FWIW, as part of our reconciliation process, the C gave W a homework assignment to write down a list of at least 10 positive things that came out of my A. She had no problem coming up with that list. I think we all agree that any A, be it an EA or PA, is a bad thing. But what got us off on this track was a simple statement that an A isn’t necessarily all bad. Good can come from it. I agree with that. That’s not condoning having an affair. Neither is it recommending having an affair. It is what it is: a simple statement that good can come from something bad – that in our corporate condemnation, we shouldn’t overlook that fact that good can come from it.
I think I discussed this in another thread when I explained that I no longer feel guilty for having the A, but I do still feel regret for the damage it did to our R. Our R was forever changed. What I did can never be undone. In many ways the R is actually better, but there was a certain sense of trust and innocence that has been forever lost. The A was bad, no question. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to achieve the positive changes that we saw in our M. But that doesn’t negate the fact that good did come from it.
This same reasoning applies to the Nazi experiments that keep getting dragged into this. What they did was bad. No question there. But the scientific knowledge gained from it is no less valuable just because the means of gaining that knowledge were immoral. The result certainly doesn’t justify the means, but that doesn’t negate the value of the results. We all agree that torturing other human beings “in the interest of science” is unequivocally bad. None of us would recommend the torture of other people to increase scientific knowledge. But it’s patently ludicrous to claim that nothing good came of it – that no knowledge was gained.
But that’s getting way OT. My point was that sometimes good can and does come from bad things. An A is a bad thing, but sometimes good can come from it.
