Last night while taking a shower, I was hit with the thought of them taking a shower together which H had previously admitted they did on one occasion...

Freaking pain and agony shooting through my whole being!!! I could not get the visual out of my head...and especially because he and I take showers together sometimes and it feels so intimate and something that is "ours"...but I guess nothing was really "ours" anymore once he got involved with her...

I told H, he got upset with himself...said how ashamed he is, how he regrets the whole peroid of his life...nothing really more he could say...

It sucks that this stuff can pop up like this...and it hurts like it just happened...

This is another one of those "details" questions...I had asked if they showered together and he answered honestly...but now it just gives me one more thing to trigger over..Did I really need to know that they did this??

Thanks for listening

I understand completely.

Marie, I went through the same thing, but looking back now, I'm glad I asked for, and received the details.

Why? Because my imagination of what went on was FAR worse than the reality.

Triggers ARE a real pain. What I did was dive right into them, acknowledge their existence, try to figure out WHY I was getting triggered, etc. Basically, analyze them down to the minutest detail. In other words, I turned them from an emotional slam on the head into an intellectual exercise.

What this did was give me ownership of them, gave me the power to say "NO" when they reared their ugly head.

It didn't stop the triggers, but it DID lessen their impact on me in a dramatic way. Instead of flooring me, they turned into pesky door to door salesmen, and I kept slamming the door in their face. Eventually, they stopped coming by...

Cory

"Opponents cannot exhaust you." - The Art Of War

I agree with H2C that what you think happened is probably even worse than the truth. Imagination turns it into a perfect scenario, when, in reality, they probably had the same problems the rest of us have in the real world - I'm thinking of the un-romantic 'mopping up' afterwards like they don't do in the films. Think I've been here before on this subject, but I still think I'm right!
Have had the shower thing too - H and HER did it in the shower. The only bit of satisfaction I get is that it was stopped abruptly by me ringing his mobile phone... don't ever try and tell me female intuition doesn't exist. After his phone went to answerphone, I got a friend of HERS on the case (she turned out to be more my friend) and then she got someone else on the case, so the two of them were in the shower with their mobiles going like mad and they gave up. Ho hum. How sad!!! Still think of it, though, every time I'm in the shower. EVERY time. Even sadder.........

Do I ever feel what you are feeling on this one! All of a sudden, SMACK, something will hit and it just jolts me. Sometimes I think I torture myself with memories.

Fridays will always be a trigger for me, since we danced every Friday. Now if I go out I am wondering how to react if he might be there....just want to stay home...and if he is dancing with another woman that will be another pain...to watch him with someone else will be very difficult, but I know it will happen in this small town. I am making sure I am surrounded with my "Mafia" as I like to call my good friends, so I will never be left alone, like a wallflower, if he is with OW.

I see by what I have written that I am pulling the trigger even before it happens. Need to stop that, replace it with a different scenario: perhaps I will be dancing with some hunky guy who...has a job, is not an alcoholic, will treat me like fine china...Hmmmm. Friday, here I come. Smiling.

Good luck on your path, Marie.

Judy

Judy said something about pulling the trigger. I wonder if it's possible that a trigger is only a trigger, if we let it be? ie we pull the trigger?
Because, all that happens when there's a trigger, is that we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, it doesn't hurt anybody else, certainly not the person the trigger is about. Half the time they don't even know we've pulled a trigger....