How can a WS sit in a room right next to their kids' rooms and carry on an internet conversation with the person they're cheating with? How do you do that and then see yourself in the mirror the next morning?
This message has been edited by JunieB on Jun 12, 2008 1:34 PM
This is something I have asked myself and my H so many times. His only answer is that it wasn't real, it was a game he was playing, he had compartmentalised his life with me and kids quite separately from what he did with OW. When the two collided, as when he invited her to our house for a family weekend, or when he was e-mailing her from the family computer with the kids and me in the next room, he just saw it as playing the game. I guess there was even maybe an extra challenge from the possibility that he might be discovered. It was something he gave OW: I'm prepared to risk discovery to be in contact with you as a token of my feelings for you. After D-day#1 they made a decision not to be in contact from home, because somehow it didn't seem so much of a betrayal if they kept it to the office, so I suppose he did feel uncomfortable being in both his worlds at once.
In the end the answer is that the BS is not thinking straight: the BS is deep in the affair fog where rational thoughts and social conventions are out the window, and they just can't grasp what they are doing. I know that after 3 D-days and a final emergence from the fog, my H is deeply ashamed of the kind of thing you mention, and finds it even harder than me to understand how he could have done it. Right now he sometimes finds it very difficult to face himself in the mirror - that is all part of coming out of the fog.
I can only imagine the guilt and shame I would feel if i behaved that way. I don't want to go there, it must be horrendous. For those that don't feel that shame and regret, there is no hope at all.
It pains me to retell that the very fact that it happens right in the next room is a turn on to many WS in itself. So painful.
Ami posted about self-delusion back in early December. I found the post incredibly insightful and it opened my eyes to a few things and helped me make some major decisions.
“Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.”
How does anyone do wrong and still look at themselves? Has anyone gone against their own parents as a teenager? Has anyone cheated on their taxes or taken office supplies home from work? Has anyone broken traffic laws? I'm sure there must be something where each of us has done something hurtful against another person and remembers how we did it.
Most often we justify it to ourselves. We say that wasn't wrong because... (fill in the blank). In a society of relative morals and values where almost anything goes so long as we can rationalize it, in a society where relativism is the dominant world view, adultery has long been forgotten as a crime against any absolute moral code. After all, if there is no one God or one moral truth, then we are free to pursue any that we deem appropriate. Consequently the adulterer, the murderer, the abortionist, the thief, the child molester, the euthanist, and all others doing things that were once considered criminal (and truly were) need only to rationalize their actions. If we deserve it, or they need it, or our past predisposed us to do it, then we are not wrong for doing it, if only in our own eyes. If our friends coaxed us to do it, or society pressured us, or if our parents mistreated us as children, then we are not at fault. There is no end to the excuses we find to shift the blame from where it belongs. Adulterers are not unique in this. Our faltering spouses are not special cases in this. They engage in one of the oldest human actions and reactions… to do what is known to be wrong, to do it willingly by rationalizing it, and then deny and put aside, minimize and ignore it’s consequence.
And it can be even more confusing when people also say they do things for "good" reason like "my husband/ wife did not love me well enough" etc..
One way I try to deal with this is to see how I feel about things - Increasingly I find I can feel what to do - If my heart aches then it is telling me something. If my stomach gets tight, if I find I am breathing in a shallow way or if I feel pain in my solar plexus - All these things are telling me things that even my "clever" mind may not realise. I would like to bet there is a direct correlation between cheating and physical side effects - in both the cheater and the cheated too (who often "know" something before their minds find out). Even look at how many minds are upset, how stressed they get, how confused, forgetful etc.. they become in the cheater. How often they have to dull that tension and nagging pain with drink and drugs. Acting out of harmony with the world is a recipe for upset and illness one way or another.
Intellectually, I can understand to a point how a person does this, but on a personal level I am still left speechless. We can go into the road to self delusion, we can talk about a lack of moral and ethics, we can go into the existence of God, but none of this eases the heart when we come face to face with the fact that our spouses got naked, and had sexual intercourse with someone else, and then was capable of coming home to us and our families. It does boggle the mind. Eventually, I have learned to just accept it for what it is, and that is a very awful, wrong thing my husband did to me, our, family and himself.
>none of this eases the heart when we come face to face with the fact that our spouses got naked, and had sexual intercourse with someone else, and then was capable of coming home to us and our families.
I agree, the emotional reality of this realization rings true no matter how well we understand the workings of all that goes into it. I have a suspicion that those emotions are essentially good because they are what makes us compassionate and better equipped to avoid doing those horrific things that would otherwise come far too easily for us.
>Acting out of harmony with the world is a recipe for upset and illness one way or another.
I agree with that Jerry. In my view, I'd see it as outside of God's will, but I agree with that basic premise that there is something that transcends the tangible world and speaks to us when we or our spouse is outside of what is good and right. I suspected my wife was having an affair based on very little direct evidence enough to ask her about it one day after the first climatic sexual acts, despite not being home 5 1/2 days of each week. Somehow I just knew.
TomJ
This message has been edited by tomj76 on Jun 13, 2008 12:00 PM
