I am not placing any blame here what so ever. I am simply clearing up what was said.


And would you think that by taking those things away was going to make me want to give to you what I already thought was wrong.



Hearing how you felt about it was all I could do.


You have only recently made those changes. Something that never should have needed changes made to it.

There are phone records stating you talked to him 3 times minimum (I say minimum because this does not include texts or calls you can get and do make from work).

03/16 05:54 PM PONTIAC,MI MM/PU 8 outgoing
03/18 05:29 PM PONTIAC,MI MM/PU 17 outgoing
04/09 08:15 AM Incoming MM/PU 7

Thank you for the info.

Something I learned which may be helpful (or not)...

When you make "I" statements...there's "I feel" "I think" "I believe" "I hear (perceive)" "I experienced" or "I remember it as..."

Owns your stuff. I think you already know this...I'm going for refinement...which means we up our awareness and commitment.

When I use I-statements, I found I overlapped a lot...said I-feel when I meant I-believe. They are very different...emotions result from our beliefs...so distinguishing these for ourselves give us clues as to what we are really trying to communicate.

Hope that helps...not going for rigid precision so you can't be misunderstood...(control)...All humans can be misunderstood...not in their control. They can do a bang-up job, though, on acting respectfully to be clear to themselves. Doing your best, as Cat said, is what's called for.

And I think you can see where posting to you has already helped me. Nothing is a one-way street...

I believe resentment rewrites history...that pesky emotion taints a lot in me. Distorts my perception, gives me permission to state my stuff as fact, not own it (sure feels like I'm owning when I state my thoughts as fact, though).

For instance, I THOUGHT I was a good listener (because I was told I was). I discovered I was NOT a good listener...made too many assumptions, didn't clarify or confirm before launching ahead. Didn't make me bad...just means my experience was different than whoever was speaking to me.

I have learned to listen well...through understanding.

God works, Ezb...and I don't think I've shared where my real change came in about listening...four years ago (thereabouts) I was a mess...facing the loss of my marriage...the marriage I was coming to realize I'd trashed myself...I was in a lab's waiting room and saw a poster on the wall...and it said (with some great graphic)...

"Strive first to understand, then be understood."

Struck me like lightning. Huh? Wha? See, my assumptions in conversations had a false payoff...if I could grasp what the person was saying faster, better, more intuitively (assumptions hide in there), then I would be thought of as smarter, more compassionate, experienced...downright keen.

Not real, eh? See, the person was sharing THEIR stuff...and my intent wasn't to hear and know...to understand...it was to SEEM like something I wasn't...that ol' self-image. I had to change my beliefs to listen well.

Understand does not mean to agree, to approve...I use it to mean I respectfully heard your stuff. I acknowledged it was yours, validated it was yours. Just like now, in posting to you...I am striving to understand, then be understood.

And yes, I believe my cart (understood) has gotten ahead of my horse (understanding) a bit. I don't believe we change a lifetime forming and acting from the habit of assuming very fast. It's been four years...and I still get it backwards at times.

Maybe that's part of how we stay changed, though...that awareness signals us looking at our code, adjusting our alignment...what do you think?

I'm not assuming you don't know what I'm sharing with you right now...I sharing it because I don't know.

LA

I do not feel I can answer that question considering we have not be exclusive our whole marriage and to this day you can not say that you would give the swinging up for the rest of your life for the better of our marriage. If it was you asking me to give the swinging up I would have in a heartbeat with no regrets of doing so. But I believe that is the difference between us. I have always had a strong belief in marriage (which was taken away from me) and well I guess I never fully knew what your belief was on marriage.

Bunny,

You said...


Do you mean "a woman" or "the women"?

LA

And as I have stated before the first two I was telling him to stop contacting me. As for the third one you have listed. I did not talk to him after the second call and I would have been getting ready for work at that time.

But again I am being accused of lieing and cheating. Something I have never done.

The way you worded it was that "I took it upon myself to start it". That makes me feel you are placing blame like it was not an agreement.


Could you answer my question please I feel you are deflecting.


So you still will not try to fully understand it?


I will not apologize for that anymore. The only thing I can do as far as that is to change the present and the future. I have been wanting to talk about this deeper and we have had opportunities but our meetings have been cancelled by you. I'm not sure what else i can do but make myself available and if you choose not to then that is your choice.

we would meet couples but only me and the other woman would play.

I am sure it did.


If you are not going to talk about the past anymore and only work on the present and future why is it that you keep bringing the past up?

And as I have stated before the first two I was telling him to stop contacting me. As for the third one you have listed. I did not talk to him after the second call and I would have been getting ready for work at that time.

But again I am being accused of lieing and cheating. Something I have never done.
[/quote]

I don't believe I made any accussations there I believe I was just stating facts. So if I hear you right he made a 7 minute call to your phone at 8:15 am and there were no voicemail checks from you after so it is just a mistake on the bill and you didn't speak to him?

I don't believe I ever said I wasn't going to talk about the past (it has to be dealt with for healing). I do remember saying I wasn't going to let the past effect my present or future (meaning what has happened does not mean it will happen again).

Posting it was an accussation that something is going on. Why don't you just ask him yourself then.

And I am telling you I did not talk to him and no I did not have a voice mail from him. What does the phone record show? Did I check my voice mail?

What I really want to know is: If you are working on things why would you be accusing me of lieing and cheating? Would you not think that is going to push me away more?

Now I'm replying to myself...is that even legal?

I'm putting out there for both of you what I learned about communication...honing it into a skill.

Use "I" statements...and listen and repeat to confirm or clarify.

