Good Guy, Bad Guy – Which Is It?

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So which is it?

A man who would betray his wife is the ‘bad guy’, right?

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Scrooge trembled more and more.
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

A guy who works hard at a lucrative career affording his family the niceties of life and a great vacation each year—goes to church on Sunday and votes in every election. Good guy—right?

You may have just been caught up in the same sort of black and white shallow judgementalism that pervades most addicts thinking. And the thought patterns that lead to destructive choices, such as betrayal.

No one is born ‘bad’, as most of culture defines it. We are molded through our upbringing mostly by people who have likewise been molded–to have strengths and weaknesses, good and bad qualities. And you know what? Most of this modeling has no nefarious intent. It is the result of the unexamined life. The failure of generation after generation to do the difficult work of realization, responsibility and change.

It takes courage and fortitude to break old patterns that are ingrained from childhood. Old, rusty, ponderous chains. Often these patterns were survival mechanisms that allowed us to adapt to scary or difficult situations when we were powerless youngsters. Coping mechanisms that did the job as kids, but when carried on into adulthood reek havoc with selfhood and relationships.

A little boy who is sent to military school run by nuns, ostensibly to gain a foothold on the path to college by parents who struggled to pay for this schooling, but could not see their way to making any other choice when overwhelmed by multiple siblings, one of whom was deaf, and an alcoholic dad. Bad people? Hey, they sent their seven year old to boarding school where his tender heart was terrified by a system meant to mold young boys into men. There he learned to hide and lie and cheat to survive. Fly under the radar. Don’t get caught or reprimanded. Bad kid?

No matter the good intent of the parents. No matter the innocent child turned to manipulative survival skills. No matter. The intent to pass on destructive life coping skills was not there, yet it happened…worked like a charm.

“The best laid plans of mice and men.”

Where was the introspection of the parents when they made those decisions, convincing themselves that discipline and structure would be to their eldest son’s advantage? Where? When Dr Spock was touting ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’– and ‘let them cry it out’? Where was the language of the heart that could have looked into the innocent eyes of the eldest of four and seen a young boy who needed his family so much more than a structured college bound education in isolation? How else could that tender heart have taken it, but to feel rejected and punished. A human doing, not a human being any longer. Straighten up and fly right, boy.

We are not born to lie and cheat, steal and break vows. We are carefully taught –mostly by people who are justifying their choices by convincing themselves they are doing what’s best. Until and unless they figure otherwise, the legacy goes on. From grandfather to father to son the story continues. Until and unless someone can look deeply into self and reality to say ‘no more’.

How do you break the cycle of learned self-deception?

Why? via the opposite. Truth. Vulnerability. Hard conversations. Courage like one has never before had to muster.

Breaking the code of silence.

Breaking the chains of addiction’s mandate. Secrets and silence.

Breaking away from passive, looking the other way existence.

Unabashedly sharing one’s heart and the pain overflowing from all the mistaken choices made and enforced in one’s own childhood. Grieving innocence lost. All those years missed in the loving bosom of an imperfect, but caring family. The message internalized: ‘I am not worth loving.’

And so the same story, different scenery and timeframe, but the same broken story is repeated again and again.

Until someone says

“No more.”

The destruction stops with me.

“Are You Still Together?”

A fellow betrayed wife asked me in the comments section of my blog on affair recovery dot com. My response:

“We are in house separated. There was no ‘light switch’ turning point. My path has been more like a dimmer switch –the light brightening as I lean into my choice to move forward. My attendance at Alanon has supported the need to ‘detach in love’ as I have worked at rebuilding my life. At some point, as in any grief (especially the loss of a loved one to death. This is a kind of death), you have to decide to live again—to find the reasons that surround all of us, to go on.

We can not afford two households. I am not willing to sacrifice any more than I already have. I want to continue to be able to afford not only basic living expenses, but to be able to see my daughter and granddaughter living on the other side of the country. I choose every day to look for (and find) all the good, all the beauty. Life goes on all around me and I choose to jump back into the stream. Life is not what I planned, nor imagined, but it is still good.”

