House for sale. So Sad. Family Breaking Up (pt 2)

[labug]

So, all that helps to understand but these are things you can do nothing about.

And I doubt she's consciously playing head games. I can only speak from my experience, I was much like your W as you describe her (except for the tardiness). Don't know if you've read my threads or other posts, I've mentioned it here and there. Being an emotional abuser is a difficult admission to make but I in order to get better I had to admit it.

That being said, I can honestly say that I was never intentionally playing mind games or any kind of games. It was just who I was at that point in time. I even remember telling my H when he was complaining about my behavior, "I'm not doing it to you, I'm just doing it and I don't know why." I had an idea why but even tho I was seeing an IC, I wasn't ready to address that yet.

I had brought survival techniques and a huge amount of fear from my childhood into adult hood and didn't know how to let them go. That's not an excuse but a statement of fact. I believe that we aren't responsible for what happened to us as children but we are responsible for how we live our lives as adults.

So this is not to let your W off the hook for her behavior but don't fall into the trap of giving it more power than it really has by assigning evil intent to it. She may be a truly evil woman but if that's the case I doubt you'd want to stay married to her.

Dwelling on her faults is a wasted endeavor. My H had/has his faults, they weren't the same as mine but were destructive to the M none the less. No one wins in playing the tit-for-tat game. I played the victim for a long time, complaining about his faults instead of working on mine, sure that if he changed then everything would be OK.

Flawed thinking because the only person I can change is me. Continuing to focus on his faults kept me stuck.

The only person I can change is me. I had to figure out who I really wanted to be, what were my values, goals, strengths.

So what kind of man do you want to be?

Figure that out and be it, no matter what your W does or says.

Detach, move forward, don't blame where you are on anyone, not even you.