May seem awkward or even affected at first to say, "I hear you saying you blame me"...I remember. Means a world of difference in our how we experience communicating with one another. Doesn't make something that isn't fact (blame isn't a fact) into a fact. We refute facts with facts.

We do not refute perceptions. We validate. "I can see how you hear me blaming you; not my intention."

I did this a lot, folks...I swear, no lie. I couldn't tell the difference between fact and experience. I had to sort it into two categories...My stuff and my actions.

My stuff is: My own thoughts, feelings, perceptions, perspective (how I view) and beliefs. Those aren't facts...they are my stuff. My experience.

Facts are my actions..."I left the room."

Stuff: "I left the room because I felt like hitting you."

I can easily see the overlap, how easy it is to take one for the other. I still do. And at times, I still do it.

Our brains do not know fantasy from reality...so we don't always understand what happened and don't come close to knowing how or why. Just discerning in my Stuff sentence what DID happen is tough...until you get it into your head you WANT to separate reality from stuff. Actions from stuff.

I statements help tremendously to train your brain to discern which is which. That's been my experience.

See, I had a really deep problem with refuting my DH and others. I would slip in (this is embarrassing) what essentially was a six-year-old LA saying, "Nuh uh!" "Did not" "Did to"...

Consider if those statements even apply when what is in contention was..."You did NOT feel that way! Liar!" "You did too mean to bump into me!"

Fact...I bumped into her (my bestfriend back then...and yeah, this wasn't a one-time exchange).

Experience: She experienced my intention to bump into her because she believed I was angry with her.

There isn't a "reality" in that...it's her experience, through her filter. My may have been that I wasn't angry until after she accused me of doing it on purpose.

Unprovable.

I figured out, though, my penchant to refute (making all things fact that were not) also came from my belief that only EVIDENCE of love, care (feelings) was possible. See, evidence of loyalty would be A, B or C. Nothing else. Didn't own my perception, my stuff separately. Didn't factor in my own DJs, which were actually GIVING me that experience...that my best friend suddenly hated me and I was a bad person because she did.

(Picture us ten minutes later playing cards, btw, laughing.)

If you feel like refuting someone's experience, see if you're invested in collecting evidence of something you treasure...like love. You may experience feeling "right" more than loved...it's a sneaky replacement that we get from living by collecting evidence (proving our stuff to ourselves...making it fact) that turns out to be a really poor substitute for the real thing.

Now I've lost my goal...which was communication. The better you change your communication with your partner, the better the communication you will have with yourself.

Learning to listen goes both ways...I ask you to listen to yourself, identify your true intent (not your assumed one) and check to see if you're focused on being right or understanding.

And like the instructions say "Rinse. Lather. Repeat."

LA

Bunny,

Man, I gotta type my fastest to keep up with you guys. And quite replying to myself.

Thank you for clarifying. So you had sex with other women while you were married. I see in a later post to ezb you said you had never cheated. Does that mean you do consider what you did as adultery?

LA

Do you mean it made you felt accused? I was simply clearing something up and giving everyone full information.


The bill shows you did not check your voicemail. It does show a 7 minute incoming call.


I'm working on clearing things up from the past. It allows us to better understand and move forward to a better future. If we cannot talk about all the issues then they will remain and fester and put us right back at this point. What I hear you saying is that if I choose to want to talk about sensitive issues to you then you will just keep walking away, is that correct? If so then how is that working on the marriage?

I did not view it as adultery because i was never interested in only woman. I believe I would have viewed it that way if I had thought I could souly be with only a woman. Then did come a time shortly after doing it that I was no longer interested or needed to do it.

Ezb (yes, I'm replying to your reply to Bunny...just didn't want to reply to myself again)...

Would you consider that once we have identified what we did wrong, expressed remorse and apologized, that the amends continues for as long as the injury? Meaning, restating your remorse (if you still wish you had not done what you did) owns that you still feel remorseful?

When it comes to trashing our marriages (me, included), my amends stays active for as long as my marriage. Doesn't mean I'm the bad guy (or was)...means I remain remorseful for what I did, know why I did it, and how I won't do it again (enforcing boundaries).

Could this also be the same root issue...you cannot say you will not do it again...and I get that...I committed to listening to know and understand my DH...and since I committed to that, there have been times I have failed. Doesn't mean my commitment to NOT do that lessened...meant I stopped acting from my commitment.

So I own and apologize again. Doesn't make me a liar. Means I permitted myself to do that which I truly do not WANT to do...because at the time, I justified doing it. I lied to myself.

I'm still working on those permissions I have.

I do not believe, after four years, I have reached a place where I will not apologize for all that I did in the 15 years prior in my marriage. I don't know when or if I'll reach it. I am, and remain, heartfully sorry.

Your wife has asked for your consideration, understanding, to be listened to and known. Those seem to me to be the same things you desire. You cannot require of others what you will not do yourself. Doesn't work that way.

You are not apologizing for who you are...you are apologizing, with ownership, demonstraing your remorse, for what you did.

Again...it takes practicing awareness and discernment to know what you need to apologize for and what you do not. Takes time and commitment to see the difference.

Key for me was: To stop reacting to my emotions and take my time to refocus on my code...hold up my words/actions to it, and then act. The pauses are a great investment, IME.

LA

And i had thought we had already cleared this up last week but clearly you are still hanging onto it.


Again I did not talk to him on that third date but you are going to believe what you want and I can not make you believe anything else.

Bunny,

I understand how you viewed it then.

How do you view it now, today, looking back on your choice?

LA

I won't turn you in and I assume (yeah I know) that you won't refute being able to quote yourself lol