Living with groundlessness

[AJM]

I just agree with AJM. It's really not us, is it?

I guess what's so ironic is that one of the biggest things we were loved for, are now what makes them run?

And to be completely frank, I see that I feel the same way about stbx too. I really liked his quiet and sweet side. But it turned into stone cold silence. I know to him he loved my extroverted personality, and direct approaches to life. But then again what used to be fun about it turned into a buzkill because it turned into always bringing up responsibilities and things being too serious for him.

See, ME TOO. If being the "go to" person works exceedingly well with everyone else in my life (and there are different levels of being the go to person, of course) and this is what other people expect or like me to be like and I'm "good" at it, but my ex now despises it after 23 years of seeming to WANT me to be that way (because of course it absolved him of so many responsibilities), then how do I know whether I'm supposed to "change" this about me or not?

Right. Why was it ok one moment and not the next? <shrugs> Who knows?

Here's the only clue I have to this: the people in my life who have always been closest to me have said that I was a control freak when I was with XH and I was very intolerant and pushy and cynical. Those same people say I am not like that at all anymore, and if I am, I catch it and stop it asap, and that I am the best person I've ever been now that we are divorced.

That says a lot to me Antonia. It says to me that issues have been going on for a long time even if he didn't express them. My friends told me similar afterwards. I used to view this as I was different (like a chameleon in some ways) depending on my surroundings. To some degree this is true. I still am. It's who I am. But in other ways, it was an early sign that things weren't right. They weren't. I look back and see that things weren't right and even at the time I knew something wasn't "right". I didn't know what. Things were hidden from me (either her lying or not knowing, or by me putting it out of my mind and thinking it wasn't anything "big"). I told myself every couple has issues, but these are not dire issues; we're working through them. We were, but then one day "we" weren't. Does that mean I should change things about me? I have, but not because of her. I changed the things I didn't like about me(there were a few but not many - I like me and I have no regrets). I changed more based on what I now knew when I had the information available. I do that. I evaluate and change based on information available. I never have had any problems changing when I see a need.

Jack asks a good question. Forget for a second how you see you. How does the world see you? How does your ex see you (not really valid since it's screwy in many cases - they want you to be the bad person so that they aren't. Human nature I think)

Can you imagine for a second that you weren't the "take charge" kind of person but instead relied on somebody else to "tell" you what to do? One day you wake up and think, "Have I grown up?" Or like a child, "I can do it myself!!" Even if you could have all along, you feel like you are being "controlled". Amplify that with everything else that's going on in your head (guilt, anger, hormones, stress, etc) and you hit the boiling point. What once was ok, is not totally wrong.

For a MLC'r, everything is wrong though (or in crisis). Read back through the archives and see some of the posts about how the changes are so black and white. What once was white is black and what once was black is white. The world has gone mad! And they blow everything out of proportion to the nth degree. Like little children

What's more important is the question Jack asked. How are you viewed by others (really) and are you satisfied with that? That's really all that's important overall. If you are not satisfied with you, then you change you. That's all you control anyway. If you are satisfied, then you have evaluated and you leave it. How your ex views that is up to them. You don't control that (sic).

But in the end, the only people that my GALing matters to are ME, of course, and the people who are actively in my life, and he's just not one of them, so I'm not losing any more sleep over him.

Exactly. I'm the same way. I change for me. I change when I need to for my kids. I changed in the past for my wife, but I didn't like those changes very much and have since changed many back. Those were recent changes and not the long term changes - see above for why I did that. I was trying to adapt and save my marriage for longer than I thought - at least that was how I viewed it. I can see that it may not have been viewed that way. Wouldn't change what I did though and I never was controlling or even viewed that way to my knowledge except for the last few months of my marriage.

AJ