Trouble sleeping. Ex-wife very insistently coaxed me into feeling my feelings and expressing them. This did not go well for either person.
Conversation
I feel some resentment for being coaxed into letting that happen, but it was nothing if not instructive.
It would have been completely the right decision to allow the body to rest some more. For both our sakes.
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At whatever intensity where stuff is *actually* felt, it is being processed. Not at the same speed or depth, but to some eventually complete extent.
There is nothing wrong with taking grief slowly. Just let it seep through the cracks.
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Yes, stuff is still being felt and processed. We’re mammals.
This spirals out to one of the worst signal crossings/wave interferences that i come across:
•”attachment theory” (Winnicott and many others) - a huge contribution to our body of knowledge & understanding
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•”attachment(s)” presented as a fettering problem to overcome in some classic and neo- presentations of Buddhism, spiritual yoga, and other communities
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I just wish the English language had settled on two different words for those things. As a lay counsellor with training in attachment theory (etc) and someone who also moves in spiritual practice communities, it generates a lot of semantic dissonance in me.
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To wit, the end of the relationship with your wife is going to stir up some attachment level (Winnicott) stuff in your bodymind. Grief & perhaps anger.
Now from your depth of practice, you may be able to look at that with some detachment (2nd meaning).
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Don’t want to veer into giving you advice, just thinking out loud about these wildly different understandings of/approaches to relationality, and how that one word “attachment” ends up overloaded for some of us.
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Sure. I meant the second kind pretty exclusively. The emotion ties seem to have a life of their own.
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Yeah, they do have a life of their own, and I don’t want to say something trite or condescending, but there’s probably a way to honour them.
and figure out the right way to communicate with your wife the messages they might have.
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I'm afraid they're not pretty. Very disappointed in her after what this last conversation brought up.
The dissonance between the person she could have easily chosen to express, and the one she chose instead, is very jarring.
I just hope this new life gives her the freedom to finally grow up a bit. She is nothing short of wonderful in other aspects of her being; just not in love.
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But I also remember my own troubles with repressed parts of my emotional body.
I have very little respect for the person I was when those things came out, but the outcome was always a healthier, more mature and more responsible Sindre.
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