Ultimately though, it doesn't matter that much to you. The effect is still the same. I think I know why it seems relevant. I was there too. The madder the behaviour the more certified MLC. But in the end, it's exhausting and truly detrimental to a person's health.
KayDee makes a wise point here that imho applies to more than just those ‘why ow’ questions and is useful as a guard rail to consider for all folks new to this.
It’s a perfectly normal response to shock and confusion to dive into bits of the picture to try to make sense of it. It’s what our brains are wired to do….look for confirmation or try to squeeze stuff into a pattern that makes a bit of sense. And to get a bit lost in the detail….like standing very close up to one of those impressionist paintings. I did too. And yes, it was quite damaging to my mental wellbeing.
With hindsight, I think though the more useful vista is from a bit further back…..the pixels become a picture then, dots become a water lily.
I recently watched a Netflix documentary called ‘Bad Vegan’. Without getting into the detail of the story, what struck me is that there was a point early on when the players did not ask themselves some pretty basic big picture questions. Instead they were almost distracted by the detail of a moment……putting a lot of energy into wiring x amount of money or not, say, rather than the bigger question of not being able to meet the payroll. And imho that’s how gaslighting works….theres a lot of don’t look at this, look at that going on. Again, with hindsight, I think we LBS can almost self-gaslight for a little while. An ‘oooh, he/she replied to my text quickly’ as opposed to ‘he/she has left the family home and cleaned out the savings account’. A couple of the players said in the documentary that there was a point when they could not admit certain truths to themselves at the time bc it would have required them to accept that they had already lost a huge amount….and that was too painful or scary….so they stayed looped into a kind of sunk cost fallacy where if they ‘kept going’ they might get some of it back or it would all work out ok in the end. I recognise that thinking in myself in the first year or so, maybe a bit more, post BD. And I say that as someone professionally trained in analysis and deductive logic - not my finest hours lol.
Imho you are wise, and sane, Hollie, to keep your lens focused on all the big picture list of your h’s actions or inactions that you wrote. Bc those are factual observable things and can be a great bit of ground to stand on mentally when/if you feel nuts. Those kind of facts help us feel we can safely trust our own judgement and sense of reality. And part of that imho is the ability to filter what really matters, what is germane to our own actions and decisions and what is not. Again jmo, but a lot of MLC type drama is not as germane to us as it feels at the time.
So, in my case, what did matter was that I was receiving anonymous death threats….who was sending them or why or what they were trying to achieve by doing so or what anyone else thought about that really mattered much less than the reality that I was getting them. And that they had a big effect on my mental health and life. Which meant that my priority was to feel safer, and therefore to take actions, whatever they needed to be and whatever anyone else thought about those actions. Again, in my case, realising that my stbxh had stolen money from our joint resources mattered more in my decision making than if he had spent it on a new car or on an exotic vacation or given it to ow to spend at Cartier. My actions needed to be based on the fact that he had stolen from me, not why he had done it or how he justified it. Ditto ow….i knew there was an ow involved and I knew my then h had lied about a lot of things….right up to the divorce being final, bizarrely iirc even afterwards, he continued to deny her existence and then her significance to his lawyer, my lawyer and me. (I found out later even more bizarrely that in parallel he/she were planning their wedding…to someone who did not exist/was just a friend/nothing to see here lol). But actually that did not matter….what really mattered was that my h had left me, stolen from me, refused to talk to me pretty much and was consistently refusing to engage with any of the practical effects of that choice. The fact that I didn’t understand why, my speculation about whether ow was a delightful person ha ha or more likely not, or if he had been seeing her while my father was dying, even the fact that he was under psychiatric care, did not change the observable bigger picture. He left, he wasn’t talking to me, he lied so much it was impossible to place any weight on his words. That was the water lily. I took a long long time to swallow that, well sunk costs, probably did it in small chunks looking back, but finding the capacity to see the germane trees from the distracting wood was really important. S&itty but important.
T: 18 M: 12 (at BD) No kids.
H diagnosed with severe depression Oct 15. BD May 16. OW since April 16, maybe earlier. Silent vanisher mostly.
Divorced April 18. XH married ow 6 weeks later.
"Option A is not available so I need to kick the s**t out of Option B" Sheryl Sandberg
One week after papers come through MLC wants to talk
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