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I loved this article I saw somewhere else and I thought I would pass it along. It definitely is something to consider after your done reeling from the shock and weighing the choice that lies ahead:
The following is from a support group for Emotional Abuse.
"It’s not that I’ve got anything against being loyal and loving to men, or sometimes having to stay when they’ve let you down, but I find that women who talk about standing by their men often stand by men…who aren’t standing with them. This societal expectation that women should stick like glue…even when there’s nothing to stick to and it’s greatly unappreciated or even unacknowledged, means that we’ve been taught that it’s a woman’s job to commit.
If you’ve been reading Baggage Reclaim for long enough, you’ll know that relationships are the sum of two people. When one person is trying to be the heart and soul of the relationship, it will flounder, because for a relationship to have a decent chance of lasting the distance and you both being happy within it, you need two people with both of their feet in the relationship.
Many women, however, are getting to find out that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink from the fountain of commitment.
This expectation and assumption that we must stand by men is incredibly dangerous, because in teaching women to stand by their men, the onus is on us to do the hard work and commit whilst waiting for the men to decide if they’re going to catch up and join us.
This is why red flags will be ignored, boundary crossing is the norm, and women end up losing themselves by laying themselves on the sacrificial alter in the hope that one day they’ll be a big pay off.
A lot of things have changed about relationships in the past ten years even, and technology has really impacted on the ability for us to make connections both on and offline, but also how much of a distance we can keep from relationships – I have written before about the use of technology for lazy communication in relationships.
In the ‘olden days’, before there seemed to be this sudden desire for there to be no boundaries, expectations, or commitmment in relationships, if you stood by your man, there was a strong likelihood that one day the (cough) dog would find its way home…
Now, I have come across thousands of women who have stood by men only to be left high and dry when he takes off elsewhere.
Online dating and the modern notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea means that you have even less likelihood of your loyalty being appreciated.
Standing by your (broken) man is a code phrase for ‘kick me’.
It says, ‘I will love you unconditionally even though you may not be in this relationship the way that I am in it, and I will have absolutely no boundaries so that you get to be you and I get to lose myself trying to accommodate your whims’
It says, ‘No matter what you do, I’m going to be there’.
It says ‘I’m afraid to try to do better myself because I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore as everything is built around you’.
Stand by your man is a code phrase for settling.
You don’t hear people who are in healthy relationships having to talk about or explain that they are standing by their man. You also don’t hear men going on about standing by their woman. Why? Because they’re not ingrained with the same social messaging as women, but also, certain types of men just assume you will be there anyway, because, like, that’s what women do – note my sarcasm…
I am all for love, loyalty, respect, care, trust, care and all that jazz, but as I keep telling you all, we don’t live in an ideal world and we mustn’t keep subscribing to the frickin fairy tale.
In an ideal world, kindness would beget kindness. You’d love someone, they’d love you back. You’d love someone, they’d behave with a modicum of decency.
But deciding that you love someone and want a relationship with them doesn’t come with an IOU for the recipient where they automatically reciprocate in the way that you expect, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll be committed and behave as someone would in a loving, healthy relationship.
If you stand by a man who is committed to you, loves, trusts, respects, and cares about you, whilst also being respectful of your boundaries, your emotional investment is a good investment.
However throwing love at someone who doesn’t love you back or doesn’t behave like someone who loves, trusts, cares and respects you, even if they talk a good game, is a bit like ploughing more emotional money into a bad investment.
If you stand by a man who is not standing by you, you’re alone.
Standing by your man when there is either no relationship to stand by or the relationship has issues that may render it unlikely to get off the ground puts the guy on a pedestal.
If you stand by a man who you have put on a pedestal, the balance is dangerous as he is looking down on you.
The man that gets stood by doesn’t learn about consequences. Instead he learns that you will be there regardless and so unless he has a divine intervention, he actually has no impetus to change. Change is pretty damn difficult for the great majority of us and if there is no genuine motivation to change, we won’t – we take the easy route.
Many women assume that being loved is a reason in itself for the other person to change. But if the person doesn’t recognise or acknowledge it, but more importantly want and value it, why the hell will they feel the desire to change?
If there are own insecurities and fears are bigger than any feelings they have for you, they won’t change.
We may think that in time they’ll see it, but maybe they will…or maybe they won’t. There’s nothing to say that if they do change that it’s your love they’ll want.
Choosing broken men is partly about healing ourselves. They finally do and give us what we want, we feel infinitely better about ourselves. But choosing a man that doesn’t want to stand by you and with you but still standing by him says a lot about him. At some point you have to ask yourself how much of what you’re standing by is an illusion? Either betting on the potential or hoping that he’ll maximise brief qualities that he’s exhibited.
If your relationship has boundaries and there is love, trust, respect, and care, it is a hell of a lot easier to stand by someone through the good times and the bad because you’re together. It’s not about being happy clappers all the time because that’s not real life, but some people don’t want to be fixed, healed, or helped, and the reality is that if you had better self-esteem, some of the behaviour that you stand by would be completely unacceptable making the relationship a non-starter.
A reader recently said to me that she separates the behaviour from her man, i.e he is not the behaviour, but at some point you need to put the sh*tty behaviour with the man and put two and two together and make four and realise that with one, you get the other.
We’ve really got to start connecting the dots in our relationships and making choices, even when they are painful because until we believe that we deserve better, we don’t act like we deserve better and back away from poor behaviour.
