DavidH
6th August 2007, 09:58 PM
I've been away for a while...
It might be a good idea for me to repost my links page/listings to try to create some light rather than the large amounts of heat that appear to be being generated by those who should know better....
I take sides with NOBODY here. There is more than one side to any story -- which any open-minded, reasonably mature person realises.
I try to point out other sides and other views many times and I offer my opinions/advice to try to assist "insight" and I am sometimes accused of being "harsh" and criticised in an "ad hominem" manner that I cannot and will not respond to.
It is totally wrong to claim, as I have seen claimed elsewhere here that EVERYBODY supports person x so person y can expect no support here and should bugger off elsewhere. What utter tosh!
Affairs whether emotional and/or physical are highly addictive. THAT IS A FACT. They are merely a symptom of other problems. Those involved in them often cannot give them up even if they tried. It is simplistic and childish in the extreme to believe that if a party gives up their affair partner and returns to their relationship partner things can be fixed....
Start here for more insight:
Codependency:
http://www.drirene.com/cofam.htm
http://www.50connect.co.uk/50c/romancestories.asp?article=12527
"Relationships heal when individuals heal. When each partner does their Inner Bonding work, their relationship system heals. When each person learns to take full personal responsibility for his or her own feelings of pain and joy, they stop pulling on each other and blaming each other. When each person learns to fill themselves with love and share that love with each other, instead of always trying to get love, the relationship heals."
Learn to love yourself:
"Real love is based in a universal truth that NO ONE can love you, respect you, cherish, or adore you at a level greater than you do these things for yourself. That the amount that you do love, respect, cherish and adore yourself is exactly the level that another will love, respect, cherish and adore you."
http://www.loveshack.org/forums/t113131/
http://www.4therapy.com/consumer/life_topics/article/6713/489/Learning+To+Love+Yourself
"The best relationships are made of wanting to be with the other person, but not needing to be. I think that goes for married relationships, too."
http://joy2meu.com/codependency1.html
http://joy2meu.com/codependent3.htm
http://karenscoda.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-characteristics.html
Do you recognise this ("Blowing hot and cold") in your relationship? (Mine was like this!)
"The way the dynamic in a dysfunctional relationship works is in a "come here" - "go away" cycle. When one person is available the other tends to pull away. If the first person becomes unavailable the other comes back and pleads to be let back in. When the first becomes available again then the other eventually starts pulling away again. It happens because our relationship with self is not healed. As long as I do not love myself then there must be something wrong with someone who loves me - and if someone doesn't love me than I have to prove I am worthy by winning that person back."
http://joy2meu.com/codependent4.htm
Choosing your relationship partner:
Emotional Unavailability, by Bryn C Collins, McGraw Hill, Page 7:
"... people choose to be with partners who remind them of the parent with whom they had the most unresolved issues ... it leads the person to choose essentially the same type of relationship time and time again ... the partner might come in different packages but the contents are emotionally similar..."
----------------------------------------------------------
Another possibility is that of a midlife crisis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-life_crisis
http://midlifecrisisforum.com/6/ubb.x?s=3106003104
http://www.pathpartners.com
http://fortysixty.invisionzone.com/index.php?act=idx
http://www.divorcebusting.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=28&page=1
http://lifetwo.com/production/node/20060824-types-of-midlife-crisis
Not everybody has a Mid Life Crisis -- most people go through a Mid Life Transition. About one third cannot cope with the MLT and it becomes a crisis. "MLT becomes a MLC when it takes on the "self-medication" of affairs, rampant spending, and other such unwise and hurtful behaviour."
MLTs/MLCs are triggered by some life-altering event such as the death of a parent, loss of an important job, onset of menopause, etc; even your children growing up and leaving home... "Empty Nest Syndrome"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_nest_syndrome
http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/womenshealth/features/ens.htm
http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/emptynest.html
----------------------------------------------------------
You may eventually have to do "a 180" for your own sanity (to allow yourself to heal):
http://survivinginfidelity.com/healing_library/divorce/no_contact.asp
http://survivinginfidelity.com/faq_bs.asp#FAQ11
http://www.divorcerecovery101.com/addiction.htm
You may also need to detach emotionally:
This is a good place to start understanding detachment:
http://www.coping.org/control/detach.htm
Establishing Healthy Boundaries in Relationships:
http://www.coping.org/relations/boundar/intro.htm
Doing "Plan A" and/or "Plan B" might help...