I am sad for him. He chooses to remain in his surface world, refusing to dig deep and recover. The very nature of his stonewalling is emotionally abusive because it leaves me still abandoned to my own recovery. Over time I am able to empathize with his brokenness and not take it so personally. He may think he is choosing his comfort. That comes at a high price— rejecting living a full emotionally, spiritually and physically healthy life.

I am sad for him.

“People are who they are and they don’t change just because we need them too.”
– David Kessler, “Finding Meaning”

How Happiness Can Hurt Your Marriage

Happiness is not a goal, it is a result.

March 17, 2018 by The Boundaries Books Team Dr Townsend and Cloud

I (Dr. Cloud) was talking to a young man one day about his girlfriend. He was thinking about getting married, and he had questions about their relationship. Several times during the conversation, he said that something she did or something about the relationship did not “make him happy.” It was clear that this was a theme for him. She was not “making him happy.”
When I asked, he said that she wanted him to deal with some things in the relationship. He needed to do some work that took effort. It was not a “happy” time. When he had to work on the relationship, he no longer liked it.
At first, I was trying to understand what the difficulties were, but the more I listened, the more I saw that he was the difficulty. His attitude was, “If I’m not happy, something bad must be happening.” And his immediate conclusion was always that the “bad” was in someone else, not him. From his perspective, he was not part of any problem, much less part of the solution. Finally, I had heard about as much as I could take of his self-centered ramblings.
“I think I know what you should do,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“I think you should get a goldfish,” I replied.
Looking at me as if I were a little crazy, he asked, “What are you talking about? Why do you say that?”
“It sounds to me like that is about the highest level of relationship you are ready for. Forget the marriage thing.”
“What do you mean by ‘the highest level of relationship’?”
“Well, even a dog makes demands on you. A dog has to be let out to go to the bathroom. You have to clean up after it. Other times, it requires time from you when you don’t want to give it. A dog might interfere with your happiness. Better get a goldfish. A goldfish doesn’t ask for much. But a woman is completely out of the question.”
Now we had something to talk about. This person’s greatest value was his own happiness and his own immediate comfort. And I can’t think of a worse value in life, especially a life that includes marriage. Why? Is this a killjoy attitude? Hardly. I am not advocating misery. I hate pain. But I do know this: People who always want to be happy and pursue it above all else are some of the most miserable people in the world.
The reason is that happiness is a result. It is sometimes the result of having good things happen. But usually it is the result of our being in a good place inside ourselves and our having done the character work we need to do so that we are content and joyful in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. Happiness is a fruit of a lot of hard work in relationships, career, spiritual growth, or a host of other arenas of life. But nowhere is this as true as in marriage.
Marriage is a lot of work, period. I don’t know anyone who has been married very long who does not attest to that. When couples do the right kind of work—character work—they find that they can gain more happiness in their marriage than they thought possible. But it always comes as a result of going through some difficult moments. Conflicts, fears, and old traumas. Big and small rejections, arguments, and hurt feelings. The disillusionment of someone being different than was imagined. The difficult task of accepting imperfections and immaturity that are larger than one thinks they should be.
All of these things are normal, and all of these things are workable. And if people work through them, they reach happiness again, usually a happiness of a deeper and better sort. But if they hit these inevitable walls and have the attitude that this problem is “interfering with my happiness,” they are in real trouble. They will be angry with the “inconvenience” of their happiness being interrupted and will refuse to solve the issues or will just leave the relationship. If happiness is our guide and it goes away momentarily, we will assume that something is wrong.
The truth is (and this is why happiness is such a horrible goal) that when we are not happy, something good may be happening. You may have been brought to that moment of crisis because of a need for growth, and that crisis may be the solution to much of what is wrong with your life. If you could grasp whatever it is that this situation is asking you to learn, it could change your entire life.