We promised more AMAs, so let’s go! This week, Laura answers three questions that interlace around the topics of infidelity, trust, intimacy, divorce, addiction, forgiveness, and the complex reality of life and love. We are so grateful for the courage and trust our listeners place in us when they call in and share themselves in such generous ways. Trust us, their words and their voices will stick with you and add to your day. Submit a question for a future episode: https://www.tmstpod.com/question Show notes: The State of Affairs by Esther Perel: https://amzn.to/3AdvTvK Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7yWLC9O1WCpXdaqYArvedI?si=e740532b6dd64878 Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
AMA with Laura on Infidelity, Trust, Grief and The Complex Reality of Love and Life
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. Welcome to another episode of TMST. Today I'm answering your questions and this is the first time we've had people submit audio questions along with written ones. So in a couple of cases, you're going to hear those played. If you'd like to submit a question to be considered for a future episode, go to TMSTpod.com and click on submit a question.
[00:00:35] Okay. So there's a theme in the questions I'm answering today. The broad theme is romantic partnerships/marriages, but the specific theme is infidelity. With some sub themes of divorce, drinking and addiction. That sounds so depressing. So yeah, it's a heavy topic. [00:01:00] This is a tender spot for a lot of people.
[00:01:05] So I just want to give you that warning. It's never an easy thing to talk about, but it's also obviously so important because for a lot of people, no matter what side of the equation you're on and I have been on both. There's just so much hurt and confusion and shame and heartbreak. So we're doing what we do here, and we're going to talk about it with the intention being to open up our hearts and minds, consider important questions or points of view, and try to move through life with a little more air in our lungs.
[00:01:40] But before I get into the questions I want to state again, as I have in the past that I'm not a licensed mental health provider. I'm not a therapist or a clinician or an expert in relationships. If you are listening, you probably know that, but I just have to for my own [00:02:00] conscious conscience. Wow. Is this how today is going to go?
[00:02:05] I'm already on my third or fourth take you guys. So we're just going to keep going. I have to form my own conscience. Say it out loud. I'm speaking only for my own experience in relationships in recovery and what I've learned in my own research. So please, none of this should be taken as clinical advice or be a substitute to talking with a professional.
[00:02:27] And your situation is your situation. I don't have the darndest idea about it. “My wife and I have been married for decades. We have all these wonderful children. My wife got me sober when we first started two years ago, she started drinking and it just took her down in every way you can imagine neglecting the children, herself, the marriage, her work. Everything she worked so hard to build. She just let go by the way. I learned from one of my [00:03:00] children that she's having a five-year affair with a guy in town who was a creditor who went after married women and everybody told me this, that had drinking problems. My wife was not his first. That's neither here nor there.
[00:03:14] The affair breaks my heart because I still love her with all my heart. What scares me is, did she ever love me? I know she did. I know this isn't about me. I know this isn't about the kids. I know this is what addiction is. It's all about the person. I remember the darkness. I remember when I was out there doing anything I could to, just relieve, to escape.
[00:03:35] Her friends told me he was all, nothing more than a bottle of fantasy. Just part of the drinking. It's just so hard. I love her so much. And I'm so scared that like, did I lose her? But that's my disease talking to me. I know what alcoholism and drug addiction it just does the people, it makes you cross lines. You never thought you would cross and makes you become people that you aren't.[00:04:00]
[00:04:01] I guess all I want to hear you say is you're right. It was the disease. Your wife's not that person.
[00:04:12] Okay. Thank you so much for trusting me with this. I will do my best to answer. I, of course can't speak for your wife, but I do know having gone through this, myself and hearing from literally hundreds of others at this point who have gone through it as well, that it's almost never about how much they love their partner when someone is acting out in this way, especially when there are substances and especially when there's addiction involved. It's always about, like you said, getting outside of yourself, trying to ease the pain and that leads us to do all kinds of things that have nothing to do with our values or [00:05:00] integrity or love. Your message when I read it reminded me of this Leonard Cohen quote, I actually have it in my book as an epigraph to one of the chapters where I talk about relationships.
[00:05:13] And he says, we are not mad. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love. For the paths are dark. The paths are many and dark and we are ardent and cruel in our journey. It's so real and so true. And I did unspeakable things while drinking, which included not being faithful.