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8113_ab.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Many codependents are mutually attracted to partners with narcissistic traits...
More on Narcissists:
http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq6.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/FAQ/1804
http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq_index.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Covert Male Depression
Depression is often considered a "female disease," since affected women reportedly outnumber men by four to one. Yet male depression may be more rampant than we realize.
Many men try to hide their condition, thinking it unmanly to act moody. And it works: National studies suggest that doctors miss the diagnosis in men a full 70% of the time. But male depression also stays hidden because men tend to express depression differently than women do, as I explained at the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
Research shows that women usually internalize distress, while men externalize it. Depressed women are more likely to talk about their problem and reach out for help; depressed men often have less tolerance for internal pain and turn to some action or substance for relief. Male depression isn't as obvious as the defenses men use to run from it. I call this "covert depression." It has three major symptoms. First, men attempt to escape pain by overusing alcohol or drugs, working excessively or seeking extramarital affairs. They go into isolation, withdrawing from loved ones. And they may lash out, becoming irritable or violent.
The causes of depression differ in men and women, as well. While depressed women often feel disempowered, depressed men feel disconnected, from their needs and from others. This begins in childhood, as society teaches boys early on to pull away from their mothers, their emotions and their vulnerabilities.
Reconnection is key. Treatment first requires resolving the violent or self-medicating behaviors -- the affair, the drinking, the workaholism -- so that the underlying condition can be grappled with. But the ultimate cure lies in reestablishing connection. The ideal of male stoicism and the ensuing isolation lie at the root of male depression. Intimacy is its most lasting solution.
-- Terrence Real, M.S.W.., author of I Don't Want to Talk About It (Scribner, 1997), co-director of the Gender Research Project at the Family Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts
----------------------------------------------------------
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_n3_v26/ai_13700396
Psychology Today, May-June, 1993 by Frank Pittman, III
Romantic Infidelity
Surely the craziest and most destructive form of infidelity is the temporary insanity of failing in love. You do this, not when you meet somebody wonderful (wonderful people don't screw around with married people) but when you are going through a crisis in your own life, can't continue living your life, and aren't quite ready for suicide yet. An affair with someone grossly inappropriate - someone decades younger or older, someone dependent or dominating, someone with problems even bigger than your own - is so crazily stimulating that it's like a drug that can lift you out of your depression and enable you to feel things again. Of course, between moments of ecstasy, you are more depressed, increasingly alone and alienated in your life, and increasingly hooked on the affair partner. Ideal romance partners are damsels or "dumsels" in distress, people without a life but with a lot of problems, people with bad reality testing and little concern with understanding reality better.
Romantic affairs lead to a great many divorces, suicides, homicides, heart attacks, and strokes, but not to very many successful remarriages. No matter how many sacrifices you make to keep the love alive, no matter how many sacrifices your family and children make for this crazy relationship, it will gradually burn itself out when there is nothing more to sacrifice to it. Then you must face not only the wreckage of several lives, but the original depression from which the affair was an insane flight into escape.
People are most likely to get into these romantic affairs at the turning points of life: when their parents die or their children grow up; when they suffer health crises or are under pressure to give up an addiction; when they achieve an unexpected level of job success or job failure; or when their first child is born - any situation in which they must face a lot of reality and grow up. The better the marriage, the saner and more sensible the spouse, the more alienated the romantic is likely to feel. Romantic affairs happen in good marriages even more often than in bad ones.
Both genders seem equally capable of falling into the temporary insanity of romantic affairs, though women are more likely to reframe anything they do as having been done for love. Women in love are far more aware of what they are doing and what the dangers might be. Men in love can be extraordinarily incautious and willing to give up everything. Men in love lose their heads - at least for a while.
