Adventures in GALing

[AntoniaB]

Tested and Tsquared....I'll add...my doctor was brought up strict Catholic and so was I and she said this is often something that those raised Catholic have deeply embedded in them more than people raised in other faiths. It's so embedded that belief becomes fact in the eye of the beholder, to the exclusion of all other ways of looking at things. This contributes to the way that those people then really beat themselves up for "losing" the spouse--because they automatically feel like they got this "one shot" to have a lifelong relationship with a significant other and it backfired, and so it must be entirely their fault, and now they can't have another "soulmate".

Personally I have not followed Catholicism since I was given a choice (around age 18) but she said it didn't matter, that I had really internalized this part of the religious belief and made it fact. So I judged myself very harshly by the belief. The way she put it was look, you were not born with this. Your parents and the religious upbringing gave you this belief. The way she put it was if a belief in some ideal was destroying your own self-worth or your ability to engage with others, you have to get rid of the belief or tweak it.

Basically the goal of my therapy was to learn that just because I married with the intention of it being for life, that I can't control another person because of his free will, and if he chooses to end the marriage, I should not have to "pay" for that the rest of my life by sequestering myself and not being involved with others...but yet there are also many different types of love and relationships and soulmates and I should be embracing all those types of relationships and making them all "equal." If I learn to value a relationship with a family member or a friend as highly as I do one with a romantic partner, then if I don't have a romantic partner, I'm not a failure or lacking in wholeness...and if I value all those other relationships, I think that if I am with a partner I won't become codependent on that partner.

It all makes PERFECT sense to me now and I really have no trouble with this new belief system for myself. But it took almost 2 years to get there, and the main way I got there I think was from really working on the non-romantic relationships in my life, on making new friends, and on working on my relationship with myself.