[00:05:44] Is that who I was and who I am. Yes and no. Did that have anything to do with how much I loved my husband. No. I was very, very sick. I was in a lot of pain, a tremendous amount of [00:06:00] pain, and I didn't know how to get out of it. Some people will hear this. I know. And having been on the other side of this equation, be so angry that I'm saying this, and I understand that I get it.
[00:06:14] I'm not excusing anything. I want to make that really clear. I'm just saying there's almost always more to it than what we make it out to be. And it's so rarely about this line that you've got running in your head, which is my wife didn't love me and so she chose this. It's almost always the reverse of that, or rather replace her with you in that sentence. So it's, I hate, I don't love myself. So I'm choosing this or I don't love myself and I feel [00:07:00] so empty and I can't be with that pain. And this feels like it'll fix it in the moment. And by the way, it also happens to prove to me that I'm a piece of shit. And then you add, you know, all of this in the lens of alcohol and addiction, where we are quite literally out of our minds.
[00:07:26] I know for me, those two things always went hand in hand.
[00:07:34] I never acted out that way when I was sober. So I want to make it clear though that I don't always think this is the case. Okay. I want to put a big, huge, massive asterisk in that statement. I just made and say, there are absolutely people who are pathological [00:08:00] narcissistic, abusive, sociopathic, and they are out to hurt and they won't change or they can't change. And so I'm not making a case here for trying to stick with some kind of situation like that and trying to understand it and have empathy for it. That's a no-go in those cases. Okay. So back to the question, what you said from what you've said, it sounds like your wife is suffering.
[00:08:29] She’s wonderful who fell deep into addiction that you both have. And like you said, it makes us do what is the language from AA, incomprehensible, demoralization. Yeah. I think that describes a lot of my behavior in this area and how I felt about it. And we are [00:09:00] ultimately responsible again for these things, but they have nothing to do with love or other people.
[00:09:08] So as someone once told me and they were talking about my relationship with my daughter, but it applies in the same way. She said addiction is stronger than love until it isn't. It sounds to me. I didn't quite get that from your note that your wife is in recovery now, and it sounds like you are.
[00:09:30] And I also couldn't tell if you are together or not. It sounds like you are, but I would urge you to look at who you have become both of you in recovery. And you said you wanted to hear me say these things and hopefully just having you say them in that message to me, helped. [00:10:00] I can't offer you any real assurance other than what I've already said about my own experience, but it sounds like in your heart, you know, that this story that you're telling yourself, this really painful story is about you and what might hurt you the most, because that's what we do.
[00:10:27] Right? My big story has always been about rejection. It was always putting myself in situations where, or twisting any story to mean that I was not good enough for someone. And it was this giant reenactment of my childhood. So I'm not saying at all, please, that any of this is your fault. And I don't think you're taking it that way, but I hope not.
[00:10:57] What I'm saying is this [00:11:00] cruel, cruel story that we have, that we tell ourselves a lot of times. And we always know when we make those stories really simplistic. Right? If you did, if you really loved me, you wouldn't do this. Okay. We're going to get into that in the next questions, but those stories are almost never the true ones.
[00:11:23] Life has far more complicated than that. And we can, we can love someone from the top of our head, to the tips of our toes. And we can also cause them great pain because we don't love ourselves. And we don't have any respect for ourselves. And we have trauma that we never dealt with. And we don't know how to cope with our pain.
[00:11:53] All right. I'll leave it at that. Thank you so much for sharing your story with me.[00:12:00]
[00:12:01] Hi, Laura, my name's Brittany. I'm from New Jersey. I've heard you speak on infidelity before and how it played a role in your marriage and the ending of that marriage. And since I generally love your thoughts and insight, I really want to know what you think about my situation with infidelity. My boyfriend and I had a rough first year of our relationship, as we figured out kinks and communication and everything.
[00:12:22] Well, we did know early on was that we fell very hard for one another. I know that I love him and I know that he loves me, but I also know he is struggling to love himself and he is taking steps in his own life to get his shit together. But the truth of the matter is that over the summer, he cheated on me and it took him seven weeks to confess it.
[00:12:41] It was a drunken one-time thing with a woman he met at a bar, but I broke up with him immediately because it hurt and then three months later after, you know, being broken up, I decided that I missed him enough that I wanted to see him again. And so we are trying to repair right now with plans to start [00:13:00] therapy together.
[00:13:00] So I know that people are imperfect and that part of me wants to forgive him because I feel that he is sorry. But I know that I can be wrong about him. And I also feel like we could be wrong about people in all sorts of ways. And there's no way to know anything about anyone. The most seemingly devoted people can have affairs, but I'm scared.
