Past, Present (and Future?)
Once upon a time, mostly as a therapeutic exercise, (before he showed back up again last October), I wrote Chi a goodbye letter. It had a lot of wonderful points in it. Maybe I will post that up here sometime as well. One thing I remember from it, and from that time in general, is the sense I had of making sure I was treated right and not screwed over, and this idea of how much better I was for him than Rory. Boy, what a difference a little insight makes.
What I know now is that an affair is the result of not one, not two, but three people not recovering from some pretty significant childhood wounds, and that in looking at it the way that I had (which, let's face it, is the way ALL us "mistresses" view The Battle Over The Married Man), I wasn't seeing all the stories in the situation or all the aspects of it there were to see.
In being so sure we're the Right One and She Isn't, or in being so wrapped up in making sure we're treated right and not used or hurt (and those are good things to be looking out for, to be sure!), many times we aren't seeing how what we do is actually harmful, not to the wife--that much looks obvious but is debatable in some situations--but harmful to this suffering person we're calling the love of our lives.
Make no mistake, if the guy we're with is stepping out on an established relationship, he's not doing it because he's healthy. He's doing it because he's got some pretty serious problems, and if we can step back enough to see what those are, it makes our own path, in terms of what's highest and best for all three parties, a lot clearer. If you read the second post in this blog and look at the attitude I had then, then contrast that with my new, revised goodbye letter, you might see what I mean.
Dear, sweet Chi,
I
just want to reiterate one more time how glad I was to hear from you,
how much I value you in my life, and how glad I am we met. Maybe that
sounds a little
weird considering, but I've learned so very much in the years since our
relationship took a turn towards the more serious.
I
love you and adore you as much as I always did. However, I have learned
a lot, and if you'll bear with me, I'm going to take you on a couple of
side trips
through things that happened to me while we were apart, in order to
illustrate a point or two. By the time I get to the end, I promise this
will make sense.
Side
Trip One: Jane. Of course you remember Jane. If you read my blog, you'll
know what happened with her, but if you don't, I'll try to be brief as I
summarize
this. You know I "inherited" another writer's group when the previous
owner stepped down. In trying to attract members, I, unfortunately,
invited Jane. (I thought better after I did this, but too bad, she
remembered and came anyway.)
Of
course you remember how she acted. Well ... I started out thinking she
had improved. I'm sorry to say that, after giving off that impression
for a few months,
she got worse than she ever had been. Others in the group got treated to
every sentence beginning with, "I'M published," and, "MY editor said,"
and "I've done blahblahblah so *I* know." She would talk on and on and
on for twenty minutes without ever stopping
for breath.
I
kept hoping she would get it and alter her behavior, so when people
complained, I made excuses for her. Secretly I was afraid of confronting
her, because she
was so much like my mother, I knew how she was going to react, the same
way no one else wanted to confront her because they knew how she would
react: stunned, tearful, and hurt, of course, because she was so nice
and after all, she IS published and therefore
knows more than anyone else. They counted on me to rein her in, and I
didn't have the skills to know how, so I sat there and watched one
member after another drift away, while I hoped if I worked with the
difficulty, she'd change.
Eventually,
only three people were left: me, Jane, and a self-published author named
Judy who put up with Jane because she knew so much about self-promotion
and
she got a lot of ideas from her. But, strangely, the nicer we were and
the more we put up with Jane, the worse she got. She snubbed Judy at book
fairs several times and was just plain rude and horrible to her a
couple of other times.
Finally,
we sat her down and spoke with her. I told her that everyone else was
gone, citing her behavior as the reason, and if she drove one more
person out,
I was going to have to ask her to leave. I outlined several areas on
which I would like her to work. One was talking over other people for
twenty minutes at a time, one was the boastful bragging, and the last
was starting and maintaining arguments. (Jane now
does not believe in ever using the word "was," will introduce
grammatical errors into her work rather than use that word, and started
not one, but two, thirty minute arguments about the use of this word.)
So, we spoke and it looked like this discussion went
well.
Sometimes Jane was okay, but mostly we saw the same behavior. Judy and I were
thinking about just disinviting her permanently, when the following
happened:
One
day Jane came into group with a story she was submitting to a contest at
a magazine. By this time, we had a new member, Nick. We all read the
story and had
the same comments: Good story, but it's a knockoff of Jurassic Park.
Nobody will ever publish this.
Jane was furious. (Well, rather, she was humiliated, which then made her
furious.) She brought in a copy of the rules of the contest, which made
it clear that,
believe it or not, she had actually done what the magazine had asked
for. We were all flabbergasted. (Wouldn't you be?)
