The Fight For Self Forever

[CT1118]

Wish I had time to read them all, but I do not. So I am offering some open ended advice here to those arrived and those who seek to be awakened. I have learned this in my time here and my time alone, so this is at least the truth of me and what I got from all things here - you gotta fight all hell and you don't stop until you get to the victory of daylight.

What I believe most do in these situations is self-justify, cut and run, blame, and/or abandon in the name of the other being wrong. What is not realized is that going through, or rather, fighting Hell for someone else is really a fight of self - - and the battlefield is inside you.

The cold irrationality of dealing with a loved one who is a victim of abuse, stress, boredom, mid-life, bad parents, or anything else emotional or physical, is going to be the truest test of who you are as a person. A test you may not be strong enough for, patient enough for, or confident enough for. And why do so many break or quit, why is that society's go-to? Because this is a war of one, and that one is you; this scares the sht out of most of us. You will not be a martyr, you will not be a self-sacrifice, you will not be rescued. No, what you will do is face yourself down. Question who you are and how you got this way. Question how you got here and then how you really got here. Question what happened to your goals, your dreams, and I mean the ones that belonged to you - not "us". Question what you believed to be the truth, to be the just, and to be tangible in this world. All you were taught to expect has just been proven false. "And the dish ran away with the spoon" - you can look that lyric up if you want, it matters to this paragraph.

To fight Hell, you must be prepared to dismantle yourself. You must let go of yourself. You must review your own abuse, shortcomings, faults, and fallibilities. You must stare stare fear, anger, and ego in the face each day; sometimes you blink. But if you can acknowledge who you have been, how you got there, and where you want to be, you can develop new strategies. You begin to lovingly detach from the other person, you begin to wake up, you begin to believe in what you can do and what you want as an individual. You begin to see victory on the horizon. You become deliberate in living for you. This is if you make it this far, it is not a fight for the weak of character.

And how does a fight for Hell assist the one you thought you began this fight for? Because the truth of love, real & honest love, is that one must know and love themselves to mentally and emotionally fit enough to love another. But we marry young or we marry when unresolved of another or we marry wrong. This is a battle that is long, it is painful, and it will deprecate your heart, mind, and soul if you allow it; allow it by spying, allow it by obsession, allow it by convention. But hopefully, in the end, you come out to be the person you never felt brave enough to be. This fight is not forget and move on or forgo and move out , this is forgive and move into - move into self.

Damage was done, but dmn if you can't grow, you can't accept, and you can't be. You can. The love of your life looks like you and you alone. You gotta get you first before you get to others. Only then will you present a package that others can be proud of and proud to stand beside. You do this and victory looks like daylight, Hell is in retreat. The Fight For Self is absolution. You gotta be all in for the fight for you, you do this and you are free, oh so free. Now get some you.

[SH_]

Brother...I demand that life give me the opportunity to shake your hand in the very near future.

You are a phenomenal example to those that will pay attention in the application of DBing and saving of self...not, of bettering ones self for greater things in their future.

Thank you CT for the wisdom and example.

[SBJ]

Thank you for your words of encouragement...truly inspiring.

[Canefan]

Wow. Good stuff. I think I just grew an inch or two reading your words. Thank you.

[CT1118]

Thanks all. I want to move all forward from where I struggled. I owe much to many. If it helps, that is my goal: I learn so that I may teach, so that I may learn...got it? Comments welcome, but please take these errors into the self.

This is not what I would have chosen for my second paradigm shift lesson, but its important, most here lie about it. Spying. Spying...[breath exhales.....wish I could run away...but I was bread to fight].

Stop. Oh yeah, it's that easy. Oopps, sarcasm on the advice when you arrive. To stop spying is to stop the mainline heroin of the LBS for most of us. To pretend like we don't, or we did and now we don't, or that we didn't and now we won't...yeah...I'm gonna go with most of us did, do, and continue, until we release ourselves from that sht. And it is sht. My story with it, in brief...(hint, it won't be brief, I rarely am ).

