Quite a while ago, in my original series of posts, both @Gypsy and @Kettricken hit the nail on the head: She's a 40-something adolescent.

Now @Generosity said some nice things about me (and when really attractive women say nice things about you blush you'd better appreciate it and live up to it), but I clearly (as laid out in excruciating detail in my very first thread a year ago) had no small number of shortcomings that led to the D-cisive moment.

I can certainly say I'm better off as a person now as a result of the journey so far, so in that sense I'm a DB Success. I really do have a sense of myself and my capabilities now that I didn't before.

More importantly, I have more information. STBXMRSSP's done and said a lot of bizarro things, and now I know things about her and about me (I mean, you can't help but learn something when, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary tirade she blurts out "and none of this would have happened if you'd just taken the chance I gave you to get back together with me!" ["Um, what? When? Where? Did I miss it in the middle of the spitting and the slapping and the Signore Schmuckatelling?"])

As these things go, her story has evolved over time, all of which adds information, and more information is always useful (to me). @Gypsy noted above that we both like to fight. I don't like to fight, but I definitely don't like letting her get away with things, and these days I don't fight so much as I end fights. I'm sort of practicing the jeet kune do of divorce-busting.

JKD was Bruce Lee's marital arts innovation -- it was like krav maga before there was krav maga -- street-fighting style, or the style of no style.

BTW, I'm not a martial artist. I've always been interested in how artists (append the modifier of your choice -- musical, dance, etc.) see the world -- what the source of their art is. So though my brother got into martial arts as a result of watching "Enter the Dragon," I was more interested in how Bruce Lee thought about what he did.

Here's what he wrote: Jeet Kune-Do is simply the direct expression of one's feelings with the minimum of movements and energy...a man who says Jeet Kune Do is exclusively Jeet Kune Do is simply not with it [I used to think about this when I'd read "that's not true DB'ing" or "MWD says..."] He is still hung up on his self-closing resistance, in this case anchored down to reactionary pattern, and naturally is still bound... He has not digested the simple fact that truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive.

So for the "JKD man" (it was the Sexist '60s, after all), the "true" martial art was just doing what you had to do, with a minimum of energy.

That was my DB mistake for the longest time -- I was putting too much energy into it. I really started to do well (IMO, anyway) when I stopped putting energy into it and just started flowing, Tao-like.

So like Bruce Lee, when she attacks instead of defending against the attack, I just turn the attack against her and let her defeat herself. The other day, in the midst of a lambaste-a-thon, she said (we'd met at the school for parent-teacher conferences), "Well? Are you just going to stand there? Don't you feel anything about what you've done?" [BTW, the current story is that (again) the D is all my fault.]

SP: "Yeah, I feel something. I feel sorry for you. You lied and you cheated, and because you're a liar and cheater, you know how easy it is to deceive someone who trusts you, and so you'll never trust anyone you're with because you'll never be sure he isn't lying and cheating on you. You'll never have a trusting relationship again. How sad."

The air went out of her, and that was it. I'd written that to her, but apparently hearing it from me, in my normal, balanced voice was a real blow. Jeet kune do.

So I'm just deflecting her blows, stepping aside from her attacks, letting her spend the energy while I conserve mine for the fights that matter (i.e., the fight for my fair share of the community asset pie).

But I'm also a lot more serene about STBX. I don't think there's "really" anything wrong with her. What I think -- total speculation -- might be going on is that the cork is off the bottle in a way. She was not -- not in the 20+ years I knew her -- what you'd call a self-reflective person. I don't think she'd ever really given herself, her mind, her desires, etc., much systematic thought at all.

This is something all the information I've acquired from experience of her in the past year has given me and, in a weird way, I'm grateful for it. Knowing it, I know that had I "succeeded" in busting the divorce during '09, I would have been the one who had grown and she would have still been "her" -- which would have simply been a recipe for another D-Day, IMO.

So the cost of an explosion of feelings / emotions / thoughts / experiences in an unreflective person -- mandatory self-reflection, if you will -- might be the kind of collateral damage she's been creating of late. Suddenly she's not who she believed herself to be, the world doesn't seem as tidy as it might have, and, having been so incurious about herself, I suspect she just doesn't have the tools to cope. Now with counseling maybe she's getting there, and for her sake -- and for the sake of Themselves more than anything else -- I sincerely hope she does.