L4,
OK. I've been thinking about this for a few days now and I guess it's a good time to bring it up.
The Policy of Radical Honesty
Reveal to your spouse as much
information about yourself as you know;
your thoughts, feelings, habits, likes,
dislikes, personal history, daily activities,
and plans for the future.
To help explain this policy, I have broken it down into four parts:
1. EMOTIONAL HONESTY: Reveal your emotional reactions, both positive and negative, to the events of your life, particularly to your spouse's behavior.
2. HISTORICAL HONESTY: Reveal information about your personal history, particularly events that demonstrate personal weakness or failure.
3. CURRENT HONESTY: Reveal information about the events of your day. Provide your spouse with a calendar of your activities, with special emphasis on those that may affect your spouse.
4. FUTURE HONESTY: Reveal your thoughts and plans regarding future activities and objectives.
Full article
HERE. When folks began suggesting that you not burden your H with your troubles and thoughts is was in reference to withdrawal from OM. The suggestion to "go to the park" was to spare him from having to see you agonize over triggering and thinking about and missing contact with OM.
But it seems that we are now into a different dynamic that I think needs to be considered from the POV of PORH. The question then becomes how to state your feelings, your fears, your disappointment without love busting and wiping out months of really good work.
Unless you can tell your husband what he does that causes you pain and or makes you feel unhappy, then you are destined to live in pain and unhappiness until resentment overrides your ability to hold it all in and then let it all out at once.
We have talked a bit in the past about boundaries. In this case what you really need to find is a boundary enforcement that allows you to preserve the peace, not be hurt by his actions and still not withdraw from his LB$. I think that's a pretty tall order, but the alternative is to keep doing what you (both) have been doing. How's that been workin' for ya?
I don't know if I ever shared with you about the weekend my wife and I had about a year after she began her affair in earnest. It was a weekend retreat in Indianapolis sponsored by a large church and was in fact part of their opening weekend for their new facility. It was based on The Song of Solomon:
songofsolomon.com, a series created by Tommy Nelson, pastor of Denton Bible Church, Denton, TX.
Denton Bible Church That weekend our teacher was Neil McClendon from
Grand Parkway Baptist Church in Richmond, TX. Neil is one of those gifted teachers that will tell a story, include jokes and one-liners that have people literally falling from their seats in laughter and then drop the point of his story on you and have a room of 5000 people sitting in dead silence for over a minute as they take in what he just said.
So the second afternoon he talked about conflict resolution and told a story. He said that he and his wife have totally different ways of dealing with conflict because of the way each of their families dealt with it when they were growing up.
He said that in his family conflict was resolved in the backyard by use of farm implements and other large heavy objects. He said sometimes all the kids went to bed early with bruises on their foreheads and blisters on their behinds, but nobody went to bed carrying a grudge for anyone else. I have said that my own family was similar to this. We always resolved problems by rational discussion and logic…
After beating each other senseless and a little bit of blood was shed.
He said that in his wife's parent’s home when she was growing up they had a completely different way of handling conflicts. Whenever there was some serious breach or other problem that arose the solution was to storm from the room, slam the door to your bedroom and sit and stew for about a half hour. Then everyone reassembled in the room where it all began and pretended like everything was perfectly alright and no conflict had ever occurred.
Now while everyone in his family was shouting and hitting each other pretty often, his wife's family always seemed to have smiles on their faces and was never anything but sweet to each other. His family seemed to be full of conflict and his wife's seemed so peaceful and relaxed...
But what this leads to is what Neil called "gunny sackin'." It's as if whenever we have a complaint we ignore it and pretend that everything is fine. As a result we start to carry around all of this resentment with us. It's like we put it all into a big gunny sack and lift it onto our backs and carry it with us from place to place, relationship to relationship, conversation to conversation...
Until the day that the sack is just too much for us to carry on our own so when we have a conflict with someone and it is just too much to take with what we are already carrying around, we take the pack off our back and dump it all out at once.
So now not only are we unhappy about what is happening, but we are unhappy about everything that we stuffed into the sack since the last time we cleaned it all out. We aren't just mad because he is late for dinner tonight, but because he was late to dinner the night he met your parents and was 10 minutes late to the kids play in the 1st grade and missed your daughters debut and because he is ALWAYS late because he's ALWAYS waiting till the last minute and ALWAYS thinking about something besides his family and NEVER giving a thought to ANYONE but himself and...
You get the idea...
The problem is that until a conflict is resolved it remains whether we discuss it, fight about it or just stick it into a gunny sack to drag out later when it has more value in the argument we're having then than it has relative to the one we're having now.
Resentment generally comes from unresolved conflict. Most of us want conflict to end and go away more than we want to find a solution that will make us both happy. Thus we need POJA...
But POJA is not intended to get us what we want at the others expense. Rather it is designed to let us arrive at a solution that makes BOTH of us happy. But in order for it to work at all, the environment to negotiate must be safe for both of us. And that means that neither of us can love bust during negotiations. When one of us begins to make selfish demands or have an AO or starts with DJs, Dr Harley says that we should walk away from the negotiation until some later time. What this means ultimately is that there will be times when we aren't going to get a resolution the first try or the second or even the third, but unless we get back to looking for a resolution to the conflict, the conflict remains and just simply won't ever go away.
Failing to return to finding a resolution always leads to resentment. The more important something is to us, the more resentment it creates until we have all the fuel we need in order to act selfishly and just begin doing whatever we want, since we aren't making any progress in negotiating anyway.
Resentment becomes motive. Now when an opportunity shows itself, we take the selfish way out and an affair becomes so easy because we never get to solve anything and our resentment fuels our justification to do whatever we want because he/she doesn't really care anyway and...
Resentment must be dealt with. It cannot be allowed to fester and grow. It becomes like an infection that poisons the whole system (marriage) until only radical measures can save it. (I KNOW about infections left unchecked...)
If my ENs are not being met, whose responsibility is it to do something about it?
Not a rhetorical question, BTW. I do expect an answer...
Mark
ETA: In case you didn't see it on Roo's thread, I thought I'd post it here too.
The Seven Emotional Trials the Cheater Will Face
