I kept trying to make the puzzle pieces explain this surreal world I had been forced into. But I had to stop, I was done; none of the information I could find could tell me what happened & why.
I did the same. Most of us do for a while, even just a little, and longer than is good for us. It’s normal as HT says.
Looking back, I think it serves a strange purpose if not a healthy one perhaps.....most of it is a trauma response, just like HT says, trying to make the pieces explain what we can’t grasp. It’s a desperate kind of feeling, isn’t it? I remember it even now. I think we do it until we realise that it isn’t giving us the answer we need, again just as HT says. But I think it can also metaphorically rub out nose in the actual reality.....I still remember the strange sense of idk, shock? weirdness? of seeing a picture of my h (bc in my heart he still was my h, and legally had only been my xh for a couple of weeks) getting married.....it forced me to accept things I could not understand. And that was painful but useful and necessary.
I think the tricksy bit - and again most of us go through this stage - is holding the belief that anything they are doing or not doing, whether they seem happy or not, says anything at all about us. That’s the nut to crack imho....and, for me, removing him from my head and not seeing or knowing helped me to break that ‘habit’. Again jmo, but I think that is just as true if you are telling yourself the ‘they look happy so I must have been wrong about my marriage’ story or the ‘they look miserable so karma proves i’m right’ story. One cracks the nut when it’s more like a stranger on a train whose happiness or unhappiness, success or failure, is not an issue in your life....and like a stranger, not knowing helped me.
I have found that it is a habit in a strange way, love, or perhaps attachment more accurately. It was built over time with thousands of small things....interactions, conversations, small moments, shared memories....and it takes time to unlearn that habit and replace it with new and different habits. It took me years but now I simply don’t think of myself in the same way and would find going back to that kind of attachment very strange. Again, looking back, I think it took me about five years to lose all of the old mental habit...which seems like a darned long time
....but I am far from where I was. Idk if that’s good or bad as such, but it is certainly different and more peaceful than the desperate rollercoaster years. I’m grateful for that. Nothing special about me....we all get to new habits imho in the same way we built the old ones....with time and a series of small steps.
Maybe my H is having the time of his life; I don't know. But I truly believe somewhere deep down where his honesty & decency went to hibernate, he has an ache in his heart about our lost R, the shattered R's he has/doesn't have with our sons, & the lost friends/family. He lied to himself & he deceived himself before he lied to & deceived me--a price will be paid for that.
I am less certain than HT about this. Or perhaps I am just accustomed to telling myself I don’t know.
Having said that, writ large, I suppose I do agree with HT that lying, betraying and causing damage to people who have loved and trusted you for decades is a big thing. In the short term post BD, it seems as if we LBS pay a heavy price simply bc we value the things that are lost and damaged. They do not I think for the simple reason that, at the time, they don’t value those things as we do. In the longer term anecdotally, that changes for some perhaps as they find themselves in a life that isn’t quite how they imagined it would turn out to be. But maybe that isn’t the case for all of them. Or they manage somehow to continue to justify it to themselves or blame others for it. True narcissists - of which there are relatively few of course - will never feel like normal folks feel about these kind of things even when it is blindingly obvious that they should. (A recent appearance by our former PM here, Boris Johnson, appearing before a committee to testify about lying to parliament was like a case study of the Narcissist’s Prayer in action
.....from it never happened to if it did, it wasn’t my fault lol....almost laughably nonsensical to watch but not so easy if you were one of the people outraged or grief stricken about losing a loved one during a Covid lockdown where you followed the rules and Mr Johnson did not. Just like with an MLCer imho, a level of emotional detachment makes a difference....but it is self evidently true that he feels no shame and will not carry consequences that hurt him in the way that might feel fair to so many others.)
Having said that, most of our spouses were/are not true narcissists at that level imho....they may have been a bit higher on the narcissistic scale than we believed or they may have shot up there as part of an MLC type fracture. So I suppose it makes sense to believe writ large, as HT says, that they are not probably incapable of shame, remorse or regret entirely. Creating this kind of pain and distress and damage by one’s own actions in life is a big thing....and i’d guess that there is some kind of price to pay for that eventually. If only that you have to accept that you are a person who can do these things to people who love and trust you, that you are not actually the kind of good, decent, trustworthy or kind human being that you thought you were or wanted to be.
I find that as incomprehensible as I always did, so tbh I accept that I do not know what it might be like to walk in those shoes years later. Part of my own progress was learning that I now know what it feels like to have one’s life and predictable beliefs implode....I can never quite go back to the Me I was before I knew that can happen or knew how I can react when it does. Maybe, for them, it’s a bit the same....they can never unknow what they are capable of doing or perhaps that others could do the same to them. I don’t know. What I do know is two things.....that it had nothing to do with me, just like Mr Johnson’s behaviour and rationales had nothing to do with the millions of people trying to cope with the rules he imposed on the rest of us, and that I could not have done what my former h did so the consequences of it for him are not relevant for my life either. It seems to me from over here in the cheap seats that our former spouses would need to do one of two things to hold their own cognitive dissonance together....either mentally erase their old life that included us or completely rewrite it as some kind of horror story of years of misery.....doing either would require losing quite a lot of one’s own life story and that must be a rather strange thing to experience....and it isn’t likely to be true, so you’re building a new you on pretty shaky psychological ground. Must be odd to live with that.
Just like with Covid, there were consequences for me and others, that’s true.....but it is necessary to unpick one from the other. Mr Johnson’s future career or lovely new house or multiple marriages will not change the reality of what it was like to live through lockdown and be unable to see my mother for almost a year....or my own choices about how I reacted at the time based on the information available to me....and I would drive myself crazy if I tried to link one with the other. Imho the same argument holds true about our former spouses.....unpicking that link is the nut we all eventually find our own way to crack. And not looking for evidence one way or the other helped me.
Stranger on a train principle.....
“As much as you burn me, baby, I should be ashes by now.”
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