It might be a good idea for me to repost my links page/listings to try to create some light rather than the large amounts of heat that appear to be being generated by those who should know better....
I take sides with NOBODY here. There is more than one side to any story -- which any open-minded, reasonably mature person realises.
I try to point out other sides and other views many times and I offer my opinions/advice to try to assist "insight" and I am sometimes accused of being "harsh" and criticised in an "ad hominem" manner that I cannot and will not respond to.
It is totally wrong to claim, as I have seen claimed elsewhere here that EVERYBODY supports person x so person y can expect no support here and should bugger off elsewhere. What utter tosh!
Affairs whether emotional and/or physical are highly addictive. THAT IS A FACT. They are merely a symptom of other problems. Those involved in them often cannot give them up even if they tried. It is simplistic and childish in the extreme to believe that if a party gives up their affair partner and returns to their relationship partner things can be fixed....
Start here for more insight:
Codependency:
http://www.drirene.com/cofam.htm
http://www.50connect.co.uk/50c/romancestories.asp?article=12527
"Relationships heal when individuals heal. When each partner does their Inner Bonding work, their relationship system heals. When each person learns to take full personal responsibility for his or her own feelings of pain and joy, they stop pulling on each other and blaming each other. When each person learns to fill themselves with love and share that love with each other, instead of always trying to get love, the relationship heals."
Learn to love yourself:
"Real love is based in a universal truth that NO ONE can love you, respect you, cherish, or adore you at a level greater than you do these things for yourself. That the amount that you do love, respect, cherish and adore yourself is exactly the level that another will love, respect, cherish and adore you."
http://www.loveshack.org/forums/t113131/
http://www.4therapy.com/consumer/life_topics/article/6713/489/Learning+To+Love+Yourself
"The best relationships are made of wanting to be with the other person, but not needing to be. I think that goes for married relationships, too."
http://joy2meu.com/codependency1.html
http://joy2meu.com/codependent3.htm
http://karenscoda.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-characteristics.html
Do you recognise this ("Blowing hot and cold") in your relationship? (Mine was like this!)
"The way the dynamic in a dysfunctional relationship works is in a "come here" - "go away" cycle. When one person is available the other tends to pull away. If the first person becomes unavailable the other comes back and pleads to be let back in. When the first becomes available again then the other eventually starts pulling away again. It happens because our relationship with self is not healed. As long as I do not love myself then there must be something wrong with someone who loves me - and if someone doesn't love me than I have to prove I am worthy by winning that person back."
http://joy2meu.com/codependent4.htm
Choosing your relationship partner:
Emotional Unavailability, by Bryn C Collins, McGraw Hill, Page 7:
"... people choose to be with partners who remind them of the parent with whom they had the most unresolved issues ... it leads the person to choose essentially the same type of relationship time and time again ... the partner might come in different packages but the contents are emotionally similar..."
----------------------------------------------------------
Another possibility is that of a midlife crisis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-life_crisis
http://midlifecrisisforum.com/6/ubb.x?s=3106003104
http://www.pathpartners.com
http://fortysixty.invisionzone.com/index.php?act=idx
http://www.divorcebusting.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=28&page=1
http://lifetwo.com/production/node/20060824-types-of-midlife-crisis
Not everybody has a Mid Life Crisis -- most people go through a Mid Life Transition. About one third cannot cope with the MLT and it becomes a crisis. "MLT becomes a MLC when it takes on the "self-medication" of affairs, rampant spending, and other such unwise and hurtful behaviour."
MLTs/MLCs are triggered by some life-altering event such as the death of a parent, loss of an important job, onset of menopause, etc; even your children growing up and leaving home... "Empty Nest Syndrome"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_nest_syndrome
http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/womenshealth/features/ens.htm
http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/emptynest.html
----------------------------------------------------------
You may eventually have to do "a 180" for your own sanity (to allow yourself to heal):
http://survivinginfidelity.com/healing_library/divorce/no_contact.asp
http://survivinginfidelity.com/faq_bs.asp#FAQ11
http://www.divorcerecovery101.com/addiction.htm
You may also need to detach emotionally:
This is a good place to start understanding detachment:
http://www.coping.org/control/detach.htm
Establishing Healthy Boundaries in Relationships:
http://www.coping.org/relations/boundar/intro.htm
Doing "Plan A" and/or "Plan B" might help...
