Uncertain of What I Have (Thread 2)

[burned]

Annoying seeing happily married couples, except: 1) “happily”? W and I went out for a date night 4 days before I discovered that she had been cheating on me for 6 months. Or there’s a selfie of us smiling together back in November, when her PA was already up and running. So how many of those happily married people are about to get BDed? And 2) how many of them are 2nd marriages? And 3) pretty soon that will be us. (I’ll admit that whenever I see a guy with a wedding band I get jealous and think, what does he have that I don’t?)

As for ICs: 1) you don’t HAVE to go with anything they say. Mine isn’t familiar with DB and isn’t pro-M to my knowledge, but obviously not anti-M, and i don’t know if he is religious, and he never asked me if I was or wasn’t. And so forth. And YET, I had already been seeing him before BD (for depression), and the first time I saw him after BD, when I was sobbing in the fetal position, his advice was: kick her out and tell her to call you when she’s ready to work on the marriage, and move on. Sound familiar, like maybe something a few people around here have suggested? Yep. And he repeated that advice week after week because I didn’t listen. Dug myself into a very deep hole, and made it very unlikely that I’ll be able to save my M. And then? After S, he started telling me to forget about her, set her aside, and start to rebuild. Took me too long to listen to that advice, too. The point being, there are good ones out there, which leads to 2) you can BD your IC and find a new one. For the most part they don’t take it personally, for the reason that their success rate depends primarily on two factors: “fit” between IC and client, and quality of the therapeutic relationship. If you don’t get along, neither of you benefit. You end up not changing, and their “treatment success rate” suffers. Then they are less likely to get paid by insurance companies and blah blah blah. Nobody wins.