LadyBlue,
You have kids, so you will understand this analogy. I read a book awhile back that changed my mindset about lots of things, and really helped to explain how affairees justify their behavior to themselves. Here's the analogy - it's from the book Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box.
This is really paraphrased, so it's nowhere near a quote!
You're lying in bed asleep and the baby is crying. You wake up and think that you ought to get up and see what's happening, after all, your wife usually does it, and she needs some rest. But you don't get up right away. The baby cries again. You think to yourself that you ought to get up, and then you think you really are tired, too.
The baby cries again.
Then you look at your sleeping wife and think, why doesn't she get up? She is just sleeping. She could get up and help the baby too! After all, I'M the one who goes to the job every day! She doesn't have to drive that commute! She doesn't have to put up with my boss, or that grind! She gets to stay here with the baby, and I make that possible. She doesn't even appreciate the hard work that I put in. And here is the baby, crying, and she sleeps through it all, not even appreciating me and my hard work, nope, I shouldn't have to do this at all, and I'm not going to. She is lazy, and probably even naps while the baby naps. She probably had a nap today, too, while I was at work.........
See how that went from the husband thinking about doing something for his wife, to not wanting to, to berating her as being lazy and then blaming her?
Sort of how this whole affair thing happens, how it is justified in their minds. Starts out as "I shouldn't", and works its way through to "well, the BS really hasn't ever been the kind of spouse I wanted in the first place".
And none of it is true. It is an exercise in self-betrayal in order to justify behavior that the person knows is wrong in the first place! In the case above, the man's first instinct is to get up and check on the baby - the right thing. Then he goes against it (self-betrayal), which leads him right down the path of blaming others and attempting to justifying his own poor choice.
And all of it is "garbage", as you so rightly labeled it!
What he told you - all that stuff about not ever being happy, loving you differently or less, you never being happy - it was all involved in the exercise of his own self-betrayal and justifications that followed.
What they do are to try to convince himself, and then you, that what he is doing is okay. That the affair is okay. That he can violate his own moral code and get away with it, because these justifications somehow make sense, and blame someone else - or that he has actually made "nobody" at fault!!!! - and that everybody can live with the outcome. Sit around the campfire at the end of the rainbow and sing Kumbaya with me, because I've made everything okay!!!!! Affair and all, see, its all justified.
Only what you've done? You are trying to believe it. The reality here is:
Its crappola. He made it up.
Go from there.
SB
Last edited by schoolbus; 02/01/09 03:21 PM.