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8113_ab.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Many codependents are mutually attracted to partners with narcissistic traits...
More on Narcissists:
http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq6.html
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/FAQ/1804
http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq_index.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Covert Male Depression
Depression is often considered a "female disease," since affected women reportedly outnumber men by four to one. Yet male depression may be more rampant than we realize.
Many men try to hide their condition, thinking it unmanly to act moody. And it works: National studies suggest that doctors miss the diagnosis in men a full 70% of the time. But male depression also stays hidden because men tend to express depression differently than women do, as I explained at the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
Research shows that women usually internalize distress, while men externalize it. Depressed women are more likely to talk about their problem and reach out for help; depressed men often have less tolerance for internal pain and turn to some action or substance for relief. Male depression isn't as obvious as the defenses men use to run from it. I call this "covert depression." It has three major symptoms. First, men attempt to escape pain by overusing alcohol or drugs, working excessively or seeking extramarital affairs. They go into isolation, withdrawing from loved ones. And they may lash out, becoming irritable or violent.
The causes of depression differ in men and women, as well. While depressed women often feel disempowered, depressed men feel disconnected, from their needs and from others. This begins in childhood, as society teaches boys early on to pull away from their mothers, their emotions and their vulnerabilities.
Reconnection is key. Treatment first requires resolving the violent or self-medicating behaviors -- the affair, the drinking, the workaholism -- so that the underlying condition can be grappled with. But the ultimate cure lies in reestablishing connection. The ideal of male stoicism and the ensuing isolation lie at the root of male depression. Intimacy is its most lasting solution.
-- Terrence Real, M.S.W.., author of I Don't Want to Talk About It (Scribner, 1997), co-director of the Gender Research Project at the Family Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts
----------------------------------------------------------
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1175/is_n3_v26/ai_13700396
Psychology Today, May-June, 1993 by Frank Pittman, III
Romantic Infidelity
Surely the craziest and most destructive form of infidelity is the temporary insanity of failing in love. You do this, not when you meet somebody wonderful (wonderful people don't screw around with married people) but when you are going through a crisis in your own life, can't continue living your life, and aren't quite ready for suicide yet. An affair with someone grossly inappropriate - someone decades younger or older, someone dependent or dominating, someone with problems even bigger than your own - is so crazily stimulating that it's like a drug that can lift you out of your depression and enable you to feel things again. Of course, between moments of ecstasy, you are more depressed, increasingly alone and alienated in your life, and increasingly hooked on the affair partner. Ideal romance partners are damsels or "dumsels" in distress, people without a life but with a lot of problems, people with bad reality testing and little concern with understanding reality better.
Romantic affairs lead to a great many divorces, suicides, homicides, heart attacks, and strokes, but not to very many successful remarriages. No matter how many sacrifices you make to keep the love alive, no matter how many sacrifices your family and children make for this crazy relationship, it will gradually burn itself out when there is nothing more to sacrifice to it. Then you must face not only the wreckage of several lives, but the original depression from which the affair was an insane flight into escape.
People are most likely to get into these romantic affairs at the turning points of life: when their parents die or their children grow up; when they suffer health crises or are under pressure to give up an addiction; when they achieve an unexpected level of job success or job failure; or when their first child is born - any situation in which they must face a lot of reality and grow up. The better the marriage, the saner and more sensible the spouse, the more alienated the romantic is likely to feel. Romantic affairs happen in good marriages even more often than in bad ones.
Both genders seem equally capable of falling into the temporary insanity of romantic affairs, though women are more likely to reframe anything they do as having been done for love. Women in love are far more aware of what they are doing and what the dangers might be. Men in love can be extraordinarily incautious and willing to give up everything. Men in love lose their heads - at least for a while.