This is meant as a sequel to The Wall and other emotional jokers. I am not writing a book; wouldn't know how. It is my intention to throw out some theories and stuff and see what people think. This site, as run by Dr. Harley and his coaching center with Steve and Jennifer, has a wealth of material that isn't being utilized enough. That is obvious by some of the questions I see asked in the forum.

I invite all opinions, positive and negative. Much like The Wall, I suspect that thoughtful posts will generate something that is far better than my starting point.
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One of the greatest insults you can ever give someone is to say, "They are the same as they were XX years ago." This implies that person is incapable of learning life's lessons. See, most folks understand intuitively that they change themselves as they experience life and in effect, become a different person, more or less. Only those with a strong entitlement personality or a sociopath tend to stay the same with their values and even those types modify themselves to avoid jail, most of times.

I think it would be beneficial for us to really notice the fact that we change and embrace that idea on the conscious level. Most all of us recognize how much different we are than we were as teenagers, and most are thankful for the change. We just need to carry that idea forward and see how much we change as adults. The changes are usually so gradual we don't realize just how different we become as time moves on and we experience more and more of what life has to offer.

But not all changes are gradual.

The old style Marine boot camp took the core values of teenagers and changed them to those core values which were important for the purposes of the Marines. This is much like the first time for combat or rape or the trauma of discovering that our partner in life has committed adultery. We are shocked into becoming different from what we used to be, right now, immediately, with little time to absorb the why and what of the change.

Sometimes that rapid change doesn't matter and sometimes it does.

The Marine gets a new structure to mold their values in life. The rape victim has available all sorts of counseling to help with the trauma. Most often, the adultery victim has nothing except what is in their minds, unless they seek help from a forum like this or counseling, itself a minefield of incompetents, Charletons and the well meaning but often ineffectual church based counseling. Probably less than 1% of adultery victims discover this site and the help that is available here and the coaching center. Probably even less than 4% buy a good book or a bad one, as the case may be.

With adultery trauma in the tens of millions a year, pity.

Some of the changes we make is because of what we call guilt. Guilt kicks in when we harm someone else or ourselves. Guilt is when the adulterer wakes up one morning and thinks, "What have I done?" And most do even if they don't admit it. Guilt is when the betrayed starts looking for what they did to cause the adulterer to seek solace in the arms of someone else. And they find flaws, but nothing that justifies the horrific insult to their dignity as a person that adultery dumps on their heads. Guilt is when the betrayer does mental back flips to justify what they have done and they continue their betrayal.

Guilt can drive a wayward back into the marriage. Guilt allows the betrayed to accept the return. Guilt drives both to try bits and pieces of the Harley methods, if for nothing else, to the benefit of the kids they have. And half measures almost never work. Guilt follows us around like the dead weight of 40 pounds of rocks tied around our necks. As time goes on, the rocks get heavier and heavier and heavier, until we can no longer bear the weight and then divorce or become indifferent or both.

Here is the key question:

What happens when we turn guilt into something called responsibility? And what if we change the guilt into a life lesson that in turn changes us? We all change, so why not embrace the change and turn the guilt into something that can be used to better our lives?

We have hurt someone who doesn't deserve the hurt. The wayward hurts their spouse and family, most especially the kids. The wayward ultimately hurts themselves and they hurt their wayward partner, all of the extended families on both sides, their affair partner's kids and so on. We run over someone in a car because we were talking on a cell phone. That is a ton of guilt. We take out our frustrations on a kid who didn't really do much except be a kid. We feel guilty as a parent.

Guilt is everywhere in our lives. And sometimes we get used to guilt and ignore it. The devil on one shoulder wins and the good person on the other shoulder is defeated. Our conscious is told to shut up and we go forth and do damage, as much to ourselves as to all of the others out there who really didn't deserve that decision someone made to have an affair or a one night stand or any other form of adultery. We use guilt as an excuse to run from ourselves. And guilt changes us, like it or not. And more often than not, guilt changes us in ways that are not good, not good at all.

Ever heard the phrase "Guilty Pleasures."

Guess those two words fit adultery. The teacher in Cancun, the traveling salesman, the neighbor with a sob story, the boss, the secretary, the good looking flirt on boy's or girl's night out, the business trip, the old high school flame; all a possibility for "Guilty Pleasures." And for while it lasts, it really is pleasure. Just study the impact of an infatuation on the body and brain. It is like a drug and the affair or the bit of strange or the break from the drudgery of life in general is like going on a drug high.

We get high on the guilty pleasure.

Yet most reading this diatribe understand that the low that follows the high is equal in the intensity. The higher the high, the harder the fall. While we know we will feel guilty, thus Guilty Pleasures, we seldom realize just how much guilt we will find to haul around as the baggage of life. Nor do we realize just how much guilt we will heap on others; the spouse who blames themselves, the kids who think it is their fault, the parents and friends who wish they could have helped. And the other party to the affair who was simply vulnerable.

The problem with guilt is that when we feel guilty, we make excuses and lie to ourselves. We turn into "Not me" birds. We find reason within our minds to blame someone else. We find reason within our lives to run from the guilt by stuffing what we have done and just plead "Can't we just put this behind us?" We try to convince ourselves we will never, ever do that again so we won't feel guilty. We get a divorce because we don't know how to make amends or we still feel entitled. If we try to make amends, we just feel more guilt and that just won't do, now will it? We run from guilt to find justification. And that doesn't solve the problem either because running doesn't allow the necessary change to ourselves the trauma deserves.