[00:13:18] I'm scared to rebuild trust in someone who already betrayed me. So my question to you is what the heck do you think.Thanks, Laura.
[00:13:32] All right. Thank you, Brittany, for sharing this with me. And you know, when I was thinking about how to answer, I thought about how in my 10th grade AP English class, we had our final assignment of the semester and it was to write this big research paper and to make an argument in it. And I chose the topic of [00:14:00] abortion and I wrote this very pro-life paper, quoting rush Limbaugh and all the rest.
[00:14:09] I mean, I was 15. I had never had sex. I'm this 15 year old white girl in an upper middle class predominantly white town in Colorado with literally no life experience. What the hell do I know about the world? But I felt very, very strongly about this paper and very indignant while writing it. I knew I was right.
[00:14:37] And yeah, so I write this paper and then I go off to college and I write about this in my book, but in my senior year of college, I got pregnant. It was with the first person I had ever had sex with and it, there was alcohol involved the whole time we had our, [00:15:00] it wasn't even a relationship, but the whole time we let's say interacted and I was so deeply insecure at the time. And it was the first person I had, like I said, had ever had sex with and someone I knew from high school and when it happened, there was just absolutely, I was about to go to college. There was no choice in my mind about whether or not I could raise a child at that time. He was a terrible human on top of it.
[00:15:32] Wanted nothing to do with me. And my whole life was just beginning. So within the span of a few years, this indignant young, very naive girl writing this very self-righteous paper and look please everyone this is not a statement about pro-life or pro-choice it's I have complicated feelings, bad at all, but [00:16:00] I'm illustrating something.
[00:16:02] So just stay with me just a few years later. Right. I find myself in this living in the experience of having to make this choice. And what do you know? It's complicated.
[00:16:21] So that's my point. It's a statement on the complexity of life. When I think back on the version of me that read that paper, I can see so much of why I wrote it was because I wanted my life to be simple. I wanted life to be simple, not just my life. I had a lot going on in my family. At that point I had, you know, when I say I had no experience, I had some, you know, experience for sure.
[00:16:45] I had lived through my childhood and divorces, multiple. And there was a lot of chaos and I just wanted rules. I wanted [00:17:00] rules that were true, that everyone abided by. I wanted nice, clean, perfectly square boxes into where I could place good and bad, right and wrong. Right. I wanted control and I also remember having the same feelings about quote, unquote, love, relationships, marriages.
[00:17:25] My mom used to have her friends over a lot, and I did a lot of observing about their relationships. I was always the kid that was like sitting with the adults, just listening to them talk and, or sitting, you know, when I was supposed to go to bed, sitting on the staircase and over hearing their conversations late at night, and just kind of trying to figure.
[00:17:43] All these dynamics. And I could tell when people were unhappy in their relationships, I also witnessed a lot of divorces. And I just thought it was so obvious and stupid like that in my, you know, young mind again, I was so [00:18:00] indignant, I'd say to my friends, or even to my mom, why would they be with them if they didn't love them?
[00:18:05] Why would they get married in the first place? If they didn't love them? I don't need to explain how. How cute that thinking was. So only you get to decide what's right for you and your boyfriend and the terms of your relationship. Only you get to decide if you were up for the task of including this experience in your history.
[00:18:29] Right. And learning from it and growing together because of it. But even if you decide that you do want that the shitty part is, and this comes across in your message is that, there's still just no guarantee that you're not going to be hurt again, but he's not going to be hurt. You said you're afraid. And I get it.
[00:18:52] We should all be afraid of love because it will absolutely break our hearts 100% of the time, [00:19:00] even when it's even in relationships that are beautiful. If we stayed together with people, our partners will break our hearts. And I'm not saying that we accept betrayals and abuse and such. I'm just saying there are no, there's no way that we don't get our heartbroken.
[00:19:19] Eventually, if nothing else at the end, we're guaranteed that this thing is going to end. Right? So there are no guarantees, no matter what, it's one of the things I had to accept when I got into my current relationship. And it's still hard for me to accept, to be honest. My friend, Jim, does a lot of couples coaching.
[00:19:41] And he says being, he's also been married for, I think, 18 years, maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe it's 13. It's one of those teens. It's a lot. He says being in a relationship is like holding a 357, which has a gun, I assume to your head [00:20:00] and putting your partner's finger on the trigger and trusting they won't pull it, which.
