I am a little surprised given that you are already divorced, already 32, and already in a graduate program, that you are so black and white in your thinking.

You talk about being completely in love or 100% in love. I have never heard anybody talk in this way, ever. One can say that one has studied 59% of his flashcards and another person can say that he has studied 100% of the flashcards, but being in love is not something that can be measured the way you are trying to measure it. Also, that you were "100% in love with her" does not say anything about whether she was in love with you, 100% or not. Nor is the topic of whether she is in love with you seem to be on your agenda at all.

Also, you are talking about past abuse, deaths, being too busy with law school etc. and that all of that has prevented you from attaching to her. And then you go on to say that you were completely happy for three weeks. During that period of the time that you were completely happy, did you all of a sudden forget about past abuse, deaths in the family, and the heavy load of coursework?

You were telling her that you had a long number of issues and willing to work on them, and then you were completely happy and "completely in love". But that is not possible. If you had such long-standing attachment problems that you wrote about them in a large journal, you could not have possibly instantly become so in love with her, because love is a type of attachment. So you are making a lot of contradictory statements... mutually exclusive, basically. It seems to signal an extreme degree of emotional immaturity, because intellectually your having passed the LSAT attests to your ability to realize - on an intellectual level - that these statements contradict one another. But the emotional mind seems to override your rational mind on here. Altogether, with what you have described, with your crying when talking to her mother (which is unusual in this day and age - people now rarely reach out to the parents of 23-year-olds asking said parents to influence their children... in the past such practice was much more common but now is rare), with your level of being self-centered (you wrote a whole journal and we pissed off that she did not take you seriously enough, but when she came and cried, you did not even bother to take her seriously at all), your double standard which has been covered by the previous poster, your sense of entitlement (you believe that your saying that you would work on things and do everything in your power automatically entitles you to her full attention, which is another way of being self-centered) and your inability to deal with chaos (normally, when people are exes two days ago, bf and gf today, and in a break-up two days from now, they realize that their lives are chaotic and do not split hairs over who did what when...)

... so it seems that you might have a Axis II diagnosis, or several of them, at least at the level of traits, possibly past narcissistic injury to your ego, and that the amount of trauma that you suffered in your life was tremendous and your core psyche is extremely vulnerable, causing a complete lack of resilience on your part. We are not supposed to diagnose people on this forum, but we can say that from you have written it appears that you might have traits of extreme emotional instability and that engaging with an individual therapist on a long-term basis would be the best course of action. I strongly recommend that you print out your posts on this thread and bring to the therapy session, and let the therapist assess the many undercurrents evident in your thought process, but the degree to which you compartmentalized your life - professional and academic maturity combined with very infantile emotional response - might fire back at you in some unexpected and dangerous ways later on. I would use this example to get to the core of the problem. As a wake-up call for you. I would avoid any superficial fixes but engage in deep long-term therapy. Even though DBT is usually the recommended course of action for emotional instability, in your particular case I would recommend psychodynamic therapy that deals with your core identity issues first, and adding DBT as a skills training later on. For right now, skills training would be superficial and not get at the core of your issues. One can almost say that you have a split identity - functional in some aspects and dysfunctional in others - and skills training presupposes that the identity is more or less whole.

You probably suffer a lot internally and that suffering needs to get out. Therapy and keeping a journal are/would be very good for you. Reading the journal to yourself and/or in therapy rather than to the gf or other third parties seems a better and safer bet for you.

You also seem to believe that her listening to your deepest stories automatically means that she should have walked away feeling extreme compassion for you. In a way, she did you a favor listening to your deepest stories. You are in law school and you are used to reading and writing a large volume of verbal material all the time. She is 23 and in a mediocre job. She might not be used to hearing so much verbal material at once. She might have not even felt comfortable with your level of sharing, but did not know how to tell you that the stories you said were overwhelming for her. Note that you yourself did not listen much to her, and when she wanted to tell you about that other guy, did not want to listen to her at all but instead wanted to talk to the guy. So she is in your mind on a hook to listen to a lot coming from you, but does not at the same time get your attention as nearly as often. The fact that she is 23 and not in a graduate program and in a mediocre job does not make her less entitled to your time and attention. Also, you involve 3rd parties a lot - you wanted to talk to that guy and you went to talk to her mom. Did the gf want to talk to the woman you exchanged sexts with? No, she did not. But in your post you did not make any mention of the asymmetry, which seems to evidence that you have a humongous blind spot there.

What I am trying to say in a nutshell is that you are obviously hurt, injured, emotionally fragile and in need of help, but, that does not create special entitlements and double standards.

I think joint therapy sessions for right now are a complete waste of time and money if the goal of such sessions is to keep you guys together. If the goal of such sessions is a brief focused intervention to show you guys that you should not be together and to make you part on amicable terms without too much damage done, then such sessions are worth the time and money you guys spend on them.