When I am asked questions like “How can I stop caring so much?”, I am often stunned. The question conveys how you feel so desperate in your pain that you want to turn any feelings off. You want a master switch to turn off your emotional attachments. The emotional attachments bring pain and you are tired of that.
It is difficult to wrap one’s head around the logic of how you spend time and emotional energy to develop intimacy. You invest yourself into your spouse and then you want to turn off the emotions. You can not stop caring. You can not immediately rewire your brain and your heart. You can make choices that being the process of changing things, you can distance yourself from them emotionally, but you will not be able to turn off the caring easily. The caring may turn into hurt and change into resentment, or something else, but even that takes time.
“Do you really want to turn off the pain?” The pain actually lets you know you are alive. It lets you know that something is terribly wrong in the relationship and needing attention. Avoiding the pain is part of what led to this mess in the first place. Instead of avoiding the pain, you may want to first identify what it is telling you. Numbing yourself to the pain is not going to ‘fix’ anything. It will only keep you unaware of what is going on, and what needs to be fixed.
A better question is “What can I do to change the situation?” . In response to this, first what is the pain telling you? Is it telling you that your cheating spouse is emotionally not engaged? Is it telling you that they are unappreciative? Is it telling you that they are selfish? Is it telling you that you are more concerned about your own discomfort than the relationship that is falling apart? Or is it something else?
Once you know that, then you can take action on doing something.
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Best Regards,
Jeffrey Murrah
