Hey Chris, I feel your pain. My time is limited, so I will make a couple of observations now and perhaps more later.

1) there is a tendency to take a painful situation and augment it with thoughts akin to, “i don’t know if i can handle this much longer” - I sense all kinds of this in your message. Catch yourself early when worrying about the future. Focus on what you can and need to do today.

2) grieve the pain and name it. This is something you are doing well - keep doing that. Keep talking about how this hurts you. Talking about how you feel is exactly what you should do - your other option is to not process and act out the pain.

3) learn to see pain as a friend, a mentor, not something that needs to be medicated away. This change is not comfortable, but I see you making the change and you can feel hopeful. This has it’s own type of “withdrawals” since you are used to going a certain direction and you naturally miss that. Your language around “natural consequences” is very good.

4) Anytime you can direct your language around what your spouse is doing to how you feel will also help you limit your visualization - which is also quite natural (not that that helps much)

More later