Then
she started an email war with me because I had not somehow divined what
the rules of the contest were and I thought she was stupid enough to
submit a Jurassic
Park knockoff to a magazine. Of course I defended myself--who would ever
imagine a real magazine would actually run a contest for Jurassic Park
knockoffs?? (Clearly, someone is desperate for readership.) I got the
response that she was so hurt by my assumption
about her that SHE was going to leave. Since all was lost anyway, I let
her know some of the complaints others in the group had had with her
behavior. Jane went, Don't worry about me, I'm just fine, but you're harsh delivering critique and you're not a kind
person anymore, the way you used to be.
Wow.
Here
I was, starting out with no friends at all after Simon died, losing all
the new friends I'd made in order to baby her, and in return, she showed
complete
and utter oblivion to the facts and kicked me in the teeth. Gee, thanks, Jane. We don't have any new members and I still haven't met anyone new
to have as a friend, so I essentially lost all my chances at building a
new life with new friends, in order to coddle
a person completely unable to step back and reflect on her own behavior,
who kicked me harder and harder the nicer I was to her.
The
coda: After this, Jane contacted Judy to return her last set of pages to
her. Judy met Jane at a restaurant to pick up the pages. Completely
forgetting all
the times she had been rude to Judy (probably because she had no idea
she was being rude), Jane asked Judy to keep trading pages over email.
Judy said no, but she was still half an hour getting out of the
restaurant, even though she only stood at the table and
didn't even sit down. Why? Because Jane monopolized the conversation and
gabbled and gabbled and gabbled at her for half an hour. RIGHT after I'd
just told her six people left our group telling me they were sick of
her not knowing when to stop talking. (And
she'd responded by saying, "But people always interrupt me and that's
rude!" To which I'd said, "But you talked at them for twenty minutes and
no one else at the table could say anything.")
*sigh*
Side
Trip Two: My mother. Of course you know about my mother; you read most
of the novel I wrote about that situation.
Right
about this time, I started speaking to my brother again (sort of), and
noticed my mother posting on his Facebook page. It was mentioned that
she was back
in counseling again and had been for a while, and I started to wonder if
I had actually done the right thing in cutting her off over ten years
ago. People can change, I thought. Once upon a time she said nothing was
wrong with her and she'd never go back to
therapy, I thought. It's been ten years, I thought. Maybe time had made a
difference.
And then my cousin in Florida private messaged me. Did you see this? she said.
It
was a family picture my brother had posted of the Christmas after we
had each gotten married. That was the Christmas both of us were on the
outs with our
mother because of some very outrageous behavior on her part. We had both
gone to visit our uncle and grandparents without her. My brother had
posted the photo up with a comment about how it was of happier times.
My
mother had been molested by my grandfather. This came out while I was
in high school, and we had many conversations about it while I was in
high school and
college. I had been very supportive of my mother then, and I was up
until I had to part company from her due to her outrageous
behavior just prior to the Christmas in question. Seems like she'd
remember the many many many conversations about it we'd had. I even went
to one of her therapy sessions with her!
My mother had posted on that photo that everyone in it was her enemy,
because they had disowned her because she disclosed that my grandfather
had molested her, and that she thought my brother should take all such
family photos off of Facebook. She did not make
this comment private.
I did some surfing around and saw that she had done this to a number of photos I was in.
I
posted on one of them and said that no, that was NOT the reason, and on
another I posted that she really ought to think before she posted on
Facebook, because
a post like that said a lot more about her than it did about anyone
else.
I
next heard from my cousin in Florida, who told me my mother had replied
with so much blistering invective and graphic details about the
molestation that my cousin
couldn't even read it all. She warned me about it and advised me not to
read it. I went and looked because I was curious (I had read similar
from Mom before in emails), but even my brother had written, "I know,"
below my comment and taken Mom's down.
Wow.
So now we're at the end of these little side trips, and I'm going to use them now to make my point.
My
point is how oblivious these women both were to their own behavior. How
they kept doing the same thing over and over and over again, even when
it was not
doing anything helpful for them or anyone else. Neither one of them is
able to step back very well and consider any other points of view, or
that there might be some other way of looking at the situation. Even
when people got more and more direct in pointing
out what was wrong, they couldn't see anything but what their own
feelings were telling them was reality.
And
a lot of times those feelings actually came from something parents and
family had done a long, long time ago, and not from the reality of now.
My
other point is that I've observed that, when a person was like this, it
didn't matter how nice I was to them, or how hard I tried, this way and
that way and
this way, to help. They always turned on me, and I got kicked in the
teeth no matter what.
I've observed that I tend to attract this kind of person over and over, and I never seem to learn my lesson.
Well ... this time I've learned.
I'm not saying I don't love you. I do, very much. I'm not saying I don't want to be with you. I do, very much.
What I am saying, is I've learned that I need to pull way, wayyy back, and watch for signs of this happening.
