rude or thoughtless or disrespectful towards me, I absorb it and wonder what I did to make them treat me like that. It's a more subtle form of low self esteem, but crippling nonetheless. I feel empowered with this understanding. I know it's been hammered on so many times on TAM: you can't change other people's behavior, you can only change your reaction to their behavior. I understood it, but couldn't really embrace it until now. I get it. What it means to me is: it's ok for me to have feelings, wants, needs, ambition, etc REGARDLESS of whether my H agrees with them. It's ok to disappoint people by not always living up to their expectations of you. I need to live up to MY expectations of me first. And I haven't done a good job of that. I want to change that starting now. One thing my therapist pointed out is that my H and I are completely enmeshed...H likes it this way, but I don't. He relies on me for everything emotionally: for validation, for happiness, for fun, for companionship, everything. He has no close friends that he spends time with outside of work. He doesn't spend time with his brothers except for holiday occasions. He wants to spend every waking minute with me. It's exhausting and it makes me want to pull away. My question is: I'd like to try to find something to do on my own, maybe once a week or so...something he can't invite himself to go along with (which he invariably does, even if it's just me running to the store to get tampons!). He views any time we are not working as valuable family time. If I were to choose to do something in the evening after work one day a week, he'd be incensed. I could maybe get away with doing something on a weekend day, although he'd be upset that I would be choosing to spend potential 'family time' alone. If I choose to spend time away from him and our son once a week for a couple of hours, am I really being that selfish? I don't think so, but I'd like your input in this, to help me build confidence in doing things for myself that make ME happy even if they don't make HIM happy. It's all leading up to the ultimate act of making ME happy resulting in his being VERY unhappy (divorce). I have to start somewhere in building my confidence. Any thoughts? I hope this makes sense :confused: | |||
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