When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself.
Earl Nightingale
Happy Game Day My Fellow Broken Hearted.
Going through the draft archives and found this. I originally wrote it around sixty days after the end of my relationship with C.
I’m not sure why I didn’t share it originally. Probably my small emotional boat was swamped by some other anxiety inducing moment.
Regardless, I wanted to let you know: you aren’t a monster. You made a mistake and then probably doubled down on the mistake.
Everything we judge, or others judge about our mistake is a judgement of the story someone is making up to explain pain and reactions to pain.
While some of our pain, and theirs, is real grief, much is also imagined. Which doesn’t diminish or discount pain but it is helpful for me to start separating emotionally and mentally what happened in my life versus what people imagined happened in my life.
Which of course isn’t the same as gaslighting someone.
For example, C once told me she “knew” I sent dick pics to my ex-wife. She claimed to have proof. When I called bullshit and asked to see her proof, she deflected elsewhere. I had lots of shitheadery and fuckery in my story but I cannot own what someone imagines is true.
This is why it is essential to own only what is true as compassionately, appropriately, and quickly as we can. We are not responsible for the things people imagine are true.
More about that later.
In the meantime, I just want you to know you are worthy of love, compassion, and acceptance. You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.
And if the people you are with are not working towards that truth, and acting accordingly, that will eventually slide into emotional, mental, physical, and sexual abuse.
Our actions do not justify abuse. “You did it first,” is hardly the constructive argument of people engaged in addressing their traumas.
That doesn’t make them monsters either, just emotionally rigid and frightened. As hard as it seems, try to greet their pain with compassion and understanding. Once I start separated from the stories I can explore life more fully with or without them.
And if you are doing the work, you will have to eventually own how you abused other people. To get there we also have to give up emotional rigidity and find compassion too. No one cares to admit complete defeat and admit where we are wrong. It is humiliating and humbling.
As such, “It’s important to understand that healthy people who value themselves and establish healthy boundaries,” writes Terrie Vanover in her article Why Your Divorce May Be Your Fault, “DON’T stay married to people with psychological disorders.”
Stay in the moment. Breathe. Go to therapy. Proactively own what is true. That is how shame and fear lose their powers and we can begin to imagine a better life free of secrets and lies.
I love you.
Also, GO BUCKS! BEAT CLEMSON! Just saying.
Namaste.
So if you’re labeling your ex-spouse as a narcissist or another disorder, it may be time to stop blaming them for the divorce and look at why you got into the marriage in the first place.
Terrie Vanover
Why Your Divorce May Be Your Fault · Divorced Moms
Nearly every single day after C asked me to leave and give her some space I’ve voluntarily thrown myself on the sword, and as I flail about, announce to anyone that would listen, “Her pain is all my fault. I’m a monster.”
And when I say monster, I mean what you are imagining: psychopathic, predatory, narcissistic, sociopathic, control freak. All the current bullshit buzzwords found in American’s obsession with pop culture psychology. We all think we “know” things because we read an article entitled “5 Signs You’re Dating A Narcissist.”
Talk to someone that was married and lived with a diagnosed narcissist and all of a sudden you realize you have never known one. You realize everything you know is simply a ghost story.
In reality, I’m not a monster.
As such, I’m calling an emotional and mental timeout on the nonsense. We all do things that someone else will be happy to label. Labels make us feel safe but they don’t actually address what is happening. If I want any healing for myself – or others – it’s time I started separating the acts from the actors.
For example, recently I referred to one of my best friends as “schizoid”. I certainly didn’t mean it the way my friend has taken it (understandably not well). However, in a moment in time where every single one of my actions is being examined under a microscope, there is little room for error.
She currently is not speaking to me because over the last 50 painful and miserable days I’ve broken her three strike rule on insensitive stupidity.
Earlier in the week after an emotionally exhausting and insulting afternoon, I voice texted someone. Hours later when I looked at what I sent I realized it was gibberish.
