Hopefully Drifting Ashore (Riding the Wave 4)

[may22]

Wayfarer,

Thanks so much for sharing all of this.

But being an example of how to love trauma after trauma after trauma makes me feel like I'm not just doing something right in my MR or my family, but that I'm just doing something right. Not letting all the bad in my life chill my heart. Knowing that it's still beating and ready and willing to love no matter how many times it's been broken.

You're such an amazing soul. I love this.

Regarding the questions yet to be answered, I read in one of the affair recovery books (I think it was Shirley Glass) that she sometimes recommends that the betrayed partner write down all the questions they still want answered on slips of paper and put them in a jar, and when you designate time to talk about things the involved partner can pull a question they're OK with answering in that moment and talk about it. Would it help to have them written down and shared with him so that he knows they're on your mind, even if he isn't ready to talk about them? (or even write them down for yourself to share when he's ready to admit that maybe he was being kind of a dumb@$$?)

Our MC had suggested something similar back in the spring, when I still had all my unanswered questions. At that point, H didn't even want to see them, saying he felt it made the questions too concrete, or something, to have them written down for him to read. (And of course my questions were very simple fact-based questions that H didn't want to answer because he still wanted to lie about them.) l I feel like it isn't a good idea to push your H to answer questions before he's ready to answer them, but you also don't want to get to a place where it is obsessing YOU either, to not have asked them, and not to know the answers.

He may not be able to answer those questions yet because he does not know the answers himself. Or, he isn't ready to put himself back in that place of remembering how it felt to be in the A-- maybe still too raw or too guilty or embarrassed. So maybe recording them for yourself to be addressed when the time is right could help you let go of some of the anxiety around them.

The part about valuing the MR resonates a lot with me, right now.

xx M