Hi All
Herewith part 2: I am a little hesitant to post it as he does get quite philosophical - too explain this i need to let you know that some of the things he writes are from questions i had asked him both from a personal aspect as well as from a book that we were both reading at the time which had many theories by Carl Jung and Deepak Chopra's perspective on Carl Jung's theories. Even though he writes it as one email he is answering these questions as he explains his journey
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Part 2 – the post mortem
My road to recovery was not easy – even though I had hit rock bottom and realised my ‘new’ life was not what I wanted – the urge to sooth the pain with the last binge drink or sex with a stranger were strong especially on days where the emotional pain got too much for me. I cannot say the journey was without its slip ups but as I started to deal with the real issues behind my complete dissatisfaction with life so the addictive pull of my self–destructive behaviours lessened.
I discovered that what I had expressed in my crisis came from an unconscious self I had developed to cope with some difficulties experienced in my childhood and later in my young adulthood. To cut a long story short as a child i did not feel my parents love and I often felt emotionally abandoned. This is not an excuse for my behaviour my actions lie squarely on my doorstep. However in my search to discover why I behaved in a way so contrary to who I thought i was –brought me to a place where I had to figure out what my emotional pain was telling me and how it got there in the first place. Emotional pain is the same as a physical pain it is there to alert you to a problem. If you have a broken limb the pain will alert you to make sure you have it healed, well the same goes with emotional pain – it is there to alert you to a healing that is required. This healing cannot be done through suppression or avoidance but rather by confronting and dealing with the cause of the pain. In fact, a person’s self-destructive behaviours during crisis is more like a person taking pain killers to alleviate the pain without treating the cause of the pain.
Dr Carl Jung stated “ Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” For me my shadow developed during my childhood, it developed every time I felt unloved or abandoned for expressing a particular personality trait or emotion that my parents deemed as ‘unacceptable’. I have come to learn that I had spent a life time suppressing certain emotions in an attempt to become the person that I thought everyone expected me to be, especially my parents. This started in my childhood where without intention my parents did not allow me to express certain emotional needs, and in so doing I began to see these emotions as a shameful part of me. So instead of dealing with these emotions in an appropriate manner – how could I, I was a child and children do not have the skills to deal with their emotional needs - I hid them in the dark crevices of my psyche, they became my shadow self, they became my shame, they became the demons which I came to fear. I successfully managed to bury the demons in my unconscious for 41 years and deny that they were aspects of myself. For 41 years I was the good guy, the upstanding guy – Mr. Dependable – the successful corporate guy with the perfect life. As Carl Jung says “would you rather be the good person or a whole person”. I was an incomplete being perceived as the good guy by all – and at times I even managed to convince myself of this illusionary self.
I have come to realise that I had nothing to be ashamed of, the darker qualities that were part of me are the opposites that enable me to recognise my higher self, my true goodness. If I did not know cowardliness how would I recognise courage, if I did not know deceit how can I know truth, if I did not know dishonesty how would I know integrity. We each have negative emotions that when they arise (or are reflected back to us through others in our surroundings) are there to be acknowledged, they are there to act as the guides to why you feel that way – your shadow is actually your friend not your enemy. Like any story the villain makes the hero – in my crisis I became the villain in my life as I lived through the shadow. Today I’m working at being the hero and it is an enriching experience, filled with hope and fulfilment. By acknowledging and allowing those aspects of myself that I disliked to exist has encouraged me to deal with them in a more a constructive way – I have learnt to have compassion for myself and my human failings, and have stopped hiding behind a facade of expectation. I’m beginning to live through conscious awareness as opposed to unconscious fear. By being more aware of myself as a whole human being (with good and bad) I’ve begun to take leadership of my life as opposed to allowing myself to be led by those darker emotions into behaviours that are based on fear and as such do not reflect my true self. The thing to understanding myself as whole is as Deepak Chopra states - to remove judgement and practice acceptance that everything in the universe works with polar opposites, electricity flows from positive to negative, there is day and night and so I’m both good and bad – it is what it is, it requires no judgement. However, in order to live with joy and self-acceptance conscious choices about how I choose to express myself need to be made – I could either choose to live through the shadow which only yields self-loathing, loneliness, guilt, pain, and fear not only to myself but to the people i held most dear. Or I can choose to live through a more authentic self, a self that uplifts the spirit and embraces a life of passion and joy .
My crisis allowed many suppressed emotions to surface but instead of looking within I projected the blame onto my environment – and mostly my wife. She had let herself go since our youth, she had put on 30 pounds, and quite frankly was looking older. I now know that my shame was more about my lack of self-worth, my sense of failure and I projected those feelings onto my wife and made this all her fault. Other things I blamed her for was her lack of excitement, her disinterest in doing things with me and her focus on our daughters. In my mind this gave me the excuse to flirt with another woman and start an affair. If my wife was not going to validate me as I should be validated I was going to find someone else who would – I felt entitled, this was my God given right damn it – right? right!. And so began the justification for my behaviour during my crisis.
My wife’s initial emotional reaction to my affair while it made me feel guilty it also lent more evidence that I was doing the right thing, you see I would think and say – “she is difficult I cannot and should not have to live like this!!!!”. As time went by my wife withdrew and stopped reacting, she started treating me with respect and courtesy, this only exacerbated my resentment of her because she was no longer enabling my projections of everything being her fault. You see I had set up my wife to fail she was dammed if she did and dammed if she didn’t.
