I thought I would start a thread because it seems like the LBS spends a lot of time thinking about the WAS, their motives, their psyche, etc,. and maybe we need to focus more on ourselves.
On Tuesday, I had an assignment in IC to bring pictures of when I was little to talk more about my childhood. So, the night before, I packed up a small red bag with pictures. The next morning, I arrived to the appointment 10 minutes late, talked about my concerns about S10, the divorce settlement and how I thought H's parents divorce had impacted H. Then as I drove away, I realized that the girl in the photos never made it out of the bag. I almost had to laugh when it dawned on me what I had done, and I ended up thinking it was probably the best session yet. It showed me that I've always focused on others when I'm in pain--that it deflects it away, and I've probably got a lot of work to do on myself. I need to get the girl out of the bag. I can't leave her in there, even though sometimes it feels easiest to do that...
When I think about H, I feel sad, angry, disappointed, and pretty disgusted, honestly. I don't like that guy, the one in the A. That guy feels creepy to me, and not someone who I want even close to my heart. He wasn't careful with my heart or with ME, really, in our marriage. It seems that it was all about him, from very early on.
So, what about ME? Our D will be final next month. It's been fast and we've worked with a good mediator--everything figured out in about 3 sessions. I was thinking that we spend months planning a marriage, sending out invitations, picking out dresses, getting new hairdo's, pedicures, etc, then the divorce takes 30 minutes. So, I'm going to do some of those things with some friends the day after the D. Maybe I'll even call it a bachelorette party!
I know its not a party to get a divorce, or a celebration--but it is a new beginning of sorts. I want to grow psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. A psychologist I know says that we act things out or we figure them out. I'm worried that if I don't figure out what happened that it could happen again. I don't want another marriage where I feel erased--I want a mutual relationship where we have fun, have a shared life, and are emotionally intimate and take care of eachother's hearts. I want to be with someone who wants to be part of a community and to have a bigger circle around us. My H, who is actually very funny, likable and charming, told me that he has always felt like he was walking on a dark street, looking up at houses with the lights on, and feeling sad that he wasn't in one of those houses. I feel like we could have had one of those houses, but instead, we both ended up feeling like we were outside, alone in the dark. He brought me outside with him, and I wasn't able to bring him inside with me and others. Anyway, I digress. The only reason I say this is because I don't want to make the same mistakes again.
I think it might be helpful to hear from other LBS's to see what we've learned about ourselves, or changed, to get a different outcome. I never had problems dating before I got married, and expect to date again -- but I feel pretty worried about not recognizing old patterns and maybe having the same thing happen again.
I feel pretty worried about not recognizing old patterns and maybe having the same thing happen again.
I, for one, have taken a lot of time to look back at not only my M; but also all of the girls I have chosen to date. They all have similar personality traits. So why have I have been attracted to these types?
I've come to realize that I'm a rescuer. That I got great pleasure out of being the knight in shining armour. Only thing is that it was never enough. In my dating relationships, I usually got tired of it or they would leave.
Not every girl I dated was similar to my W; but I found those that weren't like my W to be too much work, I guess. In retrospect, maybe I inferred their seemingly lack of interest, early on; a rejection of sorts. I only say that because the girls that I dated and had lengthy R's with always held me in high esteem at the beginning. It was always a quick rush to be a couple and they stroked my ego. So if I met one that was aloof; I didn't have the stamina to stay the course.
So like they say "nothing good is worth having; if you don't have to work for it."
Now, after my D (and some months after); I get to practice my ultimate 180...and that is to make sure that I do NOT fall for someone similar to my W. And my early clue will be how any R starts.
Hmmmm...this is a topic I've spent a lot of time thinking about in the past year, but only recently learned one piece of the puzzle.
I've known that I ignored too many big red flags when I was dating H. I've always thought this was because of some insecurity and my ticking biological clock. But truthfully, I'm really not that insecure a person, and my biological clock wasn't ticking so loudly as to make me desperate. So why DID I marry a guy who was ambivalent about marrying me? And WHY on earth did I keep him after he cheated in the first year of marriage?
Just this week, I stumbled across a book on my friend's bookshelf. Although she owned it, she had never read it either. I can't think of the title right now, but it was a book about the effects of having a parent die when you are young.
I was 14 when my father died, my friend was 8 when her mom died.
Reading it, we discovered that she and I manifest two different responses mentioned in the book.
The book says that such children deal with love and loss by gravitating to one or the other - the love or the loss.
Those who gravitate to the loss may choose safety over joy. That's my friend - cautious, the two loves of her life each had to work hard to overcome her defenses. She doesn't let men in easily.
I'm the opposite - I gravitate to the love, with the illusion that if I love enough, the loss won't happen. That need to make love happen (to avoid loss) probably is part of what drove me to fight to make it work with my H when most sensible women would have walked. (I'm talking about early on. Later, when kids were involved, is a different story - I think most would fight then).
My new lover is completely different from my ex, and our dynamic is very different. However, one aspect is somewhat familiar. He lost a parent young too, and is more like my girlfriend - choosing safety over joy. So I have ended up laboriously chipping away at his defenses in order to achieve an ongoing relationship with him.
I didn't have to do this with my ex (he came on strong in the beginning then backed off). But I see in my dogged determination to woo this current guy, some of that same element that this book talks about - gravitating to love as if loss doesn't or can't exist.