[00:20:06] A little extreme and gruesome, but the point is that all relationships, if you are actually vulnerable to someone, which it sounds like that's what you were both trying to do is they have the power to create or destroy. And the closer you get, the more true that is. Okay. I just want to speak to that part of your message that was saying that you're afraid.
[00:20:44] It's a risk. It's always a risk though. What I also heard in your message was that you really love each other and maybe there's [00:21:00] part of you, that's asking for permission to do what you want to do, which is to try with your boyfriend. And so you have it not because I gave it to you and maybe you weren't asking to begin with, but, but you, you gave it to you and that's what we're always doing with these questions, right?
[00:21:19] A ton of couples make it through these things and are better for it. Again, it's not the right path for everyone, but it does happen. I don't know if you're familiar with Esther Pearl's book, the state of affairs or with her work overall, but that's a great resource for that. And all her work in general, she, she teaches us that she says infidelity has a lot to teach us about the human heart.
[00:21:49] I honestly wish you both a ton of luck. I think a really, really positive sign is that you're doing therapy together. And look [00:22:00] what you decide today. You are deciding today and you decide as you go, both of you more will always be revealed, do the best that you can with the information that you have now.
[00:22:13] And when you have new information, you can respond to that. You are right. Life is complicated, far more complicated than we want it to be. Or we grow up thinking it is or how we judge other people. Right. Like I did, um, as a kid and even as an adult, we don't hold, we hold ourselves to very different standards once we've gone through.
[00:22:48] Versus how we might think about it before we've gone through it. That applies to relationships, marriage, certainly, but parenting and [00:23:00] really anything you just don't know. And there's no right way just because our culture has idolized, a certain type of relationship and said that that is the right one in the good.
[00:23:14] It doesn't mean it's true for everybody. So I wish you a ton of luck again. And thank you for submitting the question.
[00:23:25] All right. So this next question is from Kate and it came through in writing. So this is what Kate says. It has been almost five years since I left my former spouse and best friends since high school I have since left my affair. Been sober for three and a half years and have been enjoying the process of becoming after such a painful unbecoming, my former spouse and I co-parent beautifully in many ways.
[00:23:53] He is still a best friend. Recently. I have felt the deep guttural ache for my family as we once were. [00:24:00] I miss my former spouse intensely and long for the connection we want to. He has moved on and is currently in a healthy, committed relationship with a truly wonderful woman. I want no part of hurting him or her.
[00:24:15] And I stay quiet with my feelings, sit with them and allow them to teach me whatever I have it is I have yet to learn. So my question Laura is how do we actually move? How do I not compare a future partners to the one I pushed away and hurt so deeply? How do I reconcile with the behavior of a version of myself that I no longer even recognize or relate to?
[00:24:39] He deserved so much better than how I treated him. I'm struggling to comprehend how I was able to behave. So selfishly and hurtful it's as if a dark side of me has retreated and a healthy, sober, more peaceful me is tasked with trying to forgive myself. How can I, when I know I gave up on a man, I love and on the [00:25:00] family, on the family, my children long for, okay.
[00:25:05] So this question goes right to my heart because I empathize with so much of what you said, Kate. It tracks with my experience. Not exactly, but for a lot of it, I've been there. So I'm going to talk about my experience because I think I just happen to be a few years further along, and then I'll turn it back to your questions as best as I can.
[00:25:36] So my ex-husband and I got separated in 2012, so almost 10 years ago. We filed for divorce a few years after that, but we've not been a couple for almost a decade. Actually a decade. It will be a decade this year. So. There was also a lot of drinking. And as I've said in prior questions, infidelity on my part, [00:26:00] these things, weren't the sole cause of our separation, but obviously played a huge part.
[00:26:05] I loved him, but I was totally emotionally incapable of being in a relationship. I was like an emotional teenager. I had no healthy coping skills, no capacity to be, to be honest, I was honestly, completely distraught for a lot of our marriage because I loved him and I also didn't want to be married to him.
[00:26:29] And I didn't know how to be with that. Those two conflicting, there was a lot of cognitive dissonance in there and, and that's the depth of how I could express my confusion at the time. I didn't have the self-awareness or understand. Anything more about it. And of course there was the alcohol, there was the drinking and that muddied everything.
