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pseydtonne  ·  4006 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Extinguishing Old Flames

What might have been? Divorce papers, lots of fights. She clearly has both issues and a desire to rebuild herself. Don't make these YOUR issues.

It's exceedingly important to free up your heart, mind, and schedule for the next few relationships (because there will be a few). There are some important steps to this:

1) Separate the following and track as if they were running daemons: your feelings for her, her feelings for you, your ability to stand back from your feelings;

2) Understand that you cannot guess someone's feelings. We aren't psychics.

3) See the cycles and which rewards lead to a loop. Some part of you is repeating an action willfully because it gets a reward from that process. The reward could be schadenfreude, self-harm, a comfortable guilt, even a cookie. See when you're in a rut and see what encourages you to stay in it versus a larger but less known reward outside of the rut.

4) The bus out of the swamp is leaving, so get on it. The only way to get over this is to see it as an infected wound. They only heal when treated, then otherwise left alone to heal. If you poke at the wound, it won't scab up and heal properly. Change towns, get new positive activities, branch out from the person you were when you met her. Be where you won't worry about that anymore by being involved in new things.

I speak from experience: get moving. Get a car and move to another state. You can't help her and probably don't want to be on her road: you want the comfort of a sweet heart from your memory. That memory is a photograph, not an actual person.