Hello all! Happy 2021 to you.
I'm curious if others have experienced the feelings I'm currently having, as I try to assess how much more therapy to save up for. :)
Context: 2 years from separation and I've grown a lot in this interval. I'm in a good place. My D-Day involved a long term (4+ years) physical affair with a good friend of mine, and what I would call emotional affairs with one other friend of mine, as well as knowledge of the affair among other friends of mine, so it was laced with quite a bit of betrayal and required a lot of therapy to move past.
Since then I've dated a few times, and have had an on-again-off-again relationship with one woman who I wrote about in the past here. I described her as a bit erratic at that time.
What happened was this: we were kind of dating again but telling one another it was temporary and that we would see other people when the pandemic restrictions eased. I would say the relationship is/was pretty asymmetric at this point, her having very nearly died in late 2020 and trying to get literally and figuratively back on her feet this year. While we were basically in love with one another, I was also mainly filling the role of a supportive friend during her recovery. Yes, plenty to psychoanalyze on my end there, but not the subject of this thread, so for now we'll just call this dysfunctional and move on.
So eventually she found a guy on Tinder and started hanging out with him "casually." Unfortunately, this guy, of the hundreds of matches she got, is a reasonably good friend of mine. I would say my reaction to this was not so much "what are the chances you'd match to a friend of mine" as "*of course* you'd match to a friend of mine," in the sense that she seems to attract this kind of drama if I'm being honest.
Now, there's a whole story here about how I did technically give a very half-hearted kind of permission for this in an effort to respect the two of them and not interfere in her rebuilding her life after a critical illness, but in the interest of saving time I'll just jump to the point:
When she finally declared that she did want a relationship with him, I suddenly found myself with many of the same feelings I had after my own D-Day: a kind of disgust at the thought of both of them, frankly intrusive thoughts/images of them having sex, talking about me behind my back and sharing intimate details, etc etc. Total breakdown of trust and extreme guardedness.
She wants to remain "friends" or on talking terms and I've told her that's just not an option because of how uncomfortable I feel around them. It's not at all my goal to end what they have or get even in some way - on the contrary this is in some ways an opportunity for me to move on from a situation which was in many ways bad for me, but I'm considering going back to therapy for these deeply-felt recurrent negative emotions which sometimes bring me to the point of nausea.
So I suppose I'm wondering: have others experienced acute, unexpected triggers like this after separation - and I'm not so much talking about being cheated on again, which would obviously be triggering, but instead in other situations in life/relationships where you didn't necessarily expect it to rear its head?
Hope that makes sense and have a wonderful week.