Now, I tell myself I'm okay with whatever happens, at this point in my life I'm not really looking to marry or have kids, so where's the harm in a fling, even if he's not a good long-term prospect? After all, I think this guy is pretty special, and after being left by my husband of 25 years, I feel pretty fearless. Being dumped by a boyfriend would be nothing compared to that, right?
But I have to be careful, that my dogged determination doesn't lead me to ignore red flags the way I did with my ex.
I'm not sure why I'm a rescuer. I do know that it's been part of my personality for a long time.
It could originate in my low self-confidence with the fairer sex in school. I've never really had a self-esteem problem; it was just maybe a little "shyness."
My parents split when I was 10. We moved out of state from my father one year later. My sis and I only saw him for two weeks out of the year after that. And then he usually just took us to his parents house. Which,as a kid, I was fine with that. But I wonder what a lack of a "good" male role model had in my low self-confidence and lack of example of properly loving a woman.
Maybe, self-consciously, I felt compelled to "take care" of my mother. who knows?
So the girls who had "issues" seem to gravitate to my personality and I leet them. It was satisfying to "understand" and help them. But we know that only carries you so far in a relationship.
Fast forward to the fact that I married one and had two wonderful kids with her. But I can't rescue her and she doesn't want to change.
Rescuing can also be seen as a way of creating debt in another. If so and so owes me then he/she won't leave me. Often rescuing can lead to resentment on the part of the person rescued, something we rescuers don't recognize until it's too late. In a way, it's a little bit of emotional blackmail on our part and also a sign of feeling unable to keep someone unless we bail them out of some situation. Just some quick thoughts on the subject.
I have heard from therapists to psychics that I am a caregiver, a rescuer. But I am not so sure that is true. I think I am a conformer.
That, I think, is one of the biggest problems I have had. I attempt to conform to the person I am in a relationship with, to be what they want, what they need, and thus it looks like rescuing. But it is really me trying to be someone else rather than just myself.
Do I like to help people? You betcha. But I don't want to be responsible for getting someone out of a mess they have gotten into, like I did with the SG. For a long time, I was still helping him, with homework, with ego boosts, and in the end, nothing mattered. I realized I was still trying to conform and become a person he would want.
It is a work in progress, but I have managed to stop doing it as much. The biggest thing is I am really getting to know who I am this time around, and not trying to conform to anyone.
Im still standin better than I ever did looking like a true survivor feeling like a little kid Im still standin after all this time and Im picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind..
I think this is all interesting. We all learn how to behave from our childhood experiences, so we often don't realize when we are on autopilot.
Lola, you sound like me...but I'm wondering if instead of conforming to the wishes of others, maybe part of it is that you become critical to how they see themselves.
I took the pictures of my self as a child to IC today, and it was really, really helpful. It made me recognize my role as a kind of external "validator" for others. My H sent me several e-mails this week saying that he's sorry for how badly he treated me, and, in the same breath, he says that he is the same kind and caring person I married. That he doesn't have a mean bone in his body, he just fell in love with someone else. I'm not going to go into the details of his A, you all know the drill--except that he was very, very, very mean to me. And I think he was programmed to have an affair. His mother had an affair when he was a teenager and left the family--and the myth was "she just couldn't help it". So, I see that my H is now trying to convince me of the same thing. Its so important to his identity that I uphold this myth...so he can convince himself that he is a good person. And maybe he is. But its not my job to give him that validation. MY truth is that his behavior to me was heinous.
One of my roles in life has been to cover the weaknesses in others so that they could look good on the outside and feel like they were better people than they were/are. I see that people have put me in a place of validation--to hold up a mirror that reflects a different reality from what is. None of us is as good as we think we are, we all make mistakes, but I would so much rather be with a person who knows himself and all his flaws, and can share them with me, than a person who needs me to build him up to make him feel whole. My H, and other members of my family, have wanted me to help them re-write history to cover their flaws. Its pretty crazy now that I see it. I'm a very compassionate and forgiving person, and its hard to hold onto my truth and say no, sorry, I'm not going to pretend like X or Y didn't happen so you can erase it and write a new story...especially when those things have caused me a great deal of pain.
Don't know if this makes sense, but, anyway, we all have to recognize our state of "autopilot".
I think we just feel most comfortable in doing what is familiar thus the autopilot. You feel secure when you rescue, when you look after others to your own detriment. It's familiar and therefore comforting even if in the long run it's destructive. The beauty of it is that when it all goes down the toilet you get to play the victim! Poor me, look what happened to me and all I did was be good and loving and caring and selfless...and a doormat. I think my best friend may have put it perfectly when he said "we're all f@cked up", I think Adam and Eve may have said the same thing but in a less vulgar manner! Btw musclegal, I agree with you re: the affair theory. My W's Dad was in an A for over 25 years and her mom and the kids knew about it for years. I never in a million years ever thought my W would follow in his footsteps because she had experienced the pain that his A had put the family through...she'd never do something that hurtful... oops, I was wrong!
Well hmmm.. here is what I think, and this is more about long term marriage. I think you adapt to each other. You love the person. That is the contract. When you thought it was honest and then it is broken there is a big problem. This is why I found it so hard. Wonder
