Hello—- these are good reflections to have. The early days are the worst for both partners. As the ws, you have not yet had the time to start dressing all the deeper things that make these surface things tick. And the new trauma is affecting him in ways that are pure misery for him.
What you need is to practice replacing behaviors and put a few things on a schedule.
What I did to help me work though my feelings, and gave some sense of accomplishment that encouraged me to keep going were things like:
1. Practice being in your body and present as much as possible. If you remind yourself that you are right here, in this moment and safe multiple times a day you will stay feeling more in control. Set an alarm a few times a day if you have to and do some deep breathing exercises. Or when I was folding laundry or doing chores I tried to focus just in the chore at hand. I tried to do the best job folding laundry that I could possibly achieve which sounds so silly, but the learning to focus again instead of my mind drifting through rumination tha was only making it worse. "The power of now" by Eckhardt Tolle helped me greatly to achieve mindfulness more consistently and it gave me coping mechanisms such as self soothing.
2. Exercise. Yeah it’s hard when you are depressed but if you do even 10-15 minutes of aerobic activity it can help you gain the endorphins in your brain that you are lacking that is reinforcing the behavior. Make a consistent plan. As a bonus I jogged out in nature spending time outdoors is also very good to help stabilize moods.
3. Gratitude practice- our brains are negative biased because its function is to protect us from dangers by spending 5-10 minutes a day doing a gratitude practice it can rewire your brain to keep looking for positives.
4. Some foods help with brain chemistry such as salmon, pineapple, blueberries.
The bonus here is that a lot of issues people suffer is caused by not knowing how to give ourselves love. When you learn to take better care of yourself this helps reinforce that you love yourself which allows you to have it to give to others. It also means you can tap into your sense of self more fully whiz can be very stabilizing rather than having your mood constantly tied to that of another person which sounds like is an issue for you.
And the thing you need to put on a regular schedule is bringing up the affair. Yes, you may freely talk about it when he brings it up which is a lot better than a lot of ws can muster. But by making it his responsibility to bring up the feels alone. He feels as though you want it to go away and he is being a burden in some way to you. Check in- ask how he is feeling. Seek a lot of feedback. It makes it harder for you to hide and he will feel some relief that you want to be in this with him.
Actions and words matching are very important. You have the right idea you need to apologize. And the best form of apology is changed behavior. You do not want to fall into a bad pattern of apologizing, saying you will do better, and then not following through. Building trust is crucial and doing what you say you will do is important.
You will be surprised as you practice how much better you feel being proactive and in a short time you will form better habits. You just need to try and stick with adding behaviors intentionally that are better alternatives to keep you out of the loop.
I can see you are being thoughtful about this. I know divorce can sound tempting because it is so hard to face the fall out of what you do, and we as ws are bad at self validating and we know logically that the bs is in no position to provide that but it’s natural to miss it. You have to lead the way back, and that takes consistency.
