Fighting my way out of the dark - Part 9

[Accuray]

...wonder how things would have been different if I'd taken a different approach. I don't know why I go there - it's pointless. I wonder if it's problem solving, or trying to find a way to examine my faults and improve.

The reason you keep going there is because you were traumatized and you can't put your finger on exactly what you did to deserve it. It was an effect without an obvious cause and humans don't like that. We like systems where if we push the lever, we get a pellet, or if we touch the wire we get a shock.

That way you know that if you don't want to get a shock, don't touch the wire.

In this case, your W cheated on you and decided she wanted out of the relationship. Where was the wire you touched so you can avoid ever touching it again?

When you look back you don't see exactly what caused it and that makes you fear not being able to avoid it in the future.

Totally normal and it will pass. The answer is to be a partner that only a fool would leave. If you can do that, you won't care if someone leaves because you won't feel any guilt or remorse about your own actions -- you were always true to yourself.

In terms of "fitness tests" women do not do that all the time. Everyone does it rarely, and some people do it more frequently than they should. It is a way to combat insecurity.

Everyone wants to be able to trust and rely upon their partner. If something happens that makes you doubt your partner, you might be tempted to test them to see if you're just being paranoid or if you really have a problem there.

Like everything else, it's on a spectrum.

I read an article once that said that people tend to partner with mates who have achieved more or less the same degree of self-actualization.

For instance, it would be rare to find a highly codependent person with a highly independent person, because the independent person would feel smothered and wouldn't tolerate the smothering behavior, and the codependent person would never feel safe.

If you have a woman in a relationship issuing constant fitness tests its probably because she has low self-esteem and is insecure. Chances are she's with a man with low self-esteem who is frequently going to fail the tests, and it's going to set up a self-reinforcing destructive cycle between them.

If the man "does the work" to start passing the fitness tests by building up his self-esteem one of two things will happen -- (1) either the woman will start feeling more secure herself and stop issuing them, or (2) she'll continue to issue fitness tests and the man won't accept it anymore and the relationship will end, because at that point their self-actualization is no longer matched.

Acc