Chapter 10. The dirty stinky rat

 The Janergy Effect e-book link

As I mentioned earlier in my story, my ex-husband and I had still been talking and mainly about stuff to do with the separation of our lives. It had only been a few weeks since I moved to Melbourne and I remember one day he commented on a photo I’d shared and he said I looked happy and serene.  Well yes, having your peace handed back will do that to a person, I thought.

 

Embracing the serenity

It was only a few days later that we had something else we needed to talk about and during the phone call he mentioned something that got me wondering. I asked if he was seeing someone and he admitted he was. Not only was he seeing someone, but he was getting down and dirty with this new love and I remember just standing frozen on the footpath outside my work and thinking, how can this be.  This was a devastated man would never get over his broken heart and whose life I had ruined. What a confusing contradiction this was.

He had met a woman on Tinder a few short weeks after we finally went our separate ways and they were serious. Maybe they had met long before I ever knew, but they have since gone on to be married and I hope her life is filled with none of the torment that mine was.

This news really hurt, as there were layers and layers of guilt from the constant reminder that I had left him a broken man, with no hope and no future, and for being the one who made him angry and react the way he did over the years.  I was never responsible for his behaviour. It was just a way to take the focus of his inability to be a decent man and it seems that the man whose life I had ruined wasn’t as broken as he had led me to believe.

There is always pain in any relationship breakdown, even if you are the one who initiated it, and I felt pain.  Even though I was happy with my decision, I did feel disappointment to think that it was just so easy for him to move on with someone else, especially after I begged for so many years to do something to try and fix our relationship.  But why bother fixing ours, when there’s another one just a swipe away. And I think that is what hurt the most.

During this same call, he again told me I was his best friend and I just wasn’t going to entertain the idea that we had any reason to be friends. I was feeling quite distressed and I happened to run into my boss as I got off the phone and told her what happened.  She told me to go home and to just keep deep breathing. Not sure how that was going to help, but I went home and cried and thankfully, continued to breathe.

I had also started visiting our Employee Assistance Program to get some support to help steer my overall life change.  There were a few things she suggested for me to help navigate my new life and to also really move through the hurt I was feeling.

When I shared my feelings about my marriage with the counsellor, she asked me why I didn’t feel angry.  I am not someone who really reacts in an angry way about anything. I don’t even know when the last time was that I displayed any anger.  I like the peaceful path and for 10 years I saw firsthand that anger doesn’t really achieve much, apart from making you look stupid and raising your blood pressure.  I didn’t care for either of those things.

She said that it would be totally okay to feel anger and perhaps as a good release I should take a rolling pin and smash it into a pillow with such force that I would release my rage.  Rage – well I certainly didn’t have rage. Hell, I didn’t even have anger. I had disappointment and hurt. To see whether her advice would make any difference, I decided to go home and undertake the therapy.

I did find my rolling pin, went into the bedroom – which was wall to wall glass put the pillow at the end of the bed and began smashing it like I was smashing a pinata, and one that I imagined had his face on it.  FUCK YOU, I yelled over and over. And well, yeah, it felt kinda good and probably looked funny for anyone who might have seen what was happening from the outside.

Lots of people I know have harmonious friendships with their ex-partners and I thought that I would probably be one of those people who would have a friendship with him, even with all the shit that came with it, but as I really stopped to consider it, I decided that he wasn’t actually worthy of my friendship and my life didn’t need that fucked up negative energy invading its newly found peace.

The counsellor suggested I begin journaling. I find it quite hilarious that I am a writer who didn’t really like to journal, but I did get myself a notebook and I did a stocktake. 

I wrote down all the reasons why I made the decision I did (a reminder).

I wrote down all the things that I deserve in my life (a reminder).

I wrote down what I was feeling and accepted and acknowledged that it was okay to feel all the feels.

I wrote down any thoughts of regret that I had made the wrong decision.

I wrote lots of stuff and none of it I ever went back to look at because it was all now out of my head and buried deep in the back of a book.

There was one very visible thing I did that served as a great reality check and a defrag for the emotions that lingered. I got a giant Post It and wrote down the cold hard facts as to why I wouldn’t entertain any kind of friendship with him. There was plenty of reasons, including his future wife who sprung up out of nowhere and it was a reminder of the good I deserved in my life. I couldn’t be friends with someone who:

• frightened me
• humiliated me
• intimidated me
• blamed me
• yelled at me, yelled at my family, yelled at strangers
• was continually angry
• didn’t want to try harder
• didn't see how much they were hurting me
  

Blah blah blah blah blah. The list went on and when I looked at it in this way, I asked myself a very important question. Would I actually keep relationships going with any other people who made me feel this bad?  I know for sure that I wouldn’t, so there was no place for him, even though we had spent the past 10 years together.

Being continually sucked back into an ex’s life is a very real thing and it can take years for people to break free from the cycle that comes with it. Some people never break free, but I wanted to be fully free so I could get on with life.

I know many women, who like me, find themselves feeling the same feelings that I was, and being faced with the same scenario that I was and it’s easy to become trapped into a cycle of going back and forth with this weird, broken and unhealthy relationship. I knew that I had to change the whole way I was responding to this roundabout.  On reflection, I was in a very emotionally abusive relationship and there were lots of layers to peel off.

I would have memories of some of our great times together and thought that perhaps I was being harsh by cutting him off, but I would look at the list which continued to grow and reality would keep me on the straight and narrow.  I was right in my decision and getting all of this stuff out of my head was liberating. 