[00:26:55] It put everything, any kind of gross I could have had sort of [00:27:00] on pause. It made matters worse. It also kept us going in a lot of ways and was, uh, was, was part of how we met and how we, how we quartered. So, but as I, as time went on, I got sicker and sicker, you know, with the drinking and he, and he didn't. So there were also beautiful parts of our relationship and fun parts.
[00:27:25] And like you, we were great friends. We had similar values and we did life together really well. We have a daughter, all of these things were true at the same time. Right. So when we separated though, I was, I was mostly relieved because I thought I was finally free of the burden of this conflict. And plus my addiction was just in full force.
[00:27:48] At that point, I honestly wanted to drink the way I wanted to, and without someone watching me specifically him and I got to do that within a year, I got a DUI and [00:28:00] I racked up a thousand other atrocities. It was, I was in a really, really dark, scary place with drinking and it happened fast. It got worse.
[00:28:10] Fast. So by 2013, 1 year later, that's when I started to try to get sober. It didn't take long. And then I finally did get sober in 2014. So in those first couple years of sobriety, and again, it seems like your journey is sort of tracking with mine. I was just trying to survive, right? I was still mostly unable to unravel our story or even feel any grief about the marriage ending.
[00:28:40] Which tricked me into thinking that I was, that I had grieved it, but we were also still really close and very much a part of each other's lives. We were never physical, but again, emotionally attached for sure. And we did have other people, [00:29:00] but we would like talk to each other about it and we spent holidays together and we still, he was still like, in a sense, my first line of support.
[00:29:09] I never, well, I never wanted to get back together with him. I was still very emotionally attached and I relied on our relationship heavily. So in that time also, as I got sober and you know, we start to deal with things in layers as we can. And as we're able, and as we learn more, I had developed this story line about us.
[00:29:38] Sounds from your letter, like a lot of what you've got going on. I was the villain, he was the hero. I was the fucked up awful antagonist of his heart and his dreams and our family. And he was the proverbial, you know, good man. He [00:30:00] was the one who loved me. I started to idolize him and especially as time went on, you know, our memories are fuzzy and I saw the way that he loved me as ideal and pure and all those things.
[00:30:18] Right. I very much continued to play out what had been a big part of our dynamic when we were together, which was sort of him as this all-knowing parent and me as this irresponsible child. I deferred to him. I tap danced around our conversations all the time, because I never wanted to create any kind of conflict because if it felt like I did, he could let go of this guillotine hanging above my head.
[00:30:49] Right. He still had this power over me because I still felt so much shame about what had happened. And [00:31:00] he ultimately had the final word on whether I was a good person or not, and he could punish me in other words, and I believed he would be fair to do so. So the dynamic and this was largely just going on in my mind.
[00:31:17] We didn't talk about these things. This is just the story that I had. I lived with this subconsciously like this story for years. And it, of course, wasn't just about him. There was a much deeper belief in there about what love looked like. And, that I had to work through. The reality is he is a good man.
[00:31:45] He's a great man, but he's not perfect by any stretch. And as with any relationship, it always takes two. And continuing to carry the story. I started to see what others started to reveal to me [00:32:00] that it was really keeping me stuck and not only that, but it wasn't true. It wasn't true. But I was not really available to anyone else.
[00:32:17] And I too, like you, I compared people to him, not because I wanted to be with him, but because it seemed like maybe he was like this gold standard or something, but eventually like you, he got into a relationship with someone and they're now married and they've started their own family. And it, that period of time was hard on me.
[00:32:41] The same ways that this is probably hard on you. I felt like I lost my shot at a family and, yeah, I know. I did. I'll say that felt like I'd lost my shot at that first shot, right. That pure the [00:33:00] sweetness of your first marriage and your first concept of family. And I hated spending holidays alone and going to things like school events alone.
[00:33:12] And I really was attached to this idea. So I'm just thinking now there's a story that's really sweet. Insightful story that Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher talks about. She was married before she became a Tibetan Buddhist nun, and she had kids and everything, and her marriage broke up because she left or her husband left her because he met someone else and she talks about, you know, years later.
[00:33:50] After she had already gone through the process of completely changing her life and being in a totally different place. You know, her version of [00:34:00] maybe sobriety, where she became this Tibetan Buddhist nun and this teacher and this extraordinarily wise soul, and she would get a piece of mail with his writing.
