It comes down to this: I thought I had something that I didn't have. Accepting that hurts because it calls into question my entire history with him, my judgment, my sanity, my reality.
First of all, oh my goodness, yes. I think most of us recognise that stage as part of the process we go through in making some kind of sense about what happened. And I’m not sure there is an ‘off the shelf’ answer to it. Or tbh that all of those questions and doubts eventually neatly disappear for good. But as someone said most of us eventually reach our own point where we feel we can sanely separate wheat from chaff without wincing.
Was it all untrue? On the liver principle, probably not. On the quacks like a duck principle, perhaps some of it was not all of the truth. The really tricky bit imho is that we don’t know which bit was which, do we?
As Xyzcf said though, we learn that we do have more choice about what we think than we might think we do. And again jmo, deciding what we think and what that means to us is an important kind of self care. If I can’t know for certain, but one set of thinking leaves me feeling nutty or unmoored from my own sense of who I am, and a different set of thinking leaves me feeling sane if sad, then I can choose to think what feels more constructive for me. And I can change my mind of course as I learn more info or as events unfold.
The simple principle that helped me is that whatever it was, whatever I call it, the driving force behind this experience just wasn’t about me or created by me. I can’t comprehend it bc it wasn’t from me; it was an Other, something outside of me and my life and my reality.
Again jmo, but I think that’s why many of us find reducing contact with the Now Version gives us a bit of clear water to separate the Then Version from the Now One vs continually trying to balance both on the same plate.
And perhaps that’s also why accepting the metaphorical death of the Then, regardless of what happens, and the reality of the Now, is part of the process for many of us. Perhaps doing that changes our mental metrics in some way, or helps us separate Then and Now as two different things, two different people really, idk. We teach ourselves to expect different things from a Now vs a Then person. For me, and I’m not recommending it as such bc I appreciate it sounds a bit nutty, I found it made sense to my brain to think of my much loved husband as if he’d died. It fitted how I felt, it fitted my practical reality. But in my case that was a reality of no shared kids and a remarried vanisher.
It’s normal for brains, especially traumatised brains, to chew at things like a dog with an old toy. Our brains are wired to believe that if we can figure it out, we can either fix it or we can prevent it from happening again. Essentially that we can keep ourselves safe. And I think that’s why we also go round and round the circle of ‘was I stupid/delusional/blind’. Bc it’s a bit scary to take your hands of that control/knowing tiller and accept that sometimes things happen that we can’t foresee or fix….that some things are not knowable or predictable in that A therefore B way.
Again jmo, but digging into those almost existential kind of questions that are about so much more than a crappy spouse tends to alter our perspective on a lot of things, big and small. It challenges old assumptions and it changes how we see a lot of things as we move forward. It’s kind of like taking a house back to bare boards and bricks really. I’m not sure that’s ever an easy process for any human and we don’t always know where it will take us tbh. And of course there’s a weird sort of connection with the other person who often seems to have taken the choice to either slap lots of new paint up or indeed just move to a new house singing while leaving us surrounded by rubble and brick dust. We are not on the same kind of page as the MLC types, that’s for sure, and tbh I think the process gets idk not easier exactly but more sensible when/if we can accept that. Their story is no longer our story and vice versa, we do not actually know or understand them anymore or vice versa; our windows are fundamentally different now. And where that takes us, and them, is also unknown, at least for a while. And the unknown is scary too, isn’t it?
I find myself sometimes thinking about Gisele Pelicot as an extreme version of this, maybe a lot of women do. I can’t comprehend this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7vvj8gymyo, these men. I just can’t. I don’t see how her or her children can either. It’s beyond me. But nonetheless real, isn’t it? Or part of the bigger Real of human life. And it’s hard to know what to do with that even from a distance. To understand how such ‘normal men’ can think in ways that allow them to act like that. It’s just beyond me but I do get to choose what I think it means for how I see the world, and men in my world. How i infer a whole from terrible parts. Or not. Again in the spirit of keeping it simple and sane, I think I can only do my small part in saying Yes and No to some things, in acknowledging the Dark but choosing the Light as a compass as much as I can. Maybe that’s why so many of us are deeply moved by Mme Pelicot’s own choices?
With time and hindsight, I tend now to believe that most of my memories of what those twenty+ years were like to me were real. And I value them bc to me they were mostly very good indeed. I was real, my actions and thoughts and observations and feelings were real, and so my memories of those things were real too. Bc, fundamentally, I believe that I am not sufficiently stupid or delusional enough to be capable of imagining them for twenty years, that if there were big red flags to comprehend, I would not have seen them or felt them. At the same time, do I have my own blind spots and biases? Sure.
