One thing I have learned is your relationships are projections of the relationship you have with yourself.
I feel I betrayed myself and my best interests by having an affair. And it’s the same thing I did to my husband.
I feel in terms of respect, I didn’t respect myself. I let some old married guy use me with no investment and then discard me like yesterday’s trash. If one can not respect themselves they are incapable of respecting others.
If you are jealous it’s because you know how your mind works and you project that on your spouse. Most cheaters are jealous and suspicious because of their own duplicity.
For me, my husband was always held in high esteem by me because I truly felt he was a better person than me. I never felt like I deserved him so I don’t think I always fully believed he loved me. But that was due to my own belief of being unworthy or unlovable. I instead do everything I possibly could for him to make him happy to ensure he would love me and never leave me but then I started to resent that I couldn’t be loved for just me. And my affair I was seeking that validation, but it was very illogical to do that when part of me saw the affair for what it was.
You are trying to solve this with logic where there is none. Did I respect my husband in the decades before the affair? Yes and no. Yes, I believed he was as a wonderful person and made my life better and was better than me. I did everything he asked and more.
But when I learned to respect myself and understand my own boundaries then I had a deeper truer definition of respect that I do apply to him today.
The thing is we are never one thing and we are always evolving but we can only have the relationship with another person that we have with ourselves. We may feel all the feelings, and I have and do. I love my husband deeply. But those are fond feelings, and marriage takes things that were not as strong in my value system, such as commitment when the relationship with myself got hard. I always didn’t things I felt I was supposed to or what a good person or good wife will do, but underneath that was a woman who craved chaos, and felt unworthy.
I didn’t love myself so therefore my love for him was more about romantic feelings than all the underpinnings of being a safe partner.
I had numbed myself for a long period of time because I couldn’t cope with my relationship with myself and that definitely strangled my connection with him (and really my other relationships).
The affair was never about him it was in despite of him. I didn’t value or appreciate much of anything due to the constant emotional numbing because underneath I had all this past trauma and shame. It was like I was holding back a flood with a wall I put up. The affair happened like a hole in the dyke that I stuck my finger in and caused instead a tsunami that left destruction to all that was in its path.
My affair was completely about me and this world I had in my head that I was not pulling out and looking at with any rationality.
Affairs are irrational. They are usually used to irrationally cope with all the things you aren’t dealing with. They have nothing to do with the ap or the bs. They are part of a war we have going on with ourselves in which all this unconscious stuff we are not dealing with is making us miserable. We keep seeing external forces ways to deal with it through various forms of escapism. I drank too much wine for a few years, for example.
You see this as about you, not choosing you. And you are not wrong to feel this way. You only have the ability to say is it safe to even love this person she is disrespecting me, disregarding me, I don’t even know what’s there for her to even try. And you have very right to say she isn’t safe and won’t be safe based on the data you have. So I am not talking you out of that. Understanding a thing doesn’t excuse it, nor does it dictate what to do about it.
But for her this hasn’t been about you. It’s her own deficiencies that has created this complex way of not dealing with her shit in a proactive manner. Her relationship with herself is that she does self-destructive things. Her conditioning is chaos needs to be part of love to feel like love.
If you can really see that, then you can get more objective in what you see as she works on this. The cure for these ws behaviors is to learn to love and respect yourself. You will learn to associate peace with love. Because when you do that, you will want the best for yourself. And you won’t even think about ruining those relationships that are healthy and good. You will instead learn to do the work required to maintain them. Such as: learning to communicate, learning to sometimes live with discomfort, learning to be aware you are avoidant and not allow it to rule you. I could go on and on. But for most ws the affair is an immaturity, an undeveloped person who has to find ways to gain that maturity and development.
It’s not easy work and it’s ongoing long term. I am nine years into that journey and while I have a much deeper self awareness, I keep myself engaged on that path because after getting healthy I see this is never ending work everyone needs to do. Evolving is possible but it takes vigilance and dedication. If she doesn’t have that, cut your losses now. No one does this kind of thing just to keep a relationship, we do it because we have been someone we don’t want to be and we will do everything to keep traveling away from that as possible.
So in essence, you can gauge some of the intention by knowing what they wil do if the relationship is over. If you believe they would continue work on themselves because they are rocked to their core over what they did, that’s a good indication. If they are only doing things to keep you then they will only keep going long enough until they believe you are now secured again.
[This message edited by hikingout at 4:03 PM, Thursday, February 19th]