I started to vacillate between guilt and avoiding the guilt by altering my projections and deciding that she was not really being kind she was using it to be manipulative – this view was encouraged by my affair partner and new friends, who would warn me about the woman ‘scorned’. Yet apart from protecting herself and our daughters financially, my wife never became the vindictive scorned woman. So yet again it was just another projection as I had by now started to cheat on my affair partner and was being deceptive and manipulative towards her. I would often lie about my marital status to these other women and in order to present the “good” guy image I would vilify my wife and caste the blame on her for our failed marriage. Playing the heroic victim seemed to win me many points in luring woman to my bed and more importantly their understanding and empathy fed my need for attention and admiration which gave my failing self-esteem a temporary boost.
Cheating on my affair partner did bring some guilt which I again justified by viewing the quality of our relationship as a trade off – she gave me everything I had complained about my wife not giving me – kinkier sex, thinner sexier body, participating in all my interests at the expense of her own – the trade off – I had money and paid for most things from expensive dinners to upmarket get always. Furthermore, she had compromised her integrity by having an affair with me, like me she was not to be trusted, like me she had no honour – so she did not deserve my faithfulness. I guess I blamed her for helping me break up my marriage. And a deeper part of me knew that unlike my wife who fell in love with me when I was a penniless student with a beat up old car, who had loved me through my successes and failures – and still believed in me in spite of my failures – my affair partner being a young, corporate woman fell in love with the successful image I presented – so she ‘loved’ the image not the man behind the image. My affair partner would not have given me a second glance if I had driven a moderate car instead of a luxury car or not spent the kind of money i spent on her – again a justification for my awful behavior.
I had become that comical pathetic middle aged guy who spends loads of money to keep a younger sexier woman at my side to show the world my success – no-one was fooled – I was like the proverbial teenager who takes up smoking to look cool – you fool yourself into believing the world is buying it, but the only people buying it are the parties involved - the rest of the world sees quite clearly through your pathetic attempts - i had become a man trying to capture his lost youth and avoid the reality of aging and dying – how humiliating.
In truth my marriage may have had its problems but they were minuscule, the few problems that did exist could have been solved with some real honest talks. Our marriage prior to my crisis was good – I trusted my wife, I loved her, she was my best friend and confidant (she had always supported me through thick and thin, through good and bad) and she knew me well, but at the time I was convinced I hated her.
My lack of any happy memories during my crisis was a complete farce – I have a memory from one of the more earlier days (before the affair) when I came across a family holiday video – in it i was happy - i was goofing around with my wife and yet as i watched that man in the video clip he was a stranger to me. That happy man could not be me as my memory served me I was unhappy for most of my marriage. In the depth of denial I brushed off the video clip as a once off moment that was never repeated again during my marriage. And yet there are albums filled with good times and many more videos that speak to a good solid and mostly happy marriage. That’s denial for you.
In the six years during the worst part of my crisis, I seldom visited my daughters I just could not stand seeing the haunted look in their eyes and so I made excuses not to see them. During the two worst years of my crisis I only saw my daughters a couple of times two of which were on Christmas. My guilt over what I was doing to my wife and daughters overwhelmed me and sent me into overdrive abusing and using with higher intensity in an attempt to suppress the anxiety, the guilt, the loneliness and the sadness. In my messed up mind I also managed to successfully blame them for this – so it was easy to justify to myself why I could not visit them – you see it was their fault they were making me feel bad about pursuing my life. After all I was not stopping them from living their lives – these are the distortions of a mind living in crisis. My demons were well in control and I was merely their puppet.
Today, I write this in an attempt to take ownership for what I did by exposing my shadow to the light of knowledge and in so doing I have started to live a more fulfilled life – yes I regret losing the life I had – I realise it is what I wanted all along – with a few tweaks here and there. My wife has lost the weight and has a new enthusiasm for life – she looks great. She admits that she is grateful for my crisis because it forced her to take a good hard look at herself which enabled her to make the changes she had been putting off. She has made herself a priority in her life. The contrast in how we both chose to deal with our pain amazes me, she chose a more conscious way to heal while I followed the more unconscious path – and there is a part of me that envies that she has less to be shameful of today. Although........ she often tells me this is my perception because she did go to the depths of despair too, she did experience her shadows and her shame, she felt her failure at losing me and our marriage. None-the-less I can see she chose a more constructive path – I do not begrudge her this – it has made me more aware of her value as a mother to my children and it has filled me with pride that she was my wife and best friend because in her I also see that part of myself.
We both wish we could have somehow made these changes while remaining together. I do not blame her for not wanting to reconcile – I know I broke it !! If the tables had been turned I wonder if I would have been as forgiving as she has been. I suspect with all the demons that had been lurking in my psyche at the time I would probably have turned my back on her and not looked back. My wife has been there in the background through all of this – in the beginning of my crisis, once she had stopped reacting, she made it clear if the time ever came when I needed her she would be there but as long as I was behaving in a self-destructive way and with so little respect for her and our daughters, she would keep her distance – she was the only person I trusted enough to phone when I finally reached rock bottom.
I have the deepest admiration for her strength of character and for her ability to forgive so completely. I remember my 9th grade history teacher saying to our class when writing a test always trust your first answer it is invariably the correct one – well I should have trusted the first choice I made in terms of the woman I married and the family I created with her – they were the right choice. What a pity that it is only hind sight that is 20/20.
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Hope this answers some of your questions
take care
moment
a view into MLC from a MLCer
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