Originally Posted by Mark1952
GM,

Just a point to think about. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything, ever. He can't compel anyone to sin, yet we all do.

What the devil offered to Eve and Adam in the garden was the right and power to choose for themselves what was right and what was wrong. It is thinking we have the right to make that decision that is at the heart of sin, all sin.

The devil is not the evil version of God, is not omnipotent nor omnipresent nor omniscient nor able to produce physicality on his own. He therefor cannot and never could compel us to do anything against our will. WE choose to take his bait and do what he wants us to do even though we know from the beginning that he wants us to do it so that it might destroy us in the end.

Now as for the practical...

You and DWG need to spend more time together, meeting the intimate emotional needs of each other and less time involved in any activity that reminds either of you of the days of betrayal of the past. I won't say "quit playing music" but would rather ask, "what would you do if she asked you to stop playing music?"

All of MB hinges on one assumption. That is the assumption that whatever we do, it affects our spouse in some way and the effect is either a positive emotional response or a negative response. This is not only true of things that we know might cause an emotional reaction but also of things we never considered before. What we have for lunch when we are sitting alone at work might be a trigger for a negative reaction and if some affair time trigger or past moral failure trigger is related to something we continue to do, then every time we do that thing we are causing our spouse to relive that pain all over again, not just figuratively but literally since the same emotional content of the original event is present in the recalling of the memory of that event.

The two halves of the Love Bank equation are to make deposits so that our spouse loves us and to avoid Love buster that make withdrawals to maximize the balance in our account so that they continue to love us.

It takes both halves for MB to work. We have to maximize the deposits and minimize the withdrawals and no matter what we do, we are doing one or the other of those two things.

Even things we do that we think should have no effect do have an effect, even when we don't see it right away.

Whenever we find ourselves falling into conflict or having a difficult time resolving some issue, our first order of business is to examine our UA time and ramp it up a bit with a focus on meeting the 4 intimate emotional needs.

And just so you know, the sudden loss of trust was probably not even related to the incident it centered around. It probably happened way before that and caused a twinge of fear about getting the whole truth and then on top of that came this binocular thing and the stopping on the way home and the mail on the floor...

Knowing how things run around here, look really hard at IB on your part concerning anything at all. Have you done anything at all recently that might have indicated that you were not taking DWG's feelings into account even for a moment in time?

Mark

Thanks, Mark.

As a retired guy, DWG and I spend 99% of our waking hours together, and part of the reason there is even any chance for us to recover after my behavior and her experience of that for so long is because we do spend literally all of our time together. How much is UA time? I don't know. But I would guess close to twice the 15 hours per week that is the MB minimum. Since we are both musicians (she is a symphonic clarinetist), she is loath to ask me to give up the Jazz Workshop. For both of us, playing has been literally our life's blood. I have offered to quit many times in the year and a half since D-Day, especially because my involvement as administrative director of a jazz festival was the cover for 90% of my lies during my affair. But she won't hear of it. She even joined our board in order to allow me to try to revive the festival in this awful economy. Still, I am running out of energy and passion for it largely because of my own guilt at what my life had become. I am committed to playing our scheduled summer concerts. I think at that point, I may very well stop, especially if it is a source of anxiety for her, no matter what she says. Nothing is really important to me any more accept for her and our two grown boys. Not surprisingly, they are both great jazz musicians. Our youngest is leaving for New York City next month to spend at least a decade there developing his skills in that milieu. Part of DWG's emotional hair trigger state right now is because of his leaving this region, and it is part of mine, as well. In fact, she is nearly a basket case over his leaving, though he has lived in a city 60 miles away for the last 5 years, making his reputation and becoming one of the best. That is the thing missing from my thread and hers, but it explains why we both are so emotional and volatile right now. Because of the long problems in our marriage, her relationship with our sons has been the thread holding her soul and sanity together. It is a huge loss for her. They are both great young men because of the values they learned from her.

- GM

Last edited by GreenMile; 06/30/10 01:21 AM.
FWH, age 63. 24 years of narcissistic behavior, infidelity, and emotional abandonment of my BS, age 57, DancesWithGoats (DWG). D-day two years ago, leading to emotional breakdown. Been working MB program and toward spiritual transformation and personal growth since then, with some slow but real progress. DWG still with no trust, but with grief starting to subside a bit.