I'm trying to better understand how this all impacts my W and how she feels about herself
This is what we call a cheese-less tunnel.
You can not understand what doesn’t make sense.
If someone told you 1 + 1 = 3, would you spend hours/days/weeks trying to understand how they came to that conclusion or how they feel about it?
Trying to understand the motivations of a WAS/WS (which normally comes with the hidden agenda of then wanting to insert some sort of reasoning or persuasion to them) is a monumental waste of time.
The cold, hard reality is that they have to feel the pain themselves and then decide they want to change their trajectory.
Kind18 sums it up well here. I went down many a cheese-less tunnel during my first go-round with DBing a few years ago. To quote Al Swearengen from the series Deadwood, trying to figure out a WAS or MLC spouse can be "like trying to touch the moon with your finger".
At the same time, in DB and DR, MWD does drop marital situations into several "common dilemmas" (infidelity/wayward spouses, spouses with mental health conditions, MLC, and passionless - see the Contents section of DR). Each provides some background on what our spouses MAY be experiencing and why and, more importantly, she offers potential solutions to consider.
There seems to be a fine line between having at least at a high level an idea of what situation(s) our spouses may be in AND going too far down a cheeseless tunnel, mind-reading, making assumptions, and otherwise over-analyzing the "why" behind our spouses' alien-like behavior.
Long story short - be careful how deep you go down any tunnel related to your spouse's motivations/drivers and focus more on your own improvements, growth, and development.
