My struggle was more with resentments then forgiveness but for me its all the same process.

I have found that removing the word should from my life has helped me immensely. There is nothing that I should do, say etc until when and if I am ready. There is no timetable. I accept that I am doing the best that I can at any given moment. 

The other thing that I try to do when I am struggling with letting go of something is to sit and reflect on how the hanging on to that emotion is serving me? 

That isn't always easy to acknowledge that somehow I am getting something out of remaining stuck . It requires some brutal honestly and evaluation of myself. Its neither a bad thing or a good thing it just is an awareness, an insight. This often allows me to move in a direction that I would prefer to go.

I have discovered that I cannot forgive something until I have acknowledged the FULL hurt that it caused.

SO much of my experience of being enmeshed with an alcoholic was that part of my self protection was to tamp down the full experience of the hurt feelings.

In fact, I have discovered that much of my 'practice of detachment' was, in fact, the practice of denial. If I could detach myself from something, then how bad could it be? It certainly wasn't enough to smother me. If I could "let go and let god", then it couldn't have been that big a deal - it was just something I could hold in my hand, right, and let float away into the sky! Certainly nothing too awful.

Gosh, why was I never achieving that "serenity" in my program practice? I was detaching, letting go, gray rocking, blah blah ... and it was only the most temporary of helps.

Now I believe that if I deny the full extent of the hurt, there is no accounting for the full extent, and thus there can be no scabbing over that wound. It would be as if I had a big open wound and just kept throwing tiny bandaids at it, and wondering why the bandaids didn't even stick to the skin.

I am finding that once I fully embrace the hurt that the many betrayals caused, they start to move from a place where I cannot dislodge them, to a place where I can start moving them around. The scar will always be there, I know. But the rage, shame, etc. stops owning me as completely as it did when I had buried the hurt out of "view".

I will tell you that I have not forgiven my ex for the things he did. But now I feel like I don't have to. Because I'm no longer CONSTANTLY being consumed by rage that is coming from a hurt that is buried where it can't be seen. That hurt WANTS, no NEEDS to be seen, acknowledged, and felt. Once it has that validation, much of the frustration that came with it literally fades, or at least evolves into something much more tolerable. It can move of its own accord, to a different place in my being. I am still just starting this whole aspect of the healing process but I can tell that it's going to be good. Because I can ALmost feel things starting to scab over.  

So for me, I say "Anger isn't something that needs to be 'let go'". It needs to be addressed, questioned, seen, and reacted to. SO much of my anger came from the frustration of not being heard, not being believed. These days i've been saying "yeah, I was angry. I was wounded deeply. Betrayed, nearly destroyed. Nearly silenced. I tried to look like everything was ok when everything was on fire inside. I'm not going to deny that anymore."

That has been so freeing for me. I'm still disentangling myself, but this is the first thing I've found that really helps me to move in the direction of healing. 
 

I can almost see a future in which I am a being that is covered in scars and old bruises. But I'm whole, and I'm not fueled by range that burns unchecked.  That's my hope. 

Dear SunnyFrog,

I hear you. There is such immense loss from this disease, YES. It's horrible.

Your feelings are all valid and don't need to be "excused to the disease". It IS a wound. It DOES hurt. There HAS BEEN LOSS.
Years ago, after I suffered a loss, someone said this to me: "If it hadn't mattered, it wouldn't have hurt." I forgot this during the many years I lived with my exH. But once I left and started to "pick up the pieces", I remembered that truth. If you aren't ready to "talk forgiveness", don't. I'm finding that forgiveness is a verb that needs to be applied only when other conditions have been met - in myself. I have to have faced the enormity of the wound. Explored the farther edges of it as much as I can. Only then can I decide how much effort it will take to dislodge itself from it's place (where it is inevitably holding me back from a better life experience).

Grief is kind of like a pot that has boiled over on the stove. We have all these feelings, and when something is too powerful to be contained, our ability to compartmentalize feelings is derailed.
And then it's not just the boiling over the edges of the pot that cause problems - the "spilling over" causes a mess all over the stove top that can be next to impossible to clean up without drastic measures (like a razor blade on glass tops!). That is so true in our human experience of grief as well.

I find grief terrifying because it is uncontrollable; you never know how deep the well is, and it can be so deep there seems to be no chance of returning from the deep. The greater the loss, the deeper the well, the harder the return. I don't know that there's a timetable for this "return". If you spend decades going down the well, it sure isn't going to be a short trip back to the surface.

As an anonymous poster on the internet, I can't really hold space with you the way I think we all deserve; for someone to sit beside you, holding a hand and saying nothing, just letting the connection between you remind you that you don't have to drown. (Cue the F2F meeting and sponsor. Or just any friend who is actually there in person.) But I certainly wish this for you. I wish it for all of us. 

Be kind to yourself. Be patient. :)