By the way, entitlement is just another way of avoiding guilt.

Some stuff the guilt behind the Wall, mostly women, and some stuff the guilt into an empty room, mostly men. Problem is, walls leak and rooms get cracks. Unless we get caught and get into serious trouble, we tend to hunt for guilty pleasures until we do get really hurt or we recognize that we have really, really hurt someone else or many someone else. If we are the betrayed, we examine our guilt like a frog looking for wings.

Now lets take a long look at an alternative.

First we have to judge if our decision to have an affair was a good one or a bad one with unintended consequences or consequences about which we were well aware if we got caught. Knowing what we knew then and looking back, was our decision a good one or a bad one? Did we KNOW what was going to happen, did we really think we wouldn't get caught or the damage we were going to cause someone else or a bunch of someone else including ourselves would be trivial, so we told ourselves?

It makes no difference if we find information (or repercussions) later on that might have changed the decision we made at the time. If the decisions we made were the best we could make at that time with the information we had then, or as important, who we were at the time, that was the best we had in us. Yet we feel guilty. We should have known better. If we are the betrayed, the rut our marriage got in was based on decisions we made that the devil on our spouse's shoulder could use to justify " Guilty Pleasures." Guilty, right? If we are the betrayer, the rut justified what we did or the entitlement did, whatever. Guilty, right?

Another way of looking at this is to ask ourselves: "Given the information I had at the time, and who I was at the time, under that same circumstance, would I have made the same decision(s) again?" If this answer is "yes" then we made the best decision we could and that is as good as it gets no matter what the consequences..

Leave us say that perhaps the answers to the questions above are "No", what now?

The prime rule is to "Never look back". Feel on the back of your head. Do you feel a reset button? If not, there is nothing you can do to change your past decisions. You should analyze what you did and why but it does no good to agonize over something you cannot change, focus instead on what you can change, which is the present. We cannot change the past or change the future, we can only change the present. And by changing the present, we can influence the future and make it a brighter place.

Either yes or no, what we need to do is remove guilt from the equation of life other than the caution that is in our minds that we do not want to do something for which later on we might feel guilty. What we really need to do is to allow what we did to change ourselves. We need to embrace what we have become instead of rejecting it. Ever heard the old saw, "Live and Learn?"

What happens if we change just one word so it becomes: Responsible pleasures!

If we reject the drama, if we allow ourselves to change, if we recognize that as life goes on; we become different people if we really, really try to understand our less mature selves and if we strive to become grownups. If we learn from the past and apply it to the present, we become more worthy. If we change ourselves, we have reason to be proud of who we become, never mind what it took to get here. And we can't get there if we haul our guilt around like 40 pounds of rocks that becomes our unresolved baggage and weighs us down so that we are unable to make sound decisions as life moves on, our baggage won't let us.

And who wouldn't want to be more worthy?

Since we now understand that guilt is not very useful, what do we use take it's place? I am going to suggest that instead of guilt we take responsibility. One way to do this is to make amends to the person harmed. That is not always possible or practical but it is not a bad thing to do. If we are the betrayed, we change ourselves by being a better partner and we help our wayward partner by helping insure that they do not find themselves in a place where they are tempted. That is a basic Harley tenant.

To become worthy, we change ourselves. We own who we are. We take responsibility.

If we are the betrayer, we take responsibility in changing ourselves in such a way as to become a person who would never make those "bad" decisions again; a somewhat different person, if we will. This does not let us off the hook however. We are still obliged to take total responsibility for the consequences of our past decisions. We are, however, no longer the person who made the decisions but now have become a person who is incapable of making them again. And we become a person who can take responsibility including that for our owned past mistakes.

Again, we own who we are.

A major part of taking responsibility is to now go forth and make new decisions that, in their turn, are the best we can make with the information we have on hand or what we learn. That is all we can really do, keep on making the best decisions we can and then seeing what needs changing and making better ones as the circle continues.

And one of the things we can do is to learn.

One of the ways we take responsibility is to embrace what we can learn about having a better partnership and being a better partner. Instead of hating the thought of reading one more passage in one of Harley's book or one more IC session with someone we have found to help us and our partner, or with the Harley Coaching Center (recommended); instead, embrace the thought of learning a bit more about being a better person, a worthy person both in our own minds and in the minds of others.

We don't then resent learning all this stuff because after all, it was him/her who committed adultery so why should I change. We don't then run from our guilt because we did the deed and the task of learning comes all covered with guilt and we are, frankly, tired of it.

And we are never too old or too young or too busy to learn, if we really want to.

Only by recognizing that we go through life changing anyway, do we then think that maybe we can learn something by a method that is less painful than peeing on an electric fence? If you have arrived at that happy point in your own thinking, then I direct you to what is here on this site and from the enormous collective wisdom of those who are here, as an easy way to help your learning process. And seriously, you can learn from the pros and from newbies; both have life experiences to share and both can help, some better than others, granted.

A partnership/marriage is one of the single most important aspects of our life.

It thus behooves all of us to us to learn as much as we can as early in our life as we can, to the goal of "Responsible Pleasures." Now you have to trust me on this. "Responsible Pleasures" makes fantasy bodice rippers pale in comparison. "Responsible Pleasures" are far better than the fantasy of porn. Why? Because responsible pleasures are real, up close and personal, with someone who is worthy and wonderful and all our dreams come true, because we have changed and we like who we have become.

Your thoughts are welcome

Larry

I no longer feel guilt as it really is ok to go and just do what you want.

Wow, Larry, that was great, thanks for sharing!

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