Quote: Well, to me, this is the pivotal question you need to answer before accepting DB as the "right" way for you to attempt to save your marriage because if you believe the A is a cause, not an effect, then you need to try to stop the A to get rid of the cause. If, on the other hand, you accept, as DB/DR claim, that the affair is merely a BIG symptom of the overall issues in the marriage, i.e. that the marriage was broken and the A is a result of that "break", then you can accept the affair and begin working on the things that really matter, the REAL issues.
Pivotal question, maybe, but only if you examine things in a really cerebral, philosophical way, like we do. I think that whether you see the M as damaged by the A or the A as a nasty manifestation of the faults in the M, there's work to be done. Affairs generally die out on their own. They generally don't last. I think it's generally accepted that you can do a lot to prolong the A, and nothing to stop it. An A is a traumatic event in a M whether the cause is attributable to the M or not. So, there's significant work to be done to save a M, regardless of the motivation for the A. I think the really pivotal thing in deciding whether DB/DR was right for me was the issue of control and the intrinsic impact attempting it had over respect for one's partner. DB really caused me to back off of judging my W as wrong, bad, immature, etc, etc, and helped me to realize that if I continued to view her this way, and to try and stop her behavior that was damaging our life, I was going to truly lose all the respect I had for her, because I was making it contingent on whether she held the same views and values as I did. DB made me realize that I could respect her even though she was acting contrary to what I thought was right, and I got a lot of insight into why. I held this belief of equality before the A, and I was allowing myself to live differently than I believed. In fact, I think this A experience has made me more aware of where I fell short of this ideal in practice throughout the M. Acting to try and end the A is saying that I don't respect you to make decisions for yourself. You aren't aware of reality. You are not on the same level as I am. This is not the person I want to be, regardless of whether these statements have any truth in them.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. ” – Albert Einstein