[00:34:13] You know that he'd written her a letter and she would feel this old ache. And she's got really curious about that because, you know, what was that? She was very happy with this new life she had created. And what she realized was she says, I wasn't really missing him. I just had him as this archetype in my mind, you know, the one who loves you, the proverbial one who loves you.
[00:34:53] He was that one and I was attached to that story. So I digress. I'll loop back here.
[00:35:13] Having said everything that I said just now, this is what I've learned since that, when it's been a few years, what I was going through, then. Like in those years where I was really hurting and idolizing him and that period of time and our family, when our family was together was a normal process of grief.
[00:35:45] I just hadn't gone through it when we got divorced because I was drinking so much and then I had to get sober and I was just trying to survive. I went through it six years after the fact when I thought I should have beeb far [00:36:00] past it. So it was confusing, but that's how grief works. It had to make its way through me.
[00:36:07] And part of that was feeling the very real losses. It was a huge loss in so many ways, even though I do still totally believe that it was better for us to not be partners. But I still lost that beautiful love story. I lost my first marriage and all the hope that came with it before things started to get difficult.
[00:36:39] I lost my first family in its original form. Those losses are real and your losses are real, but just because we feel a loss about something doesn't mean that it's wrong. That we've done something wrong or that we should, or [00:37:00] even could go back. It doesn't mean that your husband is the right partner for you, or that you'd be happy if you went back.
[00:37:14] I think that's a big myth of divorce. We think if we just choose the right direction, right. To stay or to go, we won't have to hurt like one of these directions won't hurt, but there's so much hurt in both directions. Always. They're just different kinds of hurt, different kinds of loss. There's grief on both sides.
[00:37:37] And again, I don't know if this is what's true for you, but that's what was true for me. I was just going through grief. It was delayed. Okay. The second thing that I've learned is I had made our relationship and him into a fantasy, which is really easy to do [00:38:00] when you're removed from it. And you feel like you're never going to have that again.
[00:38:05] And you're dating people that don't remotely come close to what you'd want. And you have a lot of shame. This is by the way, why affairs feel so powerful and so passionate and so real because they're not real life. It's so easy to fantasize about them because they're not real life and that they would never measure up.
[00:38:31] They don't measure up most of the time in real life. It's the fantasy that we are suffering from. So. I really idolized that time with him because I'd been removed from it and there was distance and it was easy to romanticize it. And I had to really work hard to remember what was true, which was that it was complicated.
[00:38:56] And there were lots of things [00:39:00] about him and me that made us incompatible. So now that I'm in a new relationship, this is the third year. One that is so much better for me on every level. I can see how true it is that we weren't a good fit, but man, it, it took time. Like I had to process that grief and that took years.
[00:39:20] And then a year or so later I met my current boyfriend but here's the thing. I'm also still learning. I still love my ex-husband in a certain way. Like you love someone who you went to battle with, or you love someone in your family. I care about him. We are also good parents, but it doesn't hurt. I don't long for the fantasy of what we had. It took time and lots of good therapy.
[00:39:52] And grace has given me the appropriate perspective. I know we could have never gone back. Never. My [00:40:00] guess is that perhaps you will see this too in time, but it sounds like what you're going through is this very normal process of grief. And the only way you go through it is to go through it. It was in my sobriety and the almost eight years of my suburban.
[00:40:20] Among the most difficult periods of time that I went through, it was really genuinely, just purely hard and painful, not in like that dramatic chaos way that we create for ourselves. In some, like I created for myself in a lot of dating situations or, you know, it was just this, I, I loved someone. And I lost something I cared about. And a lot of it was, you know, a lot of that was tied up [00:41:00] in behavior.
[00:41:00] That was really hard for me to process and a dark period of my life. I think I've answered maybe most of what you're asking, but I'm going to address each of your individual questions just a little bit. So you said, how do we actually move on? So I did explore some of what I said and see if any of that is true for you, the idea that you might be operating in a fantasy about him, about the two of you about your family might be true.
[00:41:37] And that there were longstanding very real reasons why you weren't happy in that relationship, why you aren't the best match. Right. And I'd get help with it. They're happy talking, writing, et cetera. Just because you're hurting doesn't mean something is [00:42:00] wrong or that you chose wrong, or that there's a way to quote unquote, fix it.
[00:42:05] It's just grief. And it's going to have its way with you until it spits you out on the other side. But on that other side is something really beautiful. And I do know that you will get there. So you move on as you are. You move on, how you move on is as you are, you do it slowly and messily and clumsily and with help and you trust in time and you explore some of these ideas about the reality of the relationship and the possibility that you're idolizing something.
