Me, fWW Him, fBH (sisoon) Dday, 12/22/2010 I use capital letters for emphasis, not yelling. Reconciled and healing.

Ten years since dday

Today is the 10th anniversary of Dday for me and sisoon. This year has been a hard one for both of us, maybe because 10 is such a round number. After ten years, the Inner Child can’t pretend that this never happened – that it’s just a bad dream that will go away. But I did what I did, and I hurt sisoon, and it will never go away.

We’ve had more flashbacks, more questions, and more discussions. A lot of them were about our courtship, which was both happy because we stuck together through misunderstandings and got to the point of feeling safe in our connection with each other, and sad because we didn’t realize earlier that we both wanted to be together and just had different issues and different ways of communicating that we needed to work through.

For me this has also been a good year – painful, but good. I have little by little gotten to the point where I can be conscious of and work through some of the issues that supported my affair – codependence and Rescuing, underlying negative beliefs about myself, and fears of others, that led to my putting up walls between myself, others and life, and piles of old and new grief, anger and shame.

As Churchill said, this is not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning. I can sometimes, and to some extent, live in reality rather than my old scripts. The reality of me, as an ordinary human being (that’s the ‘plain’ in plainsong’), and not a monster or saint, the reality of others, as basically well-intentioned, and the reality of life, as unpredictable (which I hate), but as a source of joy as well as of pain.

I know the future will also have both joy and pain. I am so lucky to have a partner with whom I share so many values, interests and goals. How rare is it that both of us are connected to our synagogue, like blues, bluegrass, Indian classical music, and percussion, and enjoy discussing history, language and psychology? We also have differences that make life more interesting. And some differences in temperament and processing style that can create difficulties, which with the help of our therapist we are learning to deal with.

My coping mechanisms are in the nature of compartmentalizing. As I integrate myself more, my issues don’t go away. I now just have to deal with them without those defenses. I need to deal with grief, guilt, resentment, fear, and shame, as well as relationships, productivity, contribution to the common good, learning, appreciation of art and nature, and connection to spirit, as a person with what has been called “single personality disorder,” rather than “multiple personality disorder”. Or, to put it another way, to deal with the shared existential dilemmas of human life, where we are not perfect but can and must continue to develop and increase our capacities to be kind to ourselves and others.

Wishing you all a good new year.

7 comments posted: Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020

insight into wayward thinking - helpful but disturbing

The book I want to recommend is Half Broken Things, by Morag Joss. It won the Silver Dagger award from the Crime Writers of America in 2003. I stumbled across it in our library, thinking it would be a mindless mystery, useful for distraction.

Instead, it is a beautifully written psychological study of how wounded and damaged persons can slide down a slippery slope to cause irreparable damage (spoiler alert - death) to people who have never caused them any harm.

Though the book is not about infidelity, the thinking it describes seems to me exactly the same as the thinking that I used during my affair. The book is written with great compassion for the injured characters who cause this damage. At the same time it relentlessly shows the horror of the damage they cause others, some of whom are totally innocent, and some of whom are very annoying, but none of whom deserve their final fate.

As a Wayward, I found this compassionate but relentless description of wayward thinking very helpful in understanding the nature and horror of the thinking I used myself. I think it could be helpful for Betrayeds as well, to understand how a broken person, when acting out of their brokenness, could do something so illogical and out of character with the rest of who they are.

You will have to judge for yourself whether you are at a stage when reading about these dynamics would be more helpful or hurtful. I would guess that many Betrayeds would not want to read this sort of description until two or three years past dday.

15 comments posted: Sunday, December 21st, 2014