i tried but when i click on cut and paste, it wont work.

oh well, dont worry about it.

sf

It doesnt turn into an actual link until you submit the post.

Other than the Bible and theologically leaning references, the book How Can I Forgive You?: The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To by Janis A. Spring has been very helpful to me.

S-55,

That part of you that remains in self-betrayal? It is PREVENTING you from reassessing your life.

Think about it.

How can you possibly be reassessing anything, if you are looking at it dishonestly? If you are not looking at it with honesty - that is, taking ownership of your own part in things and understanding his ownership of his parts, without the justifications for WHY you "feel" this way or that way - then you cannot possibly garner a true assessment of the state of your life, marriage, or even your wardrobe.

Just look at things as HOW THEY ARE. Try to remove your justifications, anger, blaming, etc. from the picture.

Yes, I know this is hard to do! BTDT.

It is only when we remove those things that we are truly able to see what the state of our affairs (pardon the pun) really are.


So, from an outside perspective, I see that you are in a marriage where there has been what you believe to be little truth from your H, for probably the entire length of the marriage. You have built what you thought was an honest life with him, and he has not reciprocated fully - or possibly has for brief intervals.

Now, when that life is threatened with crumbling, he suddenly wants to rehabilitate himself. You are now looking back and wondering if ANYTHING was real. You are not able to determine which points of the marital events were shared during "non-affair" times, and therefore "real".

So now your rearview mirror of memory says to you:

NONE OF IT IS VALID, BECAUSE THE LIES INVALIDATE ALL OF IT.

Logically speaking, from my training, this is not true on its face. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater - but in fact, this is what our brains tend to do.

We do not store "junk". Once our brains find certain sources of information unreliable, our brains then automatically search for all other bits of information that are related to that originating source, and place it in the "tainted basis" file. In other words, the basis for the reliability is now under question, and any decisions or memories based on the original information will be questioned. This is because we are programmed to validate information, posit questions, test hypotheses, and verify tests and information repeatedly before information is written into "stone" as valid and worthy of being trusted for making decisions, etc.

For example - a baby lying in a crib blinks his eyes and the light comes on. Wow! He now thinks that if he blinks his eyes the light will come on. This info is put into an area we'll call "interesting, but not validated". It is then tried by the brain, tested, and later found to be invalid. It is trashed, because it is junk. Brains don't like to keep junk. (BUT, later on, it might be brought up again, because the child might remember that eyeblinking was tried before for something, and might be worthwhile for a shot at something else. Not stored for usage, but kept in the "just interesting for possible later use, keep in the cobweb area".)

In your situation, the brain now has information regarding a host of memories regarding your marriage. That information is that it is all possibly INVALID - because it was based on an implied agreement with your husband that all conversations, feelings, and interactions were trusted and based in a loving and mutually compassionate relationship. That relationship has been proven to be NOT MUTUALLY BOUND.

So the brain goes to work and says, "Gee, that would logically mean that all conversations, agreements, thoughts, memories, and events that share any interaction with this individual are therefore also invalid on their face. So, now I need to move them all back into the file 'interesting, but not validated' again."

This means that you now have to question everything - see how this works?

Only, the problem is, this process in the brain is NOT logical. It moves everything, all the files, when this is unnecessary. All files are not tainted.

It's sort of like a computer virus. Recoverable, but takes work.

Your job is to reassess, and make the determination if enough "files" are truly infected that the computer (marriage) does indeed need to be discarded and is not worthy of salvaging because the damage is too deep.


In your case, I'm not so sure your marriage is recoverable. You came in with the idea that you want to try. I would say, try. Because your inner self is driving that direction, it is what you need to do to settle your mind.

But I say that with the other hand also cautioning you that this marriage certainly does have a long history of tainted files. To attempt to sort this out, to gather what really is the truth of your life, will be difficult and monumental.

Forgiving him will be one of the easier things to do, IMHO. The harder tasks will be for him to earn your trust back, for you to learn to love him again, for you to understand yourself again, to rebuild what a sense of "normal" might be, and to find a point somewhere in the future where this seems like a distant memory to you.

Whether he is in your life, or you divorce him, you will still have hurdles to jump. You will still need to recover from what he did, and to understand the impact on you.

But at this point, make the attempt to stay away from self-betrayal, and do what your instinct knows to be the right thing.


And yes, I read the book. It made a huge difference in my life, my thoughts, and how I work with people. It has given me the ability to move toward peace.