Are
you going to be yet another of these people who can't achieve any kind
of self awareness or perspective on your situation other that what old
childhood feelings
and old childhood shame and old childhood guilt are telling you is just
like the way things have always been? Because all those feelings come
from sick parents, and sick parents never leave a child anything good.
Yet they model to the child that it's the child
who is wrong.
I'm aware that this is a very tall order, but it doesn't look like you've made a whole lot of progress with this as of yet.
I can't tell you what to do.
In
order for me to feel at all comfortable with the idea of us as an
eventual couple, however, I would need to see you doing some work with
your early childhood,
about the atmosphere in your home growing up, and about what you decided
as a young child about how lovable you were, what relationships are
like, what your responsibilities in a relationship should be, and how
you're supposed to feel in a relationship and
how that's supposed to come about.
It
would seem that you've spent an awful lot of time in the past three
years worrying about fixing other people's feelings and not enough time
on fixing your
own, an awful lot of time worrying about how your life looks to other
people and not enough time worrying about how it feels to you to live
your life, an awful lot of time trying to solve other people's problems
and not enough time trying to solve your own.
I
love you very much, but I have to say that I don't care if you're
married, divorced, or widowed, this kind of approach to life's problems
and people's feelings
is a recipe for disaster.
We've
got some very tough problems, here. I'm going to be looking very hard
to see what your approach to these problems looks like. Have you learned
anything
from the past three years? Are you going to be my mom or another Jane,
unconsciously recycling symptoms over and over and over, accepting them
as The Truth and never stopping to think about why you're doing things
and whether your reasons hold water or not?
Or are you going to be like me these past three years, reading and
journaling and researching and working and learning and flying high,
high up into a bird's eye view of problems and how they came about, and
how else you can look at those problems in order
to make wise decisions?
Because
I'm here to tell you, I'm done with my mother and I'm done with Jane.
I'm fifty years old and I will not tolerate another person in my life
who lives
the way they do. I can't. I've suffered enough damage from unconscious
people who run like robots on old childhood feelings and just can't see
themselves at all. Who just can't see that they need to take a step back
from what they've always thought and felt,
and research what happens in healthier families and how healthy people
look at the same situation.
Mom/Jane kind of behavior is a trust-killer, a relationship-ruiner, and a life-destroyer. I've worked extremely
hard while we were apart to identify old
childhood programming I always thought was the truth, and to stop and
think so I can figure out what's destructive before it hurts me or you any more.
I
don't work this hard for someone who cannot or will not. So it's up to
you to decide what kind of work you are willing to do, and whether the
therapeutic community
you are now in is helping you overcome your problems ... or just helping
you recycle them.
I have some great resources if you are interested. I will not tell you what to do.
It's
entirely possible that even if you do make some changes in your therapy
and acquire greater insight, you may still decide you want to stay in
your marriage
and keep your family the way that it is. People do, every day, even when
their marriage is not satisfactory and they have no reason to hope that
it ever will be.
The
important thing, and the thing I will be looking to see, is that the
decisions you make are made from a heart that's truly at peace with
everything those
decisions mean, and not a heart that's letting itself be abused or taken
advantage of, resentfully saying, "I've made my bed and now I have to
lie in it." To my way of thinking, health might sound something like, "I
know Rory is the way that she is, and I'm
just going to stay with her and love her anyway the way she is." If you
can truly do that, do that, and more power to you. A lot of people could
not, but only you can decide what's right for you, and what YOU will
TRULY be happy with.
If YOU are TRULY HAPPY with any decision you make, then so am I. Don't worry about me. I have lots to do, and I will be fine.
I
will not be happy with any decision that sounds like, "I have to
because so-and-so will blahblahblah." That's not a healthy decision made
by a healthy heart
based in healthy reasoning. Keep working until you can make a decision
the RIGHT way ... the healthy way.
I
love you and I needed to let you know this. Any relationship I agree to
will need to be a healthy one, or one grounded in solid work in therapy
with a decent chance
of becoming healthy. I still love you, but I need to see a good, solid
working attitude that's willing to dive into some codependency resources
and information about healthy families, and think more objectively
about the past three years and your situation.
If I see unconscious Mom or Janelike behavior, I'm outta here for my own
good.
And
that doesn't mean I don't love you. I'll be very sad about it, but what
it means is I won't repeat ill health anymore. If you mean to keep repeating ill health, you
don't need me
in your life. You can stay home with Rory or pick any idiot off the
street and keep being codependent and stuck in low self esteem.
My world is a place to work hard and get well. A person with that attitude has the attitude I stick with. If I don't see that ... well ...
I love you and I hope you choose health.
But I can't make you. (That would be codependent.)
Love,
Ridley
Big difference, huh?