What if?

[AntoniaB]

Oh let me clarify what I said as I think I mischaracterized one thing. I think that when our marriages were working well, when we could reasonably say that we were happy couples, then the marriage may have been the most important thing in our lives. What I mean is that I think that that can shift over time, and that the silver lining we should be looking for now is to discover what it is in our lives that we are doing or have been able to work on/accomplish that might never have been were our exes still with us, particularly if they were with us and there was ongoing strife.

Like I can honestly say that the book I just finished writing would not exist. I had started the book 9 years ago and abandoned it, and then was offered a chance 3 years ago and XH talked me out of it a second time, and even if he had not, I had no real focus or ideas. My book is ENTIRELY informed by what happened in my personal life. The way I read literature now and forevermore is very much colored by my experience. I see things very differently. It was the trauma that enabled me to come up with a book idea and my book is about literature but it's about characters who rise up from trauma and how experience, even bad experience, is necessary for growth. There is no way I'd have come up with this without my ex's betrayal of me and without my marriage ending.

I don't mean to go on about me here at all but it's the best way I can illustrate the silver lining. I feel in my heart that there is a larger reason that I was supposed to write this book. And my life shifted to make it happen.

IB look at things in your life right now and spend some time trying to focus on what you have been able to do "differently" or what is new in your life that would never have been if you hadn't been betrayed. Perhaps those things are now "front and center" instead of your marriage and you have to think of them as your mission in life. Like beatrice says this isn't about fixing what can't be fixed. It's about what you CAN change in other areas of your life with other people or yourself.