SB

mesb-
i needed several days to digest your letter and i printed it out and read it many times. wow- your thoughts overwhelm me with the depth of your thoughts.
first - thank you so much for validating the scope of painfullness i have been through in our marriage.

and for acknowledging how my life has been put into more turmoil than i was in before...

i have wracked my brain trying to find out if there are enough files in my marriage that are NOT tainted.

since my brain doesnt store "junk", i am trying to seperate the fact from the any deletion of files that might have happened due to the invalidation of our marriage....here's what i came up with.

i began to think back to when my husband was kind and loving to me, and i did remember those times....and then i remembered how even though he was loving- he was never kind. even when we were first married and even dating- HE FLIRTED WITH OTHER WOMEN IN FRONT OF ME.

he may have been fine if if was just us two alone- but NOT when other people were around- people who he would work to make them like him- people he would show off in front of.. women he would flirt with.

the problem seems to be that through this whole process of healing from infidelity- i am learning to love myself. now, i truly see my H as he is/was. and i dont like what i see.

where i used to make constant excuses for his behavior; where i used to pretend his terrible behavior didnt happen, where i NEVER THOUGHT MYSELF WORTHY OF BEING TREATED IN A LOVING, KIND CONSIDERAT WAY = now i am beginning to.

when we read HNHS and do the MB home course- i cry inside when i learn what a real relationship should be like - where a spouse wants to meet the others needs- where with the POJA a person must CARE how the other person feels about their behavior.

and then it hits me - this is what a marriage is supposed to look like. i never knew. i thought i should just be a person to be yelled at and blamed.

how ironic that my biggest pain in life has produced my biggest growth. has allowed me to open my eyes to start to learn to love myself. has allowed me to put things right in my life.

tonight - sunday- we have a phone appt with jennifer harley. pray for me. i so want to hear that there is hope for me to have happiness in my life in this marriage. i WANT it to work- but i know that i wont stay any longer if it cant.

sf

S-55,


You said something in your post I have experienced.

You talked of the realization that you were worth more than what you once thought you must accept.


In the relationship I had just prior to my marriage, I was physically abused. My boyfriend was an alcoholic who would get drunk and beat the he// out of me.

I accepted this as the way things were. I understand that this is likely because my father beat me, and he taught me that love came with a beating.

So I accepted the beatings from my BF as the way things were. That relationships looked like that. He told me nobody would want me. I was fat (I was, BTW, 5' 8", and weighed 118 pounds, so fat was NOT an issue). I was undesirable, not smart, just not anything anyone would really want or need in their life. I was lucky to have him, and he accepted me because, well, he HAD to because someone had to have pity on me.

And he had to beat me, because I was stupid and out of line most of the time. I was a pain in the a$$ and on top of that, I was crazy.

I believed he was right. I was quite insecure, and had no idea what I would do without him.

Truth was, we were dating in high school, and about a year after I graduated, and we were a mess. We were not soulmates, and our relationship was completely circling the bowl, when he beat me one night at a bar to the point where the police came and put me into protective custody overnight.

My dad asked me, when I called from jail, "What did you do to make him beat you?"

Really supportive, huh?




It was the next day, after I had APOLOGIZED TO HIM FOR "MAKING HIM BEAT ME IN PUBLIC" that I met my husband.

Two days later, after not seeing my BF for those 2 days and spending the entire time with now H (this was the longest I had gone in three years of not seeing him), I called the BF on the phone and told him we were through.

BF asked me, "Is it because I beat you?" I told him, "You know, it should be. But it's not. I found someone else, and he is showing me that love does not include hitting. It isn't what I thought it was at all. And that I don't love you - that what we had...wasn't love. I don't know what it was, but I'm sorry. We just are through."


We did meet in person (with my NEW BOYFRIEND - now H - watching from a distance). We talked it over, for the first time rationally. We parted, and he sort of accepted it. Later on, he began a string of vandalism and stalkings of my home. Anyway.

The point here is that the realization you speak of is very familiar to me. That love, and loving relationships are not tainted with the unkindness that you speak of. What you describe, where your husband is acting on the surface with words that he loves you, but then doing things at the very same time that fly in the face of that "love" - that's abusive, yes.

And your brain, it's right not to trust that information. That's the "junk" I speak of. Your brain places that information in the file labeled "very interesting, but don't rely on this as good enough to make great decisions on".

That's why you are looking at your relationship now and saying to yourself - hey, I'm not so sure I want to go forward with what I have as a partner. The past is riddled with stuff in the "junk" file. The difference now?

Your awareness of the size of the junk file.


S-55,

You have a difficult task before you. You came asking about letting your husband back into your heart. You ask about forgiving him.

Yet you find yourself now realizing that what you really have is a very weak foundation of many affairs, and a man who has filled the past behind with lies and deceit. It is difficult to move ahead in a marriage with just one affair, to rebuild from a good marriage with a solid past of trust and love.

Your past with this man, you now realize, is one that he has tainted with abuse and darkness.


I return to the questioning.


What does Sunflower want for herself, five years from now, and can she get that with THIS MAN?

and

Can you tell me the difference between love and pity?


