I'll probably regret this, though I know it won't be the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last, but I'm going to throw my 2 cents in...:)
I think a number of things come into play in a forum like this.
First, most of the time we only get
one side of the story, and that is through the perceptions and colored glasses of the poster. They may not even give us all the pertinent details.
Second, electronic (written) communication can be a very difficult medium to accurately convey emotion in, especially when the conversation occurs between people who usually don't even know each other.
Third, this particular forum, GQII, is used primarily for marriages that have been attacked by infidelity, and the majority of posters are BS'.
Fourth, this website is designed to support the Marriage Builders principles.
IMO, you put all this together and you wind up (quite logically) with an environment that
may appear close-minded. It is close-minded - if you expect every opinion to be supported equally. It is not close-minded if you understand that opinions that clearly fly in the face of MB principles will obviously not be supported.
If the purpose of this forum is to assist people in saving their marriages, why in the world would anyone expect an active WS stuck deep in the fog to receive gentle treatment? In that situation, the active WS is
THE biggest threat to the succesful recovery of the marriage, and everything else is completely secondary.
By all means, help them if possible - but don't sugar coat things. There's a difference, as was pointed out a few posts ago, between blunt and brutal. To go back to the start of this thread, referring to BIL as a cad is blunt, not brutal. If he is pursuing and/or encouraging his SIL to engage in an EA/PA, he is a cad. I don't know any other way to say it.
It is not (IMO) bashing the OP to say that. It is not bashing the WS to call them on their behavior. Nor is it bashing the BS when they slip into doormat mode.
I liken it to saving a drowning person - if the person you're trying to save is panicking, it is considered perfectly acceptable (and in the Navy we were trained to do this) to slap them. It's not done to harm them - it's done to shock them into (hopefully) thinking rationally, or at least to stop panicking, so you can save them.
To keep with that analogy, we were also taught that if we couldn't get the drowning person to calm down, to let them go, so we wouldn't drown with them.
I see that same approach here. Posters are blunt, sometimes to the point of appearing brutal. Regardless of the "target" of the bluntness, it's always for the same reason - to try and "shock" that person into waking up and seeing things for how they really are, not how they think they are.
Those posters who keep operating in their own "fog/fantasy" after receiving countelss 2x4s which eventually find themselves not being posted to.
An affair is a crisis. An affair about to happen is a crisis that can possibly be prevented. The first thing to do is to address and resolve the crisis. After that is accomplished, then you can pull on the gentle gloves and help the BS and WS re-engage in their marriage.
I've been on these boards for 16 months now. I have not seen a single one of the group considered to be "vets"
EVER turn away a poster where they thought they could truly be of help. I have seen, and
personally experienced, the willingness of many of these same people to come alongside a poster even after that person had disregarded and/or spurned their previous advice.
As far as running people of the boards, I think that gives too much power to other people. Nobody has the power to run anybody off these boards. Indeed, there has been at least one case of a poster who was asked to take their thread elsewhere, and it was a considerable period of time before that poster did so.
Several of the people on this thread probably remember when Magpie (my wife) posted here. She got handled very roughly, and she left the boards. But it was her choice to leave. While I might have approached things differently than some of the posters, and was not happy to see the treatement she received, in reality MP was not in a state of mind to be helped by these boards. She did not come here of her own accord - she came because I told her I was posting here and that she might find value in doing the same.
Having re-read some of the original stuff from back then recently, I can honestly say that I don't believe anyone had a personal vendetta against MP, nor did they think she was a bad person. They did, however, have strong opinions of her
actions, and had been around long enough to realize that nothing justifies wrong choices, whatever that wrong choice might be. They wanted the same thing for MP and I that they want for
everybody here - a happy, recovered marriage if it is at all possible.
And I think that is the most important thing to realize in all of this. The motivation behind the various posting styles is the same - to save marriages. Not one style fits everyone, and not one style works for all recipients. But if a person, be it BS or WS, truly wants help and wants to change, they will stick around and listen to those posters that get through to them, and ignore the rest. If they stick around long enough, they'll probably wind up getting consistent feedback/advice from a select group of other posters, and the posters who's style didn't work for them will move on to help others.
So yes - bash the OP when it serves a purpose (i.e., to bolster the sagging confidence of a BS, or to help blow away the fog of a WS). In the end (again, IMO), does it matter if you're driving the WS into the OP's arms? The WS has already checked out of the marriage - I don't see how it could make things any worse (and it might just drop a good dose or two of reality in their laps).
There you have it...my Friday afternoon dissiteration. Someday I'll learn how to say what I want to say in 50 words or less, rather than 500 <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