Between the time I send it and several hours later when I looked, I think the text was shared with an audience and interpreted as a sign of something much darker and dangerous. It was a voice-to-text that at any other time would have never been given a second thought – probably laughed off – but the gibberish, in that moment, indicated something sinister.
And of course, later, it came back and bit me in the ass because people want to believe their own ghost stories. We do this because it makes us feel better about our own sins.
As I’ve started to recognize how I’ve allowed others to steal the narrative over my infidelity I’ve begun to recognize that C had choices too. Not only choices but she is equally capable of making bad choices.
Today I was reminded by a pizza lady that the internet is a big place. If you make the effort you will find the dark corners. Knowing this I need to spend less energy trying to understand my pain through the mental machinations of the negative armchair psychologists hijacking my history with C and K. I need to stop trying to understand how others define what happened as a sign of something sinister and seriously wrong with me.
It’s self-flagellation. It’s confirmation bias.
I’ve spent dozens of hours reading monster stories. What I learned is there are lots of ways to be a monster in someone else’s eyes. It’s all perspective. Sure there are monsters, but in truth, most of what we are calling monster behavior is simply someone doing something stupid for stupid and innocent reasons. It’s just poor judgment, not pathological.
There are actually very few monsters.
Today I took the time to read about relationship communication and tools. About what happens in a breakup. How to loving hold the other person accountable and not roll-over out of guilt, shame, remorse or react out of anger. How to adult.
In the last 50 days, I’ve done some dumb things, but also typical. So has C.
For example, wanting to talk to the woman you love isn’t a sign of narcissism or control issues. Taken as a whole I’ve actually done a great many things well in navigating the demise of our relationships.
Mostly.
Like her, neither of us are doing it perfectly because neither of us has ever done this before. I need to be more respectful and patient with myself and with her.
Mistakes and misunderstandings are going to happen because we both physically hurt and don’t know what to do with the pain. Some people will gather around and try to alleviate the pain by telling us ghost stories. Others will gather around, tell us the truth and hold our hand as we live through the pain.
Who we choose to listen to helps define what happens next: sit in the pain and learn or hide and blame others. Neither is right or wrong, they are simply choices.
Only C’s opinion matters and she isn’t stupid. Just angry and in pain. Just like me. Combined with our communication and relationship shortcomings it creates a rich soup of spoken and unspoken expectations and fears.
Clearly, we have that in common still.
It also creates a fertile ground inviting other people to dump their shit into our garden.
For example, C has made my infidelity public in a cloistered community of 1,100 people and a small circle of mental giants. As a result, the gossip is becoming sport. The other problem is in my attempt to give her pain space I left town on a 13 state 4K mile road Oddessy. Therefore, there is no reality check, only ghost stories.
However, after my experience with W, S and a few others this past week it has become readily apparent that well-meaning, but ignorant people are applying their biases to our private issue. Gloryhounds are taking glee in working their own emotional issues out through our pain.
It’s why it irks me when people with their own relationship drama and emotional issues start offering advice or input on how to deal with the monster. Not everything is a horror story. As Esther Perel writes, “Surely millions of renegade lovers can’t all be pathological.”
Except, no one wants to watch the story of two well-meaning people navigating the end of a relationship. Friends and family slow down to snap pictures, speculate, and tell stories.
I was talking a friend that’s been a police chief for 20 years. He was telling me that after house fires people just show up offering to help. They hang around, make small talk and kick around the ashes. When they find something they pick it up announcing, “Look! I found an old picture!” They think they are helping but in truth, they just want to be part of the story.
Here is where we are today: We’re both scared. She ghosted. I’m confused. My imagination fills in the blanks.
I want to engage in the problem and solution head-on like a bull. She likes to hide behind a cape and deal with it from the side like a matador. Eventually, someone is going to be impailed or gored. Sometimes everyone.
Everyone wants to be around to see the gory details so eventually they can tell another ghost story.
And that is the root of our current dilemma.
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