The whole gratitude list thing is way beyond my comfort zone. It's sort of like religion in that sense
Actually, it's based on a controlled study done by Philip George Zimbardo,an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is president of the Heroic Imagination Project. He is known for his Stanford prison study and authorship of various introductory psychology books and textbooks for college students, including The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox.
M-47,W-40,No kids D-filed 5/27/2010 Piecing - 10/21/2010 -=Soon to be banned=-
Like it or not, you have a perspective, and whether it is optimal or not largely escapes most people because they aren't normally conscious about how that perspective influences their sense of well being and behavior.
Might be something to consider, eh?
M-47,W-40,No kids D-filed 5/27/2010 Piecing - 10/21/2010 -=Soon to be banned=-
most of the time I hardly think of her as being human at all
Dehumamization? Doesn't sound very healthy, empathetic or enlightened.
Empathetic? He's still having to deal with the reality that his wife cheated on him, tore their family apart, destroyed their marriage, caused their children tremendous emotional grief, and basically impacted the lives of all the family members in negative and painful ways! I doubt that empathy for her, understandably, is paramount in his cognitive processes right now. More like 'repay with extreme prejudice, with interest'. :-D I think that letting go of your pain and movin' on with life includes forgiving the past...it doesn't have to be more specific than that.
"Always go straight forward, and if you meet the devil, cut him in two and go between the pieces." - William Sturgis, clipper ship captain, 1830's.
Well, there ARE wolves in the forest. Pretending that there aren't isn't a healthy coping strategy either. People here are dealing with some of the worst crap that life has to offer. They do what they gotta do to get through it. All situations are different, and there is no rule of thumb.
"Always go straight forward, and if you meet the devil, cut him in two and go between the pieces." - William Sturgis, clipper ship captain, 1830's.
For over a year, STBX has included in her legal "strategy," such as it is, a pattern of deliberately misrepresenting things to her lawyer in order to induce the lawyer to make long, pointless queries of my lawyer, with the intent of running up my legal bills.
Case in point -- I let the children go through some boxes of old, duplicate photographs (remember how you'd get double-prints back in the day?) of their mother and me from our dating days. They did so gleefully and later told her during their time with her the following weekend.
First thing Monday morning, my lawyer has a long screed from hers, demanding to know why I was "destroying" and "discarding" all of STBX's "personal property" in the house and demanding a full accounting. And, since my giving the children an opportunity to see and have photographs of their mother in her 20s, this "clearly" indicated that I was "unstable" and was "undermining" her to them, so no settlement would be possible without my lawyer agreeing that I submit to court-ordered counseling.
So that is her idea of "humanity."
Yesterday, STBX frantically texted me 5 times -- despite repeatedly having her lawyer demand that there be no texting -- because something came up at work and she is unable to attend a parent-teacher conference. Could I attend in her place?
She was attending alone because I had a pre-existing scheduling conflict. When I asked her, last week, to send me her notes from the meeting, she refused -- point-blank. She would, she said, "tell me generally" how things went, but for me to "demand" that she take notes was offensive and out-of-line.
I was unavailable during her frantic texting. So she wrote to the teacher that "unfortunately" she couldn't get in touch with me, but she would send me the teacher's e-mail address and "hopefully" I would get on the ball and contact the teacher. But in any event, STBX wants to "at least talk to you on the phone" because if I were able to attend, I would deliberately refuse to provide STBX with any feedback at all.
How do I know she wrote that? In typical fashion, she forwarded the e-mail instead of the e-mail address.
So let's be clear. STBX refused to provide me anything other than a "general" account of the parent-teacher conference, but then writes the teacher -- a stranger, a third-party, a person she's "known" only since September -- that heaven forbid if I attend the conference poor STBX will never ever ever know what transpired, because that's just how much of an a**hole I am.
This was a deliberate undermining of my parental authority to someone I now have to deal with, on the fly, after jumping through hoops after 5 p.m. to reschedule my day.
Do I have empathy for the poor thing's struggles, coping with the divorce, and all?
No.
Like the sparrow said: Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
