I'm trying to do this too, yes. This is what always made me more relaxed, rather than all tense and feeling bad. Whenever I'd read about manipulation, ways of emotional and mental abuse, etc., and seeing how it applied to these relationships. That is when I start relaxing eventually and grounded and back in normal reality. Though I had to do this gradually too because I was not immediately ready to face some of the darkness that was there in these relationships. But by now I've faced a lot of it, and so I'm also noticing how I'm still going back in my memories here and there, to discover things about these relationships from this new understanding I did not have before. It helps. It's again where I can feel relaxed, if it all seems to make sense and more and more things click this way. Sometimes I can even do this before I fall asleep, i.e. these memories drifting up and me having enough of a partial understanding already about those memories, and just further exploring without pressure and waiting for more realisations and insight. If that makes sense....and then I can even fall asleep in the midst of all this (so that is anything but me being too tense). The doubting and the compulsive checking never makes me feel good or relaxed, just more and more tense.

Also today... I realised that I do all the doubting and compulsive checking, when the bad feelings come up, without me even noticing. The way they made me feel bad during the relationships and whenever they attacked me and at the end too, with their last attacks. It's like....if I question and doubt, that means they did nothing bad to me, it means me ignoring the bad state I got into from their manipulations, it means I'm the one who did anything bad, so it's actually really absurd. It's just absurd mental conjecture and never reality when I do the doubting and checking for possible good motives in these people. And when I doubt and check it's also terrible self-doubt I never ever had in my life before this abuse, and it's all really crazy actually (from their crazy-making), and it's me checking if I have the responsibility to try and fix the impossibility and also how to fix it, etc. Because I would not want to keep feeling bad, so I'd think I need to fix things somehow and I just need to figure out how. But yeah that's again just ABSURD because you don't fix things with a manipulative and abusive vampire.

So basically the message I got from them was very bad on a deep level. Like it is, "MAYBE it is what they said...that you are ****, you are the problem, so you have to keep the benefit of the doubt and assume the best instead of them taking responsibility". Does this make sense? This could seem really simple but I don't think I got this before at all, that there was this message from them, let alone get it on an emotional level.

This felt freeing, I will see how freeing... but it definitely was an emotionally very deep realisation.


I tried to read about healing too yeah, that is where I would often get really stuck though. That is what's also progressing so slowly. But it is, I think...just really really slowly. And wanted to know if I'm missing something specifically, or emotionally, which makes recovery so extremely slow. I don't know.



I wish you luck too with recovering from your marriage. And with getting free from it if you are still in the marriage atm.



I totally agree. This is what I've been doing for 3 years, just with a lot of obstacles and getting stuck a lot, I hope it'll be easier for you.