[00:42:43] And then what I'm going to say next. Okay. So how do I not compare future partners to the one I pushed away and hurt so deeply. I think this goes back to the fantasy and calling that out. But something that helped [00:43:00] me is look at the qualities I liked in my ex and seeing them as qualities one can have, but not unique to him.
[00:43:09] For example, being strong and forthright. Like I liked that about him, but he's definitely not the only person on the planet who possesses that quality. Thinking about this also helped me to remember what I didn't so much love about him at all. You know? Because if you, if you're really going down the list of, of character traits and you really.
[00:43:32] Beyond the sort of hazy fantasy of what, what you might have lost and you look closely at him and what you really admired and you really didn't like it might, that granularity might be very helpful to you. And this is the other thing it's not easy to find love at all. It takes time and you're going to meet a lot of people that aren't [00:44:00] right.
[00:44:01] That doesn't mean your ex is right. So the last question you asked that no second to last, how do I reconcile the behavior of a version of myself that I no longer even recognize or relate to? Well, this is sobriety. This is the process of sobriety. You might want to refer to the episode on emotional sobriety that I recently put out with Veronica Valli.
[00:44:30] Because it's all about integration. You are the same person who did those things. I mean, it's you, but it's just part of you and you're, you're also who you are now in the present. You're all those things. And the same goes for me. I don't recognize or relate to the person that I was, to how I acted when I was in active addiction, but I didn't deny [00:45:00] that person either. I don't hate her. I don't feel shame about her. I don't. And what I hear a lot in your letter is a lot of shame. So here's the last, the last part you said he deserves so much better than how I treated him. And I'm struggling to comprehend how I was able to behave. So selfishly and hurtful, it says if a dark side of me has retreated and a healthy, sober, more peaceful me is tasked with trying to forgive myself.
[00:45:31] How can I, when I know I gave up on a man I love and on the family, my children long for there's so much wisdom actually wrapped into this question. It says if a dark side of me has retreated in a healthy, sober, more peaceful me is tasked with trying to forgive myself. Yes. But this is what this shows you.
[00:45:59] Okay. [00:46:00] We are all capable of everything. All of us. So you like the question that was asked? Just before Brittany's question. Right. We're complicated. And it's not just you it's everyone. We are all capable of everything. We all have every possible expression of humanity inside of us. So yes, it might seem like this dark side of you has retreated and.
[00:46:41] But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean you have to reject it and there's not only the healthy, sober, more peaceful you, um, there's all of it. And that task of sobriety is to integrate all of that [00:47:00] and that yes, that includes forgiveness and you'll get there. I think I have been in the same place that you are.
[00:47:13] And about three years of sobriety, when people are really doing the emotional work to heal, it seems to be the sweet spot of time where we really hit the boulder of emotional sobriety. And we're tasked with reconciling our past and forgiving ourselves. And you're just there. This story that you have in your last line.
[00:47:42] I gave up on a man I love and on the family, my children long far is a really, really painful story. And I know enough about your story to know that that's not the bottom line truth. It's always so much more complicated than that. [00:48:00] So what I hear coming through here is shame. There's a whole lot of one sided stuff.
[00:48:07] The truth is you did what you knew how to do at the time. Now you're learning better ways. You were in a relationship with this person for a long season of your life, and you're still in relationship with him differently. So you didn't do this to him. Okay. He's not a hero and you're not the villain.
[00:48:34] There may be a point where you make amends. But this question, this last part of your letter is about you and how you're relating, relating to the shame and your capacity to work through that and offer yourself that compassion will mean everything. It will make you a better partner. It will make you capable of [00:49:00] extraordinary compassion in others and so much more.
[00:49:05] And I promise you, that's a possibility it's out there. That's how, that's how I feel. You know, I'm not, that's how I can read letters like this and stories like this. And it doesn't, I don't have any judgment towards any party because I get exactly where and how and why these things happen. And just how complicated humanity is being a human.
[00:49:31] So I hope that helps. And again, thank you.
[00:49:40] All right. Thank you so much. That's the last of our questions for this round. Again, you can submit a question to be answered on a future episode by going to TMSTpod.com and clicking on submit a question. I am in such deep gratitude for the fact that people. [00:50:00] are willing to share of themselves with me and with all of us and we will be in your ears next time.
[00:50:10] Thanks.
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