Dealing with the huge stress of a breakup
Hi everyone,
Having a bit of difficulty coping with a breakup right now - well, a lot to be frank - and I though it might help sharing some thoughts and looking for advice.
I've just come out of a 10+ year relationship. Things were great for so long, we met young and after a few years moved in together. Then about 18 months ago, I started to feel unsettled. Getting the eye for other girls was probably the first thing. I started feeling less passion for my girlfriend. We were having sex less. The time between sex was getting longer and longer, first a week, then a few weeks, then a month. I was staying at work late because I was unhappy at home. I was staying up at night because I didn't want to go to bed and be forced into intimacy - not necessarily sex, but intimacy of any kind. Things came to a head when she started making plans to buy a house, this was a step I couldn't take, and I finally told her. We talked for a while, then came to the decision that we had to split up. It was tearful, but not too awful.
That was two months ago. At first, I felt pretty blank, if a bit empty, and this lasted a few weeks. Then the stress developed. I started to worry massively about the future, about what I'd thrown away. I don't necessarily mean her, I mean the whole network associated with her. Her family are absolutely great, really level headed people, whose support I miss hugely. We've also shared friends for many years, some of which I know I'll not see again. There were days when the stress was so bad I just couldn't think of anything else. I was in a meeting at work and when my turn came to speak I just... couldn't. I made an excuse and went to get a drink, my colleagues assumed I was sick. But it wasn't that I was sick, it was the torrent of thoughts in my head, a rushing anxiety that swamped all my attempts to surface from it.
I wasn't sleeping - staying up late drinking, then waking up a full two hours before my alarm and immediately getting stressed out, unable to get back to sleep. I'm talking like 3 hours sleep a night. Last weekend I felt so bad, the knot in my chest was so awful, that I honestly thought I couldn't cope with this. I'm not saying suicidal exactly, but my thinking was; if I can't clear this bleakness from my mind, what kind of life is that? Is it worth the pain of carrying on with this stress? I phoned the Samaritans, who were OK but who were really just a voice to talk to followed by advice to see the GP. I phoned NHS Direct the gave similar advice. So I went to the GP, who thought that I was suffering from a reactive depression, gave me tablets to help me sleep and asked my to come back next week. That's pretty much where I am now.
What I suppose I'm saying is that I feel my reaction to this not normal. When I write down the facts of my relationship it seems quite clear that we had to split. The sex had gone to . I was avoiding her. We were doing our own thing. Regardless of how long you've been going out once that happens you have to move on.
But these are just words. The anxiety I feel over this is really crippling. I worry hugely that this was an enormous mistake, and that if only I'd tried harder to love her again we could have fixed things. I'm crashing with a mate at the moment, who's there some of the time, and I find being alone at the flat absolutely horrible, whatever I do to take my mind off it just doesn't seem to work. The knot in my chest remains and I don't seem to be able to shift it. I write stuff down in an attempt to stay calm, which works for a while, but eventually it snowballs and I'm freaking again.
I remember feeling this when I was with her, incredible anxiety over the conflict between losing feeling for her whilst feeling that I simply couldn't take the step of breaking up, because that would leave me alone. I've been with her most of my life, what the hell would I do without her? I didn't feel able to throw a relationship that took in my entire 20's away, so I was trapped, feeling like I didn't want to be there, feeling like I couldn't break up.
What's happened has happened. There is no going back, I know that. What I need is help with the stress that this is causing me. I find the sense of loneliness and loss absolutely enormous. I feel that a massive chunk of my life which I really, really valued, has been destroyed and I'm out here, alone, and scared to death. My ex and her family were brillilant people, really supportive and strong, and I feel that I've thrown away the chance of a normal, fairytale life, meeting in our teens, being together for years, then starting a family. All that time, all those experiences, gone.
Phew what an outpouring that turned into. Look, here it is; I'm as stressed as hell about this and I really, really want to work on it. I need to get rid of this aching sense of loss in my gut, this sense of panic that I've screwed my life up, this anxiety that I'm living with, from when I wake up to when the tablets send me to sleep.
Any advice or your thoughts are welcome
thanks!