First, a true story, in 2005 I went to my doctor and told him I wanted to quit smoking. He responded by saying, "why? there are a lot of benefits to smoking." Shocked - of course I was. "I did not expect that answer." The answer is why I still see this guy to this day..., "You want me to tell you there is a pill to make it all go away? You want me to tell you that you are ready? You're not. You will know when you are, only you will know when you are. If you were, this entire conversation would have begun with a different tone, but it didn't. I know you, I know your job - you are under stress, come back to me when you are serious. Don't tell me what you want to do, tell m what you have done."

Spying.Stop it now. Stop lying about it. Stop lying half way about it. So easy right. Are you addicted to it? Do you need it? Actually the last question was rhetorical, you are - the only way out is to sweat it out. I know that social media does not block a person, it blocks an account...and you can make another.

My story (beginning one year ago):

I spy with my little eye, a wife of mine on social media with another guy. I spy with my little eye, a wife blocking her husband from the social stye. I spy with my little eye, a husband digging through trash - digital and otherwise. I spy with my little eye, a husband feeling put in a position to discover a lie.

And then I did, and then I BD'pped, and then we separated, and then I did not feel compelled to spy for months. And then I spy'ed with my little eye, that my WW lied about still seeing the OM guy. And then I found DB. DB told me to stop - wow, I actually did. Until two months later when my son told me his mom's OM was sleeping there thru the night. Then my spying took on a NAVY SEAL effort...I mean, I had to make a power point for the lawyers so that I could win it all in the fight...didn't I? I had to do that right? Right! Seriously.....right???? Seriously, RIGHT!!!!!!!!......seriously, did I??????

Hey, that's the best I could paint it in words and punctuation that I could think of. I did not have to do that. It tore my soul open and tried to use concrete as substitute for limbs. Picture an old tree where someone filled a cavity with concrete. The tree dies and that concrete remains. Its not the ghost of a real life, its the adamant remains of what could have been a perfectly good ghost. Instead, instead, you just have the remnant of what could have been a perfectly good ghost.

When I thought I had enough, enough for the potential future lawyers, the lawyers I had not met, I did stop. Then came holiday. Specifically, Thanksgiving. I knew I would find it. I knew at the holiday I would find the golden grail: for me, for the lawyers I have yet to meet, for the yet unfought war over my son...for the truth of all of the sadness I would ever want to feel, that I did not know, that I thought I could know, for the ultimate judgement of her - for what I discovered was the ultimate judgement of the self. I found it. I found a picture of her, with the OM's family, and she looked so fake she looked like she felt sick, and I felt so guilty that I felt sick. I felt so sick that I was sick. And this was the end of my spying. I found all I could take. All that sex talk chit I saw when I first found what I found in a cold February of 2016, when I first discovered, when I first knew...that was nothing. It was nothing. It meant nothing.

It meant nothing compared to when I saw her face, her face beside his face, and when I knew her face beside his, her face that was not real, beside his face that was. And then I fking died inside myself with guilt. Not for her, not for me, but because I had quit, I had been cured, I was so far beyond all of that, but I felt the need for one last fix, and then I overdosed.

If you learn one thing form the story above, learn this. When my eye laid in silence upon that picture of her with him and them both with his family; once the visual became audible, it was not her beauty which died, it was mine. I did not have to do that, I brought that and I bought that...for me. I sold out the self. I sold my self out for a moment of gotcha, and I fking got me.

And so I decided. I had already let go. I had already detached. I had already wanted to forgive. But I had not done so. See, our stories are not over until they are over. I chose to go looking for an ending, rather than to let it write itself. Don't follow my tracks in the snow. If given the choice, I would have chosen a different lesson from my journey for the second piece of this fight for self forever, but if the DB forum has earned anything first, the first it has earned is honesty.

Take this and run, but not away, run into you. My hat is tipped and I bow in respect to all who hear this.

[AndrewP]

Ah yes. Snooping. Both a blessing and a curse. It does a few things "for" us. It provides us with proof we feel we might need for lawyers or to remove the veil of lies that our spouses weave around themselves. In my case like yours the lawyer thing never really happened. Removing the veil revealed the alien monster that had been inside my W all along. The "bomb" of that though did fire off the starting gun for the real journey that I have been on. My W and I talked about snooping. She told me that she didn't blame me and that if the roles were reversed that she would have done the exact same thing. We are both human I suppose.

