Still walking the path to my own happiness

[GH31]

Hello again RegretfulLA,

I have a call with my DB coach on Friday - we'll see what he has to say about all of this.

Great move.

GH, I haven't read your whole sitch - what turned it around for you guys?

Other than the affair ending, I don’t know where to begin answering this.

I do know that when the nuclear bomb detonated I read literally everything I could about marriage and male/female attraction. Anything I could find. I also had three DB coaching sessions as well as three other coaching sessions with other experts very experienced in saving marriages.

I must have read about 15 books, all of them at least twice. Gottman’s Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is basically tattooed on my brain now, especially his chapter on accepting influence (something I was so atrocious at doing with my wife) and “turning towards”.

I can only really speak about stuff that I personally changed, as “getting” my wife to change or anyone else for that matter was a dead end.

One of my favourite books for years has been Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. A day or two after my wife left I started his 21 day “self image” exercise, completed it, and changed my self image from that of an angry, bitter, cocky and nasty young man into that of an “alpha husband”. I had used this exercise years before to go from being a D and an E pupil to a straight A pupil (without realising what I was doing at the time).

I would mentally rehearse literally every interaction with my wife during my DBing phase, every gesture, facial expression and above all voice tone.

Gottman’s work has become more important for me in recent years. I practise what he suggests to the best of my ability and this makes conflicts when they do occur much less severe.

He actually says in his book that what you do with each other when you’re not fighting has the greatest influence on how conflicts will play out when they do happen. And they happen in all marriages.

So, without even really thinking about it my wife and I chit chat virtually every evening over dinner (after I have put the children to bed), joke about something, share events of the day, make fun of people we know about. If I am on the couch reading and she is at the table writing something (she writes a lot) and she asks me “how does this sound?” I put the book down on my chest and ask her “tell me more” or “why don’t you read it out to me? It’s this little stuff, this “turning toward each other” that Gottman talks about which has made the greatest difference for us.

We always were the best of friends before the bomb but I had a dreadful temper on me and would default immediately to his Four Horsemen, especially criticism and contempt. I virtually never go there now. There was an incident a few months ago where my wife had made a few financial oversights and it led to us having some huge bills to take care of. She hadn’t told me about it and it likely wouldn’t have happened had she told me and had we discussed it together. Naturally I was utterly furious and pre 2008 I would have exploded at her and subjected her to a angry barrage of contempt, mockery and criticism. This time I simply told her ”W, I am going out for a few hours before I say or do something I regret” and so I did. Our conversations once I got back were much more measured than they otherwise would have been.

I know that around the time of 2nd EA, H had been treating me horribly - kind of a common thread in those sitches where there are As and WAWs.

I think so. It’s a pattern you see repeated time and time again.

I can't say I was really deluded but I was definitely not right in the head...

LOL! Tell us more?

I was not in love with OM2 or even close to it .......... I think back on my behavior with him and it was really creepy because I would just basically demand validation from him, and I kept throwing things at him to see how he would react.

So really, that's mostly what it was. Unmet needs demanding fulfillment. The other part of it was "revenge" towards my H for all the horrible treatment.

I heard a lot of this from my W.

He would threaten to D me routinely

I used to say some dreadful things to my wife like this.

I would say ”I love you W, but I don’t need you” which really cut her to the core. If she voiced a complaint with me I would snap at her and say ”Get over it.”. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Who knows if H will ever have that awakening.

I hope he does.

Gottman also talks about the mortal sins in a R, the worst one being "stonewalling" or withdrawal/rejection. If stonewalling were an Olympic sport, H would be a contender for the gold.

This jumps out. Stay with me for a minute....

He really inflicted a lot of psychological damage on me over the years (but I guess he'd say same about me).

You mentioned in a previous post that you can be quite harsh in your opinion.

Can you tell us more about this?

Also, those horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling) can be a dance that both of you engage in. Very often it increases in severity with time until the marriage buckles. He writes that half of all marriages end do so within the first 7 years and if a marriage ends this quickly it is usually because of these bitter fights getting out of control. That was certainly the case for us and it was virtually all my fault.

All my wife wanted to do was to love her husband, conceive a baby and have a nice life. She hated conflict (and still does) whereas I actually enjoyed conflict (how depraved is that?). I don’t fear conflict if it comes up but I certainly don’t go looking for it anymore.

It's all so broken, and only way it will get fixed is with time, perspective and willingness on both parts. This is why I chose my screenname RegretfulLA, because I have so many regrets about everything that's happened to us.

I really think it’s salvageable (hell if my situation was just about anybody’s is) but where you start I don’t really know.

Shame and regret are unpleasant but they serve a very important purpose. They ensure you don’t ever repeat your catastrophic mistakes again.

GH31