I’m divorced, too. I was not happy in my first marriage. Even though I have much better relationship skills now, I still would not want to go back and apply them in my first marriage. (You know how people say that most folks divorce because they lack the relationship skills they’ll have to learn anyway to make their second marriages work? There might be some truth to that, but even with more skills I wouldn’t have been happy.) I loved him. But he didn’t fit me. I didn’t fit him. Maybe I didn’t love him enough to be married to him? I’m not sure how to explain entirely. I didn’t want to be married to him.
But what really let me leave was when I faced all the things I’d done that had hurt him. When I stopped thinking of him as a bad guy and me as a good guy, and I just started thinking of us as guys. There was such release in seeing what I’d done to hurt him alongside what he’d done to hurt me. I stopped feeling like a victim. I felt like an agent in my own life. At the end of the day, what I realized was that I just didn’t want to be in this relationship.
Letting go of seeing someone as fundamentally a bad guy doesn’t have to lead to more intimacy. I think sometimes it can lead to realizing what we need and what we just don’t want, period. Sometimes it can lead to release.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that just because Kathy and I are BFF’s, it isn’t the only possible outcome of letting go of the bad guy/good guy dichotomy. At least, it hasn’t been in past relationships for me. In my experience, the more I see someone else as fully human, the better things work out for me. Sometimes it leads to more closeness, sometimes it leads to more space. The one thing I can count on so far is that it leads to more clarity about what I should do.
I am looking for a way to put the best foot forward and to have a decent relationship with my ex’s Girlfreind. It is not easy though as I am one of the Bio Moms that is depicted so horribly in one of these blogs. She writes as though I am scum of the earth as she only know his version of what is going on, not the real story or even what the court orders say. I don’t want to be her best friend, just have a somewhat human relationship with her. I do not, nor have I ever viewed her as the bad guy but she clearly views me as the most horrid person and worst mother to ever be born. Any suggestions?
I find it really interesting, Jill, that you’re writing so many posts lately about how nobody’s the bad guy. I think that in your situation that absolutely proved to be true — and you and Kathy are a great example of what people can intentionally build (and make great!) over time.
I’m curious if you believe there really are no situations with bad guys, or if you accept that they exist, but as they’re outside your sphere of reference, they’re just irrelevant. And I’m not talking about people who are annoying, but about coparenting situations where one ex/parent is harming one or more of the children involved.
I’m not trying to be obnoxious or facetious, either. I’d genuinely like to know what you think of that sort of situation. Is there lemonade to be made or is it truly different from the situations you address here?
Wow. In a nutshell, what worked for me was to try to see the picture she sees, and acknowledge all of the ways I’d caused her pain, whether I’d intended to or not. I didn’t go in trying to get her to see all of my (soon to be old) picture. I just went into her picture, cried, apologized and loved her. Cause I did love her at that point. And because I could see I had done things that she felt pain about — things that that hurt her. Before going in, I spent a lot of time thinking about her and what I liked and admired about her, and even loved about her. I talked to that person in her own picture — at least as much of her picture as I could understand. And that person talked back. And I listened. And I learned more about her picture. And I tried to start doing everything I could to be transparent with her and vulnerable with her and to show her my soft underbelly and at the same time to treat her buttons with the utmost care and respect and to tell her as clearly as I could where my buttons were and how awful I felt when they got pushed and to try as hard as I could not to shut down if they got jostled. And eventually our pictures started to grow and merge.
This is my version of things — obviously! This is how I saw what was happening. Kathy might have a different take on it.
I’m going to think more about this, though, and see if I can come up with a more complete answer.
It depends on what kind of harming is being done. Abuse needs to be stopped. It doesn’t matter why the person who is doing the abusing is doing it. They need to be stopped. The kids rely on the adults in their lives to protect them. It’s our first, most basic duty. And we shouldn’t allow it to be done to ourselves, either.
Serious differences in parenting though — differences in how the kids are clothed and fed and differences in what they’re allowed to do or not do — things within the range of “I’d never let my kid do that myself, and it looks like a serious lapse in judgment to me, but it’s not something a parent should actually be sent to jail for” — those are things I think it’s tempting to use as evidence that someone is just bad or crazy. And I don’t think it’s the most accurate interpretation of what’s going on.
I guess I don’t really believe in fundamentally bad guys, but I do believe in using force in some situations to get people to stop hurting other people. Not because of the fundamental bad character of the person who is being stopped — but because of the hurt itself that is being done. I think we can stop things and still see the person we’re stopping as just another person — a person with some lovable qualities.
I guess the most important question, though, is what kind of harming are we talking about? It could mean so many different things to different people.
In a lot of the mommy blogs I read where the moms and dads are married to each other, the moms write about doing things parenting-wise that I think could easily be seen as crazy or negligent if they were divorced parents or stepparents. But their readers know they love their kids, and they know how challenging parenting can be. I guess a lot of what I see in the split-family blogs about the badness or craziness of the other house (except for the exceedingly painful legal battles) doesn’t look all that different from lots of the nuclear family mommy-blogs. There’s such a range of parenting styles. And when people don’t get each other, and kids are involved, things get ugly fast.
And parents who love their kids sometimes still hurt their kids — I think it’s part of being human. We yell, we blow up, we shut down, we don’t see or understand something that needs to be seen or understood, we miss things, we let each other down, we’re selfish — over and over and over.
have you been reading eat, pray, love?
ps, i’m linking to you on my blog. THE END.
I loved that book!
I think for me personally I usually see people as too human, so I hurt a lot faster and harder than most people. I struggle with trying to separate myself from the words and actions of other people and my own conscience is my worst enemy. So on the polar opposite, I tend to tae things too personally and blame myself, rather than realizing that it is not about me (they could just be having a bad day).
You are so right on the moment you stop feeling like a victim, I became responsible for my own actions and much more aware of how I could be nicer, kinder, more loving, open and much much more patient. A big part of the arguments hubby and I have are strictly from hurt feelings and sometimes not even about the other person - redirected aggression.