In reading your post, I sense I have struck a nerve.
My assumption you're feeling not appreciated, valued or loved?
What I hear when I read your post is a person who is in pain and is trying to defend their actions. This is normal, I have done it for most of my life. Although today, I try not to do it.
When a person defends, they are covering their fears and not facing their pain.
In an earlier post you stated that you wanted your XH to leave you and your children alone. You wanted him out of your lives.
I assume that comes from the desire to be SAFE, VALUED and LOVED. These are the three things we value the most.
Your XH brings up feelings within you that are the opposite of these feelings. You don't feel SAFE as long as he is part of your life and your childrens life. You don't feel VALUED or APPRECIATED by him for raising the kids and helping them become who they are today. You definetly don't feel LOVED by him, for if he really LOVED you, he wouldn't be causing you all this pain.
Your children are old enough now to form their own opinions. Your XH, their father, is a sick man. They can see this with their own eyes. They are at an age where they are forming their own beliefs and understanding of life and relationships.
What I hear you saying is that you have protected your children from experiencing normal human experiences. Your fears are making you overly possesive in protecting your children from experiencing pain.
Your children have never experienced a broken bone, cavity, bloody nose, or been in the hospital overnight, or had sany other health issues or problems. If they had experienced these things, would that make you a bad mother?
Laughing, your insecurities and fears are driving you in your pursuit of External Power. You are obsessed with controlling everything around you and your children's lives. By doing this, you are not allowing your children to live life. And neither are you allowing yourself to live life, the way it was intended to be lived.
Life is not all perfect. To experience life fully, one must feel the pain that comes with living. Your childrens situation with you and their father is an opportunity for them to learn what love is and what love is not. You are trying to manipulate and control in an effort to protect your children from experiencing the opposite of love.
How will one know what joy, love and happiness is unless they have experienced the complete opposite. Experiencing the negative emotions makes feeling the positive ones that much more special.
In your effort to prevent your children from living and experiencing the life you grew up with, you are unknowingly re-creating it.
Laughing, you look for your own self worth through your children. It is your children who make you feel "good enough." It is your children who make you feel "valued." It is your children who make you feel "loveable." Without your children who are you? Are you not these same things? What do you really feel about yourself inside?
Your pursuit of External Power by control and manipulation is your attempt to make yourself feel whole. This does not work. How do I know? Because I have tried it my whole life.
My external pursuits have all been about trying to make meyself feel "good enough," "valued," and "loved." The more I pursuid externally to fill that void within me, the more I hungered for more of it. I could never quench my thirst for feeling good about me. I too have become obssesed in my pursuit to seek appreciation, to be liked and loved, to be complimented for my value as a human being. I too don't value, appreciate, respect, nor love myself like I should. For most of my adult life I have felt that I did not deserve better things to happen to me or for me.
Until I can fully love myself, feel that I am good enough just as I am, and value myself for all that I am right now, I will never find peace, harmony and love.
I have believed that everything was within my power. I believed that I was driving the bus. I was WRONG.
The only thing within my power were my thoughts, my feelings, my attitude and my choices. Everthing that was external, from that which was within me, was not in my control.
It took me a long time to "let go" of the steering wheel on the bus and take a seat in the back. Soon I began to appreciate watching "life evolve" versus trying to "control life."
From time to time I do try to jump back in the drivers seat and grab hold of that steering wheel. Why? Because old beliefs crop up inside my head thinking that I can control things. Bad habits are sometimes hard to change. As human beings, we are creatures of habit.
But we have the ability and power within us to create new beliefs and new habits that will bring us more peace, harmony and love.
If you were to look back over the years to when you first began this journey of your XH's MLC. Would you say there is more or less, peace, harmony and love in your life today, than when you first started down this path of seperation and divorce?
Through the choices we make, we do create our own reality.
Many of us are in pursuit of that "someday" when everything will be just right and perfect. I have come to realize. "someday" never comes. The only time there is is NOW.
Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is not yet here. The only moment that exists is the PRESENT. That is the gift God gives to each of us.
We can live in a world of regret, guilt and shame of our past. We can fear what the future might bring to us and remain stuck in our current life and not move forward. Or we can choose to find peace, harmony and love in the PRESENT and appreciate all the beauty that life offers us daily.
