Getting Better??

[AntoniaB]

IB, interpreting them tends to be a cheeseless tunnel, as you know. We can always be totally off.

However, I can tell you that my XH said something quite similar and I don't know if it will help or not.

When I last saw XH November 1, at the funeral for our cat, he was as out of the tunnel as I'd ever seen him and telling me he missed me and would always love me. But when I asked him, "if you had this all to do over, would you still have betrayed me", first he said, "I dont' know, I might have given you a chance and our marriage a chance...I SHOULD HAVE given our marriage a chance." (Notice that he still was putting it on me to be the one to fix things there...)

THEN, 30 min. later, he changed his answer and he said, "If I had it to do over would I have betrayed you again? Well, knowing that things turned out the way they did, that I ended up with OW and I got an apartment and 'things worked out ok for me', then YES, I would have betrayed you again."

Then he said, "why did you make me say that?"

I said "I only wanted the truth. Wow. There it is."

My take on your XH and my XH's comments is this: if they had it to do over, they'd do the same. Why? Because they didn't lose EVERYTHING from what they did. They didn't end up in the poorhouse, or they didn't end up without the OW. Therefore, they made the "right" choice. They only equate "wrong" choice with the choice that makes them end up with "nothing", "alone", no family or wife or girlfriend. Total oblivion.

This is still justification/rationalization for immoral behavior, for vow-breaking behavior. "Well it can't be all bad, or else I'd have lost everything."

2 observations on this: it's a very childish way to rationalize a selfish conniving betrayal. It's akin to "well I bullied that kid but I didn't lose all my priveleges at school, so it's all good."

It's also the kind of rationalization that makes these people incapable of acting like a giving, loving, equal partner in a relationship; their world is made up of a system of rewards and punishments, and they aren't motivated to do right for the intrinsic value of being good to others, but they do right (or wrong) based only on whether they "get in trouble" or not.

For that reason, despite the fact that it hurts, these are NOT the people we want to be in committed relationships with. They can't act as equals if this is their mindset. They cannot meet us halfway or even close to it. We are better off detached from them.

I hope that someday they come to the realization that they need to grow up. But I think you and I are better off without people this selfish in our lives. Perhaps they were not this selfish before, but right now, this is all they are capable of, and it's toxic and it's better that we are away from it.