Sometimes it's helpful to remember the bad times?

In my previous marriage, the end was gentle—a handshake and a kiss outside the courtroom.  Quickly, our points of disagreement faded from memory, and for over 30 years I've recalled Melanie as a kind, generous, beautifully smart woman.  I suspect she still is.

 

My second marriage (I'm not allowed to write her name!) was a violent immature horror show that ended with serial ghosting and her getting dumped by adulterous lovers while she was shitting on me.

 

The fact that I now identify as an abused spouse has been a burning spear in the middle of my brain for two years.  Rather than forgetting the bad parts, new instances of humiliation, gaslighting, theft, and sociopathy surface.  The vast majority of these new memories are from watching her mistreat and manipulate her parents and anyone else she could control.  But I got a solid plurality of the abuse, and I alone lasted for the entire 28 years. 

 

I hate the sewage that's surfacing.  I was married to a cruel misfit and my inability to force her out of my brain has ruined my mental health.  I have not yet been able to benefit from being free of a fraud. The best healing I've found for my manic depression has been a 5-part ketamine assisted psychotherapy series.  It didn't heal, but the medicine showed me what a happy healthy worthwhile life would feel like.  So now at least I have something to aim for as I pick up the broken pieces of my soul.

 

Here's the twist:  I keep trying to bend these new miserable "facts" so they support the idea that I had a good marriage.  I'm so needy of the "I was a great partner" myth that my mind is trying to redeem a pure sociopath. 

 

This twist leaves me with a paradox:  I want to force the useless turd out of my brain and my life.  There's nothing but soil back there.  But when I do, I also feel even worse—I allowed myself to be humiliated, ignored, talked over, and truncated.