SB

Sb -
your post was so good and so bad for me. it has taken me over a week to be ready to respond.

i have come to accept that i WAS AN ABUSED WOMAN AND THAT I HAVE AN ABUSED PERSONALITY.

when you told about your first boyfriend and how he abused you, and then the realization of the abuse when you found a man who was loving- this seems to be my story also.

NO- i was not beaten as you were - but i have been verbally abused through our whole marriage.

i had no sense of ME.

i only found myself as an extension of my H- who knew about my neediness and liked to make me feel small and unsure of myself so i would depend on him.

my H was outgoing and i was shy and unsure of myself. so i lost myself in him. i found my self esteem by being his wife. still no ME.

so the more i needed him and didnt have a ME, the less i could see how needy he really was. he was just as scared and unsure of himself- maybe more. except he overcompensated by making everyone like him- or trying to anyway. its only now that i realize the truth about him and me.

so the fog is lifted and i now see the reality of my life.

because he cheated for so long with so many women- i can see the truth and feel the SHOCK of being an abused woman.

and i can see the truth about him- that he was an abusive man- weak inside, immoral, selfish, narcisstic, obnoxious, funny at everyone's expense, abusive to our children - verbally and physically, and unlike you - i do not turn to a new man to start anew- but try to start anew with the same man.

my reality is clear - i had an abused personality. i did not believe myself worthy of kindness, caring and love. i did not like or love myself. i did not know who i was. so i gave and gave and gave.

my struggle is clear. now that i break free of the bonds of abuse and learn to become myself, learn to love myself, can i make a life with the person who abused me?????

sunday, jan. 11 we had a session with jennifer. it was amazing. when she spoke to me alone - i asked her what i had to gain by working and staying in the marriage. she said taht i can have the life i always dreamed of having- filled with happiness and love.

i said that i dont know if i want to try with my husband. she said that he is a "willing participant". he takes full responsibility for the affairs and wants to change . i told her that i dont know if i am a willing participant or not. she told me that by keeping my resentment for my H, i am creating a negative way for me to act, that will eventually spill over into other areas of my life. and that my neurons in my brain are being programmed to act that way. that i need to change this for myself.

this was the only reason she gave me that made sense to me.

i asked my H why i should work on MB with him- and every reason i can refute. i can have a loving relationship with another man- it doesnt need to be him. he says - "i can be the man you always wanted and deserved". but i say - so can some one new.

the only thing he says that makes sense is -" we have 3 children together". that is a reason to try.

jennifer says that his changes have been inconsistent. she says that once we are in the program with her- i will see consistent changes and feel differently. that the memory of the affairs will pop into my mind and i can say to myself - THAT WAS THEN- THIS IS NOW.

jennifer doesnt talk about the past- only to see if she has a willing participant and she says that i do.

but my past is still a big confusing thing in my life that i need to make sense of- so i can move on to a better future.

so when you ask me if i can get what i want from my H in 5 years my answer is I DONT KNOW!!!

i know i want a loving caring relationship with a person who is humble, kind, a good conversationalist, fun to be with, loves to travel, loves my kids, cares so much about me, is self assured but not full of himself, keeps his career in perspective, and sensitive. i dont know how my husband can morph into this person.

and even if he can, is it worth it for me to go through the ups and downs until he gets it??

i dont feel pity at all for my husband. NONE. i dont love him. i dont enjoy spending time with him. but if i never saw him again- i wouldnt like that either. something is holding me here.

we speak to jennifer again on sunday night. she wants to help us learn to share our EN with each other in a positive way and to set up a way to review each other's behavior in the relationship.

i will try to have an open mind. ...

we schedule our 15 hours of undivided time, but have nothing to do in them but work on marriage builders home course.

it must be my negativity. is this negativity born of hurt and awareness of my past- or a true dislike of my H???

in the past i asked about trusting him again - about forgiving, about opening my heart, but now i dont know if i want to anymore.

i know this place is so much better to be in than being the abused woman i was.

i know the rest of my life is before me- as it never has been before.

i know his confession of his affairs has shocked me into the reality of WHO i am.

and opened my eyes to the truth.

now to see and find my way into the future.

SF

sb-
are you out there????

we spoke to jennifer tonight and it gave me hope- but as i told her - i dont want to have any hope - because i dont want the feeling of being hurt or let down again.

we went through our ENs again - individually - on the phone and she helped me word mine to be specific in the behaviors i am looking for. she also helped me word everything in a positive manner.

we spoke a little about my pain and mistrust and dislike of my H. she said that i am normal for a BS and especially for the depth of betrayal that i have experienced.

this helped me to feel better.

then my H spoke to her individually. tomorrow night we are supposed to share our En in the format that she perscribed.

i feel that his program, MB, jennifer's coaching and possibly a MB weekend, are the only possibilities left to build a marriage together.

i am trying again to open my mind.

i will NOT open my heart again... until i see consistent and strenuous change on his part.

what do you thihk???

sf