The list stayed on the wall for quite a while and it helped me heal.  Even walking past the list on the giant Post It, let the reasons sink into my subconscious and eventually I didn’t think about him or anything to do with our relationship, both good or bad. There was now space for new thoughts, new feelings and a new way of life.

Women give so much to men and often get so little in return and it can be a hard pattern to break, but this method worked perfectly for me. I bet we all know a woman who is in this same position right now – trying to please a man who doesn’t really care about her or her wellbeing.  She is apologising, she is shrinking and she is letting life pass her by. I can assure you that I know a few.

Another funny thing I did at the suggestion of a friend, was to get a balloon, write on it all the things I wanted to let go of and then let it float off into the never never. 

I am happy to try anything once, so I headed off and got a couple of helium balloons and began to write down things that I wanted to be free from.  I had a lot to put on this small space and before I knew it, the balloon was full and I was ready to go.

My son was visiting at this time and this was before finding out about the addiction – and he decided to do the same thing.  I know he had his own troubles, so he wrote many things on his balloon as well.

I still had my cute car so we drove down to South Melbourne beach, walked out onto the jetty and let our balloons sail off into the breeze, taking with it all of our problems, in a metaphorical kind of way.  Even with all these freeing moments, there was still a couple of final relationship hurdles to jump.

 

The metaphorical freedom

My ex-husbands actions were certainly very self-centred and came with little thought or regard to my feelings or the relationships I had with others.

During our union, we were part of two magical moments and those were when we love matched two of my friends. One match was with a friend of my ex-husband and the other was with a mutual friend we made during our time together.  These two couples have gone on to have very happy lasting marriages and it’s great to see something so wonderful come from all the time I spent in my unhappy marriage.

I met both of these women at the same time and have known them for about 20 years.  My friendship with one was more active, as we lived near each other and socialised often so our bond was very strong.  Shorty after I moved to Melbourne, her and her husband moved to Sydney.

I was shocked when she rang me one day to tell me that her husband had agreed – without thinking about the wider effects – that it was okay for my ex and his new lady to come and stay with them for a long weekend.

That dirty stinky rat. Why would he want to do that? I had so many thoughts as to why they would want to go and stay with my friend – saving money was the only thing I could possibly think of. But I was more confused as to why his new girlfriend would want to go and stay for a number of days with my close friend, who now knew all the troubles that I had secretly kept hidden about my abusive marriage.

It was such an awkward time and was very upsetting for me as I felt a sense of betrayal from my friend, but we have been able to move on with our friendship and put this behind us. My friendship with her is more important than the feelings I had and I understood that she was in a really tough position and was caught off guard by her husband’s generous offer to host them. But I did love that she called me and had the conversation before it happened. That was a class act.

Things were still raw and this did hurt and I actually had the guts to call him and tell him that this was really shitty and thoughtless behaviour, but it fell on deaf ears and I was told to “behave” and received an ongoing blast which was colder than the winter wind.    

I thought after that, that our business was probably finished, given that following our separation it seemed highly unlikely that another marriage was on the cards for either of us. Although we agreed to have an in-person conversation about getting divorced should the time ever come, I was really thrown off guard when I received a call one day telling me there was someone to see me in our work reception area. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and was totally ambushed by a man who had come to serve me divorce papers and insisted that I sign them.

Wow, in the middle of my working day, I get that bomb dropped on me.  And what did I do, well I told the middleman to pass the message on that I wasn’t going to sign them and I showed him the door. Talk about cheeky! Not me, but him, for having the audacity to do that. 

I’m not one to try and make other people’s life difficult, but this was the FUCK YOU I deserved and needed to have. He had to do all the hard yards for the divorce and I just sat back and waited for the ink to dry.

I was definitely able to move on from that dirty stinky rat and that part of my life and I am healed and capable of and being open to giving and receiving love and I have built boundaries that I knew would never be crossed in the future.

For anyone else living in a relationship that isn’t healthy, it is possible to break free and go on to live a life that you deserve and one that is right for you.

Acceptance was my key to finding peace and I just had to accept that things were what they were. There were highs and lows and some loose ends to be tied up but I just had to keep focussed on the bigger picture and let all those moments that seemed like derailers, just glide on by.

Here’s some of my ‘how to get over the breakup’ tips that really helped.

1. If you left the relationship and feel yourself being pulled back by memories of the good times, remind yourself of the ‘why’.  No if’s or buts, but WHY did you make the decision you did. Be realistic about whether your feelings of remorse and longing are true, or just a hangover that can be addressed with reality check panadol.
2. Make the pro’s/cons, love/hate, why/why not list, so you have a really clear picture of the facts that support your decision. Be objective about it and feel those moments of pain and ask if they are the feelings you want to keep having if you go back to that relationship.
3. Let yourself feel what you need to feel. Throw that pity party or a couple of them if needed, then clean up the mess and get moving.
4. Find things to do in your time – start a new hobby, build a new routine.  Put roadblocks up that will keep you from circling back to the same old pathway, which can often be due to loneliness. Get busy!
5. If you are really struggling, then tap into some professional help.  There is so much more you can do to help you heal.

This was a really tough time for me, as I went into that relationship knowing that things weren’t okay from the outset. I put up with a lot but I also knew that I didn’t want to be chained to the past and let it stand in my pathway to the future.  

It did take time to heal because I had to free myself from feelings that had been put on me over many years. I had to rebuild my confidence, my sense of self and a reconnect with my worthiness. I gave myself time and more time, to not only heal, but to rediscover me and begin to grow in a really beautiful way. Freedom and discovery became my new way of life.