Working on acceptance and forgiveness

[AntoniaB]

You're right, I could see his unaddressed issues creeping through when I saw him the other day. For the second time, he brought up the fact that my parents/family did not contact him when he left last year for the first time. To me, why would they? They saw him as having abandoned me out of the blue. They were beyond angry. I said "why would you even have wanted them to contact you" and he said last time "they just should have" and this time "we needed a mediator." Well, parents aren't mediators. They're biased. That was just something to say on his part. But then he said "look, my parents are awful, but yours aren't too great either because they wrote me off."

I mean, this is crazy talk. I didn't leave, I didn't have the affair, I didn't sleep with a person 15 years younger while legally married and trot the person around as my boyfriend. He did this. And his parents since then have not said a word to me and refused to answer when I reached out. That's very different from my parents not reaching out to him.

And in the context of this, he said that "of course you know my mom, she loves the OW, and she even thinks we're going to give her grandkids but she's wrong." I was up front about not having kids. From that day on she hated me. Apparently OW has told my H that she doesn't want them but has been mum to the parents.

In any case, it's clear to me that since he has been estranged from his family all our marriage that he figures she can bring it back to him and make him feel loved by them again. But if they only love your GF/only love you because of your GF, that's not any more real than before. He has to know that deep down that it's still not about him. And I think this stuff is so at the core of it and he is blind to it.