Hi there dee!  I’m just gonna give you a kind nickname.  I want to validate your atomic horror.  You  feel destroyed.  Your life as you knew it is destroyed.  But you—you are not destroyed.   Please hold on to that.  Yes you are a barely-survivor of a bomb attack, and you might be wishing you had just been destroyed with everything else, because oh my goodness!  The searing pain!  Who could ever imagine this kind of pain! 

But there you are.  Your hands, your arms, your face, your body.  Your soul.  You will rise again, like a phoenix.  (The name of one of our forum members, BTW.).

I am so sad you have had to search for us, but here we are too!  And I am glad yiu have found us.

I am also so glad you called the hotline. 

When I have felt this sometimes, these past months, I remember my children.  Your children need you.

When you can, look for the “first aid kit” pinned to the top of the forum boards.

And immediately find someone you can talk to.  A friend or family member who will,listen, support, not judge.  Do that right away, as soon as you can. 

Let us know how you are doing!  I for one sure want to hear from you regularly these next days and weeks.

Thank you, this certainly helped! I’m laying in bed with a counselor number to call tomorrow and a rest place to go to for a few days if needed from the  suicide hotline. They told me it was not a hospital but a place to clear my head and rest away from my family if needed. I appreciate your words of encouragement and I wish it would all be over with by tomorrow. From what I understand it can take years(which I’m not looking forward to) but I know it has to be done. I need to get myself healthy and then take care of my girls. I will continue to reach out and read, listen and seek advice. Thank u again!

Dear D: Sending you hugs and immense strength. What you may not yet realize: your strength has always come from you. Your life can be amazing when it is all about what is important to you. You can love from afar with absolute boundaries and limited interaction.You are worthy and perfect (as a perfectly imperfect human) as an individual on this planet irregardless of the input from the persons in your sphere. Everything changes. Pain heals and morphs. Humans are resilient. We can do good with our hard lessons.Even those that feel impossible.  They are not.  Life is not meant to be comfortable and pleasureable. It is meant to help us evolve as humans. To make us more compassionate, kind, grace-filled and yet, unflinchingly fierce.

Feel our warmth.  We need you. Stay. Heal. Grow. Help. Love.  In time, things will be different. You, are a unique treasure we need.

I read an article the other day that says “you need to put your past behind you, it no longer exists”  How do I do that, I have kids with this man? I think or look at the pics on my phone, key west vacations, Mexico for Christmas with my girls. Everything thing is so painful and so sad. I just don’t get it. I feel myself becoming cold, bitter. My mom died 20 years ago(1999) at 53 years old and a part of me died then. I feel like a part of my heart became black that day and it no longer works. I can feel that happening now. Another piece of my heart is black and is shutting down...I don’t know how much of my heart or myself i have left.  I feel like after my husband is okay in his head and my girls have found spouses and moved on to their lives that I will just be waiting to die.

Dee, I am so sorry for everything you are going through.

I could have written your post word for word.  There's no instruction manual out there for us.  We're just the blind leading the blind here.

You wrote "I read an article the other day that says 'you need to put your past behind you, it no longer exists.'"

There is no shortage of experts out there who are willing to give you the benefit of their wisdom and experience, but be aware they're all making it up as they go along.  Anything that begins with the phrase "you need to" or "you have to" or "you've got to" is probably going to be useless advice, however well-intentioned it may be.  

I tell people, going through this  is like watching "The Sixth Sense" in that there's a surprising plot turn near the end, and then a series of flashbacks where you realize you had misunderstood the meaning of earlier scenes -- and if you're like me, you go back and see the movie a second time and it has a completely different plot this time.  We all went through this same process, making the discovery, and then spending months and years recalling incidents from the past, understanding the new narrative.  So anybody who says "you need to put your past behind you" is, I'm sorry to say, full of it.  Your recovery is going to involve you going back over your own memories, one by one, until they make sense.  Your daughters are going to have to go through this process, too.

I don't know how long it takes to recover -- my initial shock was about 18 months ago, and I am still clawing at my scalp at night, waking up to find blood on my pillow.  That's probably not particularly reassuring to you.  But at your stage -- don't bite off more than you can chew at the moment.  If you set a small goal for today -- even if you're just talking about getting through the laundry or emptying the dishwasher -- make it one goal you know for a fact you can reach, and that's enough for today.

All this pain you go through -- and the conflicting feelings you endure, both loving and hating a single person who is both real and unreal and both manipulated you and wanted to be kind to you -- everything you feel, is necessary for your ultimate recovery.  So crying and puking may be necessary.

I am still feeling suicidal at times.  I've decided it's okay to feel that way, if it gives me a sense that at least there's one option I could take if the pain is too bad to bear.  I don't agree with people who leap to action with every suicidal iteration, I think if you can manage these thoughts and take comfort in them, they can help you get past the pain of here and now.  In my case, I knew I could never put my daughter through the pain of having a mother take her own life, and I knew that the only person who would benefit from my suicide would be my piece-of-shit lying philandering husband who would get away without having to pay alimony.  That alone was sufficient to make life worth living, regardless of how painful today may be.