Another must read by MARK [
I taught him everything he knows.. 
okok, I lied!] Great post, Mark!
"UA time, or more accurately, UA time spent meeting the four intimate ENs, is THE key to making all of this stuff work.
Lack of UA time leads to lack of ENs being met which leads to our Taker stepping up seeking that our needs be satisfied which strains our ability to limit Love Busters which stops the whole process from accomplishing what we wanted when we began, a feeling of being in love with each other.
When a couple spends time together meeting the needs of recreational companionship, intimate conversation, affection and sexual fulfillment, they are able to rapidly fill their accounts in each other's Love Bank. When the trend is toward a state of Intimacy, dwelling on past failures becomes less meaningful and as long as the trend continues, things get better over time.
The opposite though is also true. When no progress is being made and when our Love Banks are not getting enough deposits and our needs are going unmet then the things of the past become more meaningful to us as they are the recent past actions that predict to us the future more than our logical understanding of things.
This comes back to the problem of any memory with a high emotional content being easily recalled and once recalled all the emotions of the original event or episode shows up like clockwork within a couple of minutes of thinking about the event details.
So when we are laying down new memories that trend toward making us happy, feeling loved, etc and we feel emotionally fulfilled, contented and cared for our emotions are based on those feelings. Even when we briefly think of the past hurts, the pain associated with betrayal and those kinds of memories, we quickly replace those thoughts with the present good things that are happening or happened more recently and our emotions recover very quickly and we don't lose much in the way of feeling happy and contented.
But when we are NOT laying down new and better memories and are in fact not really spending enough time together to do those things, we tend to let our minds wander back to the memories of the betrayal and unless we make a conscious decision to change what we are thinking about before the emotions come flooding back, those negative emotions are going to predominate our waking thoughts.
Some people are able to do this better than others it seems. This is true of any traumatic event in our lives from a horrific traffic accident, to being abused by an adult when we were a child to being burned badly in a fire. (Much research has been done as it applies to burn victims learning to process memory triggers by making a decision when triggered to change what is being thought to something more pleasant and enjoyable and so short circuit the flood of emotions associated with being burned)
What takes place in cases of betrayal is that the person who betrayed us triggers the emotional response. The betrayal causes that person to become a directed stimulus, that is, not the direct cause of the emotional response but the thing that is always present when that emotional response takes place thereby becoming the thing that can trigger the response. So the person who caused us pain in the past becomes a trigger that causes us to experience that very same pain simply by being who they are. Any time we think about that person we feel the same pain all over again. Any Love Bank deposits made recently are wiped out, our Taker steps in to protect us and we spiral downward wondering where the bottom might be.
But when we spend time together actually meeting our spouse's ENs, and when our UA time is spent meeting the 4 INEs which cannot really be met win any other way outside of UA time, those more recent memories begin to give us something that begins to establish our spouse as the directed stimulus that gives us good emotional responses and so we spend more time being triggered into happiness than into depression, sadness and pain.
In simple terms, when our spouse is present when we are happy we begin to be happy whenever our spouse is present. If our spouse has done something so horrendous that his or her mere presence causes us to experience the pain all over again then unless new memories are laid down over top of those memories of being hurt he or she will forever remain our source not of happiness and well being but of unhappiness and fear.
In other words, the WS has to do so much to make up for the pain caused by the affair that it overwhelms the emotions of the BS and they begin to let the feelings of now outweigh the horror of the past.
I will also say that I think this is much easier in marriages that were actually pretty good for the most part before the affair and in the ones that were pretty dysfunctional before the affair the dysfunction becomes magnified afterward and must be dealt with as part of the healing process.
Couples also often forget that their are three parts or periods of recovery that cannot be bypassed and each one must be dealt with in order to recover and restore the relationship.
The first step is a time of individual healing for both BS and WS. They each have different demons to deal with and they cannot really help each other very much in the process. The best they can do is to be there to support each other through this step. Individual counseling can help with this step more than couples therapy.
The second part of the process is healing as a couple. This is where the most time is normally spent. This is when huge amounts of UA time pays huge dividends in the relationship. This is where past hurts and resentments are left behind by both spouses and they begin to work together again as a team, or in many cases, to do so for the first time in their marriage. This is the time when marriage counseling can actually be of a help as long as the therapist focuses on the issues of the couple and not the individual issues of the spouses. This is when we learn about PORH, POJA and UA time becomes less forced.
The final step in the process is to forge a new relationship that addresses the problems that were present in the way the marriage was before the betrayal. Now we start to use the things we learned in counseling to actually prevent us from hurting each other and so can actually start doing the things we learned in the previous step. We start to use POJA to prevent our spouse being hurt and use PORH to make sure our own emotional state is not fostering resentment.
Before a couple can become whole, each partner in the marriage must be a whole person. When two people are broken and so just happen to fit together because where one is missing pieces the other completes the puzzle neither can really function as the spouse of the other. They are each relying entirely on the other for completion. Its like finding two broken bottles and trying to fit the two biggest broken pieces together. Even if you get a fit you don't have a viable container.
But when each bottle is whole then either one can be viable by itself. And then the two can come together to become a couple rather than each having to be fixed or completed by some aspect of the other.
What happens in betrayal is that both partners are smashed to pieces. The longer the betrayal lasts, especially after discovery, the longer the healing takes and the less likely that all the pieces can be put back together. The affair acts like a hammer smashing things into ever smaller and smaller bits until in some cases melting the whole thing down and starting over to make something new out of the debris is the only possible solution. Even these couples might eventually be able to become one again, but the individual healing time can take so long that they might simply give up long before it can happen.
But when each person is working on their own issues, fixing their own brokenness, healing their own ravaged emotions then very soon after the process starts a couple can start to move forward as a team and can begin to be one of the two and make marriage as it should have been all along.
In a dysfunctional relationship, the fit is dependent on the brokenness of each other. We each get from the other what we need to complete ourselves and so when it is missing we become unable to function as an individual. Our identity is shaped by our brokenness in such a way that we seek completeness rather than fulfillment from others. So we never really reach that two becoming one status since neither of is is a whole person to begin with.
If I am half and she is half then together we must each remain stagnant to avoid changing the fit. We can't grow or change or improve because as soon as one of us does that we don't line up anymore.
What really happens in most marriages based on this method of fitting together is that one is less than half and the other tries to be more than half. This ends up being the marriage between two Renters and seldom will it lead to marital bliss unless both partners learn how to fix their own half of the whole which as it applies to marriage means that each must first become complete in and of themselves. For two to become one, each of the two must be whole unto themselves."
[\lecture]
Mark
here