There are lots of things that factual objective evidence suggests humans can do which are just literally incomprehensible to me….but I know these things are real even if not in my wheelhouse. And that’s a bit scary and a bit disheartening to accept, isn’t it? A kind of Alice in Wonderland feeling for me, for sure, and not a very pleasant one. Those things certainly still make me wince years later. Am I better for that changed mindset? Idk. Tbh I sometimes rather miss my old days of innocence lol…but it is as it is and I am now as I am, maybe future me will evolve into something else, idk. Certainly there are quite a few things I used to believe that I no longer believe in quite the same way or experience in quite the same way. I don’t always like that, sometimes tbh I feel quite angry about having that ‘done to me’, but I deal with it by accepting my own new reality as kindly and gently as I can.
And part of that, again jmo and it took a few years to get, is that my story is not a shared story. It was. And then, rather brutally, it wasn’t. And I have no comprehension at all, zero, of what my then h’s vista was or became or is now. None. Only that evidence suggests it is different. So I had to figure out which bit of my reality still felt true if I excluded his eyes from it. If any of it held water independently. In my case, I found much of it did but a few bits I wasn’t so sure about and I had to find my own way to make peace with the gaps. It really is quite existential, isn’t it? Very Cartesian and a flavour of ‘if a tree falls in a forest without being seen etc etc’ lol.
What I also found helpful was to try to keep some things simple in the midst of such complexity. Do I trust that I know what it looks and feels like if other people value me or care about my well-being? I do. Do I know when I feel unsure about that, or when what people say is different from what they do? I do. I may not understand the Why, but I know the What. I can trust my own judgement about that. I may not like what I see or understand what someone else is thinking or feeling, but I do know the difference. And that is does not have to be so complicated to distinguish as others might make out. Or not to me anyway. If you behave like someone who values me and cares about my well-being and my needs, you’re going to pretty much consistently behave like someone would if they did. If you don’t, you usually won’t. My former h did for decades. And then he absolutely didn’t. That made no sense to me at all, but presumably it made some kind of sense to him bc he did what he did in the way that he did it.
No more profound conclusion after years of chewing than that lol. And that whatever his story was/is, it isn’t the same as mine. And that’s reality too. And that’s ok. Sucky to experience but ok in a weird way. My story, my memories, my conclusions from it do not have to rest on his. That’s an ultimate version of non-attachment, isn’t it? That what belongs to me still belongs to me. And to you, regardless of how I see it or your stbxh sees it or anyone else sees it. But it is a bit of a mind wrestling match so really not surprising that it takes a bit of time, right?
Going back to the whole blind spots/bias thing? Do I see things in my former h’s view on the world now differently than I did then? Well, yes, some. Things I thought of as minor quirks or acceptable imperfections. My former h had some different takes on the world than me, that’s true…a comfort with small lies to please or avoid that I didn’t have, a pettiness sometimes, an ability to hold a grudge, a need for reassurance and validation that was different from mine, a lot of messy FOO stuff that I saw but probably did not really understand., a kind of neediness. Things I accepted or explained away as normal hairline cracks that now I see more as bigger fracture lines.
Were those ‘clues’ that I should have seen differently? Maybe. But I didn’t bc I couldn’t. Until I did. Do I honestly believe that my life would have been better if I had? Idk. In some ways, maybe. But then it’s the path not taken, isn’t it? Would I have lost other things from my time on the planet that I value so much? Maybe, yes, idk. But I honestly do believe now that I could not have foreseen or prevented whatever it was that changed my h’s story and thus mine. Bc it didn’t come from me and nothing I did or did not do changed it. It genuinely felt like a big rock rolling down a hill and gathering speed no matter what I did. And that in itself suggested to me that it wasn’t my big rock! Even if I got rolled over by it, it wasn’t my rock. It was a rock that happened to me and around me, not bc of me.
It wasn’t my rock.
And that was just as true whether I saw my then h as pushing the rock, riding on it joyfully like a rodeo horse or being crushed under it too.
It still wasn’t my rock.
But I do have the right to decide what my memories and life were before the rock, during the rock and after the rock.
Bc not everything in my life then or now is about the rock either.
Let yourself chew on these things as you will until you start to see the glimmers of non-rock life in your own way and time, my friend. I wish we could make that easier or quicker, but we can’t. We can only sit with you acknowledging the reality of the Big Rock and knowing that you will find your own take on it. Bc you will. Bc life is not just about the Big Rock.
Interestingly, I find - and perhaps that’s why some of my posts are (too) long, is that I figure out what I think now by responding to others’ questions and reflections. So, thank you for that, for sharing your questions in a way that helps others including me think out loud.
I hope you feel better soon. Being poorly is a bit like Hangry, isn’t it, in that it can surface some bubbles of strong feelings, messy stuff? Normal. But of the moment sometimes even if it feels not. Xxx
Radical Acceptance is the New Black
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