75 Days

[Truegritter]

Denver

I think a lot of what is driving you now is fear. And it IS keeping you stuck.

How much longer are you going to punish yourself for sins of your past?

You have owned up to it.

Does it make you feel better when she hits you with the arrows?

Do you need to be punished? By your W?

She is angry with you and she likely will be for a while.

You are validating that anger which is good if you want her to get through the anger.

BUT

I am concerned all these arrows she is flinging your way actually are pinning you down.

You are handing her the arrows and dipping them in poison before she loads them in the bow.

What am I saying?

FORGIVE YOURSELF FIRST

Get YOUR peace back.

Then if she decides to forgive you then she does.

If she doesn't then Denver survives.

Your fear?

If your M doesn't reconcile will you spend the rest of your life pulling arrows out?

Who wants to be with that guy? Including your W Denver.

Your M and forgiveness...don't give that to your W.

That is for YOU.

YOUR choice.

Can you look in the mirror and be honest?

No regrets.

If you have them kill them.

In your choices now, make sure you don't create more of them.

In any case YOU control your own regrets.

If you don't you will walk away a broken man regardless of what your W chooses.

[Starsky309]

I think the way we handle this needs to be true to ourselves. The way you decide to stand Denver, should be how you feel most comfortable doing it. If it's not, it will come out as fake, or even worse, taken the wrong way.

I remember this quote by dbmod:

Denver -- I have not forgotten this and you have to be careful with a lot of the 'man up' advice you are getting--because it will backfire.

But DB says to "do what works," and frankly, I don't see examples here of this backfiring. Maybe I missed them, and dbmod could point us to examples of where people did this properly (firm, but without being an a-hole), and it BACKFIRED.


Starsky

[Jack_Three_Beans]

Wow,

Look at all this advice. ; )

You taking anything from it Denver?


The whole past sins part?

My take on it is to own them, process them, kill them and forgive yourself; but understand that it might take time for others to forgive you, specifically your wife.

Not to hold onto them, wear them on your chest and whip yourself with them.

I used to come home jump on the computer play my mind controller/empath in a virtual world for hours. I'd ignore my wife, my boys and my friends. I was fat, lazy and pathetic. My greatest achievement during that time was written in zero's and ones.

I killed that guy.

I remember, so I won't forget.

Not so I feel crappy about it.

[InAPickle]

Listen to these guys Denver.

I didn't really get the detachment I needed until one day I decided thet nobody's perfect.

I mean, though I admitted the mistakes and travelled through the feelings of failure, I looked back one day and said to myself: "I wasn't that bad of a husband and father."

I may not have been "terrific", but I wasn't "terrible" either.
In some limited fashion I could even say, I did the best I could with what I had at the time.

Now DBing is about raising that "best" to higher levels, knowing you have no control over the future. But at some point you've got to quit beating yourself up and looking back. Look ahead. What do you see?

I'll just end this by saying, the "detachment I needed", doesn't mean I expect to ever be "totally" and "completely" detached. That's just the way it is, because of history; you can't erase it.