Thank you all for your happy wishes
even if it looks a bit different than it used to.
Well, yes. Quite a lot of things are.
Was lightly musing while weeding in early light this morning. (Nuts, I know, but I like the calm of autumn morning as the birds wake up and autumn light is nice!)
Ignoring the whys and whatnots, the reality is that someone I trusted thought it was ok to unilaterally destroy much of my old life when I was at my most vulnerable bc of other events or that my suffering was an acceotable price for their happiness.....there were so many middle paths not taken. I find now, as a vet, that makes me a little cynical about some things in a way I wish I were not....but i’d feel silly or as if I hadn’t been paying attention if I weren’t. At the same time, in a magic bit of dissonance, I am usually profoundly touched by how remarkably kind, loving and thoughtful we humans can be. It can be a head-scratcher lol.
As time and my perspective has moved forward, I find my take on MLC is different than it used to be. I believe it exists, that some folks can just unravel....but I also think that we humans can encounter situations where we give ourselves permission to treat other humans horribly. And that there are components of someone’s character that enable them to do this. Necessary but not sufficient character traits. A kind of immature human San Andreas fault line, if you like. Hard to predict but sometimes easier to see with hindsight.
More importantly, for LBS, I think we have to acknowledge that there is a fine and tricky line between seeing MLC as an explanation and seeing it as a partial justification. Or even a kind of distracting glitter that can segue into a kind of soft denial of things in front of our nose. It’s so understandable, isn’t it, that very human need to explain why something happened to us and why we couldn’t foresee it or do much to prevent it happening? At a very simple level, I suspect it is how our hind brains seek to protect us in future....if x happened bc of y, then I can stop it happening now by doing z or prevent it happening again by being on the lookout for y. So normal. The big lesson for me, I think, is to respect the power of the mindf**k and do whatever we need to do to remove ourselves from it, to honour our own normal whatever anyone else thinks about it.
There are some big simple lessons hidden in our messes, aren’t there?
That we suffer more when we hang on to things. That trauma has a real effect on wellbeing. That you don’t have to hate someone, or even be particularly angry, to say No or Enough. That if things quack like a duck etc, they are more often than not a duck. That you can’t Nice or Reason someone out of wanting to abuse or devalue or leave you. That boundaries feel weird before they feel comfortable. That we really only control, and sometimes then to a limited degree, what lives on our side of the street. That we have much less influence than we think on other people’s side of the street, but also much less responsibility, obligation or accountability. And that sometimes really big horrible sh&t happens around us not because of us
Years on, I honestly pretty much don’t know why what happened happened. I can hypothesise but I din’t know. Which is uncomfortable tbh. Years on, I honestly don’t know if my former h ever loved or valued me or my family at all. Bc my version of common sense says that you don’t do some of the things he did, or didn’t do, over and over again for years, had that been so. And that’s uncomfortable too bc it leaves me not knowing the reality of something like 50% of over 20 years....what’s that, about 20% of my adult life? And feeling like the only thing I could have done to avoid the horror of what happened was never married or trusted my then h. To see what I couldn’t see or know what I didn’t know. And of course, that choice is beyond my control too lol. And all of that acceptance of reality stuff sucks. I kept trying to join the dots for years and years bc I did not want to swallow that loss and those feelings too. None of it is what I wanted for my life or my future or my past or my family. But it was what I got
, so eventually I suppose it felt necessary to accept some things in order to stop chewing on them.
My experience is a sample of one though, of course it is, and the evolution from a h that started being very weird and was under psychiatric care to a remarried vanisher who went poof is not the same as every experience here. It does seem to me though that being aware in oneself of that tricky line between explanation (to oneself) and soft glitter (about the spouse) is important. That both things can be true....that a spouse unravels into something unrecognisably weird in a situation beyond your control or comprehension AND that, without glitter, this person has shown you that they are capable of doing what they did to you given certain conditions and part of their mindset finds it acceptable enough to do it more than once or for an extended period of time. I have no idea how, having seen that, one can build anything good with that unless you see a thousand green flags over an equally long period that both the conditions and their mindset have fundamentally changed. And it’s a jolly difficult thing to assess someone else’s insides from the outside, isn’t it? And a bit tiring too perhaps to invest a lot of hypervigilant energy in watching lol.
It’s not my place to tell anyone else what to do about their spouse. After all, my score was 0-1 on the marriage front - with a lot of injury time ha ha. But, as a vet, I suppose I have to acknowledge my own cynicism about the utility of playing the MLC game with operating rules shaped by the MLCer or awol spouse. And the value of glitter lol. For most of us, this truly terrible and life altering thing happens and usually keeps happening for quite a while. And it upends us to greater or lesser degrees. There are very few examples of good reconciliation building after that kind of scourging....not none, but very few. But there are more examples of hard won ‘pretty good but different’ life building here. Which is why for me when I post now, I keep my opinions about MLC and marriages and reconnections et al (mostly) to myself and focus on trying to gently encourage LBS to accept what they see as a current observable reality, step back from mindf**kery (their own and others) when they feel ready and to begin inch by inch to work out what to do with the different version of their lives and their own normal.
To fettle ourselves and our own presents and futures, I suppose
Not sure that always makes me an appealing voice lol. But I hope it makes me an honest and supportive one when as you say, Curiosity, it all ‘looks a bit different than it used to’
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Fettling