Re: Hurt and Confused.....

Re: Hurt and Confused..... ----- From: Bernd - Date: 12 Nov 1997

My gut feeling is that you won’t be able to truly forgive until you make peace with his ex inside yourself (and with her, if she’s willing), and give him the complete freedom to make his own choices in regards to his relationship with her. That doesn’t mean that your choices now aren’t appropriate for you, but my guess is that they will help you more if you look at them as a step in the healing process, rather than part of a permanent solution.

Lynda has the complete freedom to see her former boyfriend, and she HAS seen him - including privately - on a number of occasions, when he was dealing with some of his own struggles over things in his life. In the early stages of Lynda’s and my struggles to rebuild the relationship, that kind of contact would have been too painful for me to deal with, and I told her so. And it was also a very slippery slope for her to try and manage as well.

Giving her such freedom isn’t noble of me. It’s very selfish. If Lynda’s fidelity is based on fear of what I would do, then it is going to NATURALLY create hidden resentments inside of her, because I become the one who she has to get “permission” from in that part of her life. It sets up an ongoing situation where 1/I always have to be on guard 2/she always has to be on guard (reporting any contact he’s made with her, for example, and hoping I don’t misinterpret it) 3/it is an ongoing reminder that she is untrustworthy unless I set the “rules”.

It tires me just thinking about all that. It is MUCH easier trusting that Lynda will do what she feels is best for HER, and if I support her freedom to find out what that is (even if she makes “mistakes” along the way), then things will work out just fine. And they have. It’s soooooo nice not having that “worry” taking up time in my days, and robbing me of healing time. If she slept with him again, I feel comfortable now that such an incident would be VERY painful for her after, because of how it would slide her back major league in her own recovery. Instead of anger, I hope that I would be able to feel compassion, and help her try to gain some perspective of why she turned against HERSELF so sharply. She owns her body, her mind, and her emotions. Whatever part of those she shares with me is her choice, and when I accept whatever she gives with genuine inner happiness, SHE feels much safer in sharing more of her. I used to think that infidelity was a betrayal of the partner. My perspective has changed. Now I see infidelity as a real betrayal of ONESELF - and the values of honesty, respect, and genuine caring that we believe in (or thought we did).

Integrity is honesty that holds true in the face of temptation. Unless we are given the chance to learn the value of integrity to OURSELVES, what we’ll likely find is that we don’t have that anchor to hold us steady at times of weakness, which we all have. If your partner is able to learn the lesson of integrity from this experience (and it sounds like he has a very good chance), then that integrity would serve him well on a night where both of you had the worst argument in your lives, and he found himself surrounded in a room of naked, passionate women.

Those are my thoughts. Hope something helps!