Advice please; should I see my cats?

I have a dilemma. Having moved back to my home city, but having kept a job in the city I lived in with my ex, I work remotely but will be travelling back there a couple of times a month.

When I left, in the end, the main thing that broke my heart (or maybe the main thing I haven’t yet worked out how to deal with) was leaving our kittens. We got them when I moved there and I was their main care giver from when they were tiny; I played with them, fed them, cleared (a lot!) of their poo 🙂 – I adored them. And crucially they were companions for me at a time when I so needed it – largely alone in a new city, new house, newly jobless, living with a partner for the first time and trying to negotiate a complicated & failing relationship. So I became more attached to them than perhaps I otherwise would have. And cruelly due to my relationship breakdown I had to abandon them suddenly, from one moment to the next. I write this with a huge lump in my throat – Im not sure it will be a long post.

The main thing I need help working out is whether to go and see them. The way I managed to deal with having to leave them was to, basically, pretend they don’t exist. Maybe not that healthy but it was survival on my part at a really difficult time in my life. I haven’t been able to even look at my pictures of them for months. Though recently I did see pictures of them and it was kind of OK – and that made me wonder if I would be OK seeing them now hence contemplating doing it soon.

Part of me feels it would help to see them – that it would help me deal with this sadness at the loss of them that doesn’t seem to shift at all (unlike the sadness for the loss of my relationship which I have been actively grieving for).

A friend recently said to me (he had to do something similar a few years back) ‘You feel guilty for abandoning them but you need to go and see that they are OK without you’. I wonder if he is right – that this unshifting sadness is somehow trapped by guilt and that seeing them I would realise its OK, that they are OK and that I could let the sadness go (even if just a bit).

My worry is it would be too much for me, and also I feel weird about breaking down in front of my ex in the place where, well, it all kind of went wrong – far away from what is now my safe place in London. This is quite a likely scenario as not only would I be seeing the cats for the first time since I left them (ouch, ouch, ouch), but I would be going back to the house we shared together (his house). Though I was never particularly attached to the house so maybe that would be OK.

Any advice or thoughts on this, very much appreciated. Thanks.

P.S Its too much for me to actually post a picture of them just yet, they are beautiful and adorable – I chose some other lovely cats to represent them here instead for the time being.

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