Snooping also allows us to feel connected to our spouses. These people who are so very important to us have embarked on their own journey. Having them be part of our lives for so very long we feel a desire to watch over them in at least part in the hope that their course will intersect with our own. We also feel an obligation to be there to rescue someone who has chosen to not be rescued. Each shift or wobble releases emotions within ourselves and probably the related brain chemistry. I feel that you are correct in making a comparison to an addiction. For many of us, we have a "need" to look even if we know that it will cause us pain especially as we over-analyze and mind-read based on the limited information that we get.

The other side of this as people including myself will advise others is that it is difficult to plot your own course, to live your own life while you are wrapped up in what your spouse is doing. There is also the pain that inevitably comes when you see something that is not a step homewards. Would my own life be different if I paid no mind to what my W was up to? Absolutely. Very likely I would be divorced right now rather than clinging to an uncertain and intangible hope. Has the very real pain that I have suffered by snooping been worth this connection? I don't know the answer to that. That part of the story hasn't been written yet.

I have been staring at the screen trying to write an appropriate wrap-up paragraph. I can't. There is no magic pill that will make it all better or go away. There is only the journey and the choices we make along the way. Tracks in the snow are ephemeral and vanish with the fresh snowfall and the spring.

[ForGump]

CT, you ascribe so much agency in your choice to snoop. And maybe you're right. But as I see it, our fate is already sealed: there was no other path you could have taken. We loved our spouses so much, there was no other way. We were destined to stab our hearts with the blade of black truth. We needed to stab it to kill the old heart, to be able to move on, to live.

[CT1118]

As part of my Fight, I have often had to take inventory of the things I have done for me which have been good and which have been great. Now I am usually not the type of person to look back and smile, but I think once we find ourselves in a place such as this forum, such thoughts can be important. So what have you done that is good? What have you done, and done since that hurricane plowed your soul? Might be small, and that's cool. I mean small for me was I wash the dishes, dry them, and put them away as soon as I am done eating. Small indeed, but pretty big for me.

But there is bigger stuff. I think there might be bigger stuff, especially if you have been here for a bit. What is it? I would like to hear about it.

My journey - its culminating right now. I am in my last semester of graduate school. I was just inducted into my third honor society for academic performance, somehow kept a 3.9 GPA during this sht show of a year I have had. I really have no idea how I did that - other than I knew it was my fight to win or loose. Looking back though, not sure how I turned the other parts of life off to make it happen. But that accomplishment is true sh1t compared to one I hit today, this early Friday morning February 10, 2017. Its been one year. - one year clean and free of my narcotics addiction. One year since I looked into a mirror, in the master bathroom of my third of a million dollar house I shared w/my spouse, looking back at me was this dead-eyed and absent shell I had become. On the day I realized and actually discovered my spouse was having an affair, the dark-eyed reflection clicked. "Oh sh1t, I had a whole lot to do with this."

It was 9am, I had 3 pills of oxy and 2 beers in my blood. My wife was out of town, but social media snooping had just confirmed my wife was banging her co-worker. My kid was at school and I had to pick him up in 6 hours. I had called into work and really didn't care about the fallout. It was 9am, and I was high as fk. And it clicked. I poured the pills into my garbage disposal, backed it up with all the alcohol in the house, and hit the switch. I took a shower and tried to get mentally ready to experience physical need in a way I had never, ever, known before. I remember thinking that I couldn't wait to get a year of not using behind me. Guess what, looks like I didn't have to wait, I had to get to work. One year, drug free. That's a whole lot bigger than her... its the size of me. Its one bigger thing.

The fight for self. Winning at it and realizing it ain't bragging. Have you done something with your time that's bigger than her, bigger than him? Yeah, yeah you should have if your answer is no. You're bigger than all that. Go do something that's the size of you.

[Gordie]

Thank you for the inspiration! And congratulations on your one year free of narcotics. And the end of your snooping. Wow. Wow. Wow.

[hawker]

That is awesome and amazing!!!!! Congrats CT!!!! Very inspiring!!!