you must not pressure youself, that will only make it worse and stop you from showing your feelings (which is very important when you want others to help you)
you must first accept that you have a problem where time is needed to solve it... and you must accept all the side effects of it (including hurting your kids)
pressuring yourself because you don't want to hurt your kids or friends means you will not be accepting help from others, which makes your healing-time actually longer (which is of course not what you want)
or you try to rush into solutions (e.g. other relationships) without really giving it the time it would need to evolve
you really can't force yourself to love someone... nor you can force someone else to love you, that is a field that is out of one's control (you can only tip it a bit but it's too risky in your position to go in there in my opinion)
forcing love will never go right
pressuring yourself won't, either

i want you to think about why you shut and isolate yourself when you are feeling down... and you need to think about if doing so really makes sense or if it only makes it worse. for that you must try to get a bit distance to yourself, to look at how things are in a more neutral, objective way.
you must analyze your feelings to be clear what's going on with you, but disregard them when it comes to making decisions (of course that's REALLY hard to do that perfectly...)
but really... take your time, and accept you have problems where you need help with