I honestly believe that part of our healing and our strength is to reach a point when we can look at reality with brave eyes and choose our own truth to live with.
No matter what anyone else thinks. Although as Nah says, we can learn what we think by hearing what other heads do especially those perhaps with a little time and distance from all the shocking craziness
It takes a while for most of us bc this is an exhausting and often far from normal bit of life experience. But you do feel stronger when you know you have found on your own truth. And life gets simpler when you do feel that shift.
I think it is important to respect that the truths we find and choose will not always be the same, and we may not always agree with each other.
But the proof is in the individual life pudding imho.
All of us know that it takes a darned long time to just even accept what we see right in front of us.
That we don't understand it but it is still real.
Takes a lot my time to stop thinking of them as who they were and start thinking of them as who they are (which is usually pretty awful)...and then maybe a bit of time after that to let the pendulum settle and decide how we see them on the spectrum between past and present versions.
And before then we need to scrabble around to figure out how to protect ourselves and our families as much as we can.
And then eventually we get to catch a breath and figure out how we feel about it all and how we frame it in a way we can live with it all regardless of what happens in the future. Letting go and acceptance have a lot of layers. And I truly think it is harder to do if you are still on the WTF battlefield too.
We get to decide for ourselves who we think our spouse was and what our old life was.
We get to decide who or what we think they are now and how much exposure we want to have to that.
We get to decide if it was some kind of crisis or not. And if we see them as mad, bad or ill.
And we get to decide what we see them as responsible for or not, and how much we blame or forgive or neither.
I honestly believe that the difference between a good wise LBS choice or not is about how much weight we carry forward that gets in the way of making a good different life from the rubble. For some, believing compassionately in the existence of their 'real' spouse and a door on the latch is essential. For others, finding the anger and courage to shut the door on them completely is essential. For some, it is maybe in the middle. But the bit of fight that comes out for most LBS as they get up off their knees imho is that each one gets the right to choose and not to be told what they should think or feel by anyone - including here - once they have found that inner answer for themselves and know why it is the right choice for their lives as they move on from the destruction.
In my case, and it took me a very long time, I trust that something bad and extraordinary changed how my h thought and felt and behaved. He did bad things to many people who trusted him and probably to himself; he is responsible for all of his actions and some of the consequences of them.
I don't know if the 'real' person still exists or will ever exist again, but if so, I have compassion for him bc he looked like someone who blew himself and his life up and destroyed things he had valued for years. And I also know that he will never be anything better than a damaged person if he does not take responsibility for himself or if I make excuses for him. And my door had to close bc I had to accept that he would hurt me more if I let him.
I suppose the big question I came here trying to answer was could I trust my own reality which now included incomprehensibly a h who apparently hated me enough to wish I was dead.
But, for me, it was unliveable with to either believe that the much-loved husband I knew was never real or to spend the rest of my life hating him.....so I choose to believe essentially that he became mentally ill, dangerous and metaphorically died. I choose to invest nothing in that person, think fondly and with compassion of who he was and the 'demons' that broke him and have no expectation of him ever becoming something better again bc I can't know.
But if he does, and he ever asks for my help or acceptance...as long as it doesn't damage me or my life...I will show it by respecting him enough to be kind in how I let him tackle his own burdens from what happened and what he did. And even if I never see or hear from him again, I will always hope that what he became is not the best that he can do and be as I would hope others would want for me to be more than the shellshocked grieving LBS version of myself.
Bc, although it is easy to doubt it in our own situation, looking from a distance most of these spouses have become destructive, unhappy, weak, lost half-people and no one would wish that on anyone they once loved I think.
An interesting debate about MLC - Justification!
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