Instead of standing by your broken man, part of your healing is learning to stand by yourself."
The following is from a support group for Emotional Abuse.
"It’s not that I’ve got anything against being loyal and loving to men, or sometimes having to stay when they’ve let you down, but I find that women who talk about standing by their men often stand by men…who aren’t standing with them. This societal expectation that women should stick like glue…even when there’s nothing to stick to and it’s greatly unappreciated or even unacknowledged, means that we’ve been taught that it’s a woman’s job to commit.
If you’ve been reading Baggage Reclaim for long enough, you’ll know that relationships are the sum of two people. When one person is trying to be the heart and soul of the relationship, it will flounder, because for a relationship to have a decent chance of lasting the distance and you both being happy within it, you need two people with both of their feet in the relationship.
Many women, however, are getting to find out that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink from the fountain of commitment.
This expectation and assumption that we must stand by men is incredibly dangerous, because in teaching women to stand by their men, the onus is on us to do the hard work and commit whilst waiting for the men to decide if they’re going to catch up and join us.
This is why red flags will be ignored, boundary crossing is the norm, and women end up losing themselves by laying themselves on the sacrificial alter in the hope that one day they’ll be a big pay off.
A lot of things have changed about relationships in the past ten years even, and technology has really impacted on the ability for us to make connections both on and offline, but also how much of a distance we can keep from relationships – I have written before about the use of technology for lazy communication in relationships.
In the ‘olden days’, before there seemed to be this sudden desire for there to be no boundaries, expectations, or commitmment in relationships, if you stood by your man, there was a strong likelihood that one day the (cough) dog would find its way home…
Now, I have come across thousands of women who have stood by men only to be left high and dry when he takes off elsewhere.
Online dating and the modern notion that there are plenty of fish in the sea means that you have even less likelihood of your loyalty being appreciated.
Standing by your (broken) man is a code phrase for ‘kick me’.
It says, ‘I will love you unconditionally even though you may not be in this relationship the way that I am in it, and I will have absolutely no boundaries so that you get to be you and I get to lose myself trying to accommodate your whims’
It says, ‘No matter what you do, I’m going to be there’.
It says ‘I’m afraid to try to do better myself because I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore as everything is built around you’.
Stand by your man is a code phrase for settling.
You don’t hear people who are in healthy relationships having to talk about or explain that they are standing by their man. You also don’t hear men going on about standing by their woman. Why? Because they’re not ingrained with the same social messaging as women, but also, certain types of men just assume you will be there anyway, because, like, that’s what women do – note my sarcasm…
I am all for love, loyalty, respect, care, trust, care and all that jazz, but as I keep telling you all, we don’t live in an ideal world and we mustn’t keep subscribing to the frickin fairy tale.
In an ideal world, kindness would beget kindness. You’d love someone, they’d love you back. You’d love someone, they’d behave with a modicum of decency.
But deciding that you love someone and want a relationship with them doesn’t come with an IOU for the recipient where they automatically reciprocate in the way that you expect, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll be committed and behave as someone would in a loving, healthy relationship.
If you stand by a man who is committed to you, loves, trusts, respects, and cares about you, whilst also being respectful of your boundaries, your emotional investment is a good investment.
However throwing love at someone who doesn’t love you back or doesn’t behave like someone who loves, trusts, cares and respects you, even if they talk a good game, is a bit like ploughing more emotional money into a bad investment.
If you stand by a man who is not standing by you, you’re alone.
Standing by your man when there is either no relationship to stand by or the relationship has issues that may render it unlikely to get off the ground puts the guy on a pedestal.
If you stand by a man who you have put on a pedestal, the balance is dangerous as he is looking down on you.
The man that gets stood by doesn’t learn about consequences. Instead he learns that you will be there regardless and so unless he has a divine intervention, he actually has no impetus to change. Change is pretty damn difficult for the great majority of us and if there is no genuine motivation to change, we won’t – we take the easy route.
Many women assume that being loved is a reason in itself for the other person to change. But if the person doesn’t recognise or acknowledge it, but more importantly want and value it, why the hell will they feel the desire to change?
If there are own insecurities and fears are bigger than any feelings they have for you, they won’t change.
We may think that in time they’ll see it, but maybe they will…or maybe they won’t. There’s nothing to say that if they do change that it’s your love they’ll want.
Choosing broken men is partly about healing ourselves. They finally do and give us what we want, we feel infinitely better about ourselves. But choosing a man that doesn’t want to stand by you and with you but still standing by him says a lot about him. At some point you have to ask yourself how much of what you’re standing by is an illusion? Either betting on the potential or hoping that he’ll maximise brief qualities that he’s exhibited.
If your relationship has boundaries and there is love, trust, respect, and care, it is a hell of a lot easier to stand by someone through the good times and the bad because you’re together. It’s not about being happy clappers all the time because that’s not real life, but some people don’t want to be fixed, healed, or helped, and the reality is that if you had better self-esteem, some of the behaviour that you stand by would be completely unacceptable making the relationship a non-starter.
A reader recently said to me that she separates the behaviour from her man, i.e he is not the behaviour, but at some point you need to put the sh*tty behaviour with the man and put two and two together and make four and realise that with one, you get the other.
We’ve really got to start connecting the dots in our relationships and making choices, even when they are painful because until we believe that we deserve better, we don’t act like we deserve better and back away from poor behaviour.
Instead of standing by your broken man, part of your healing is learning to stand by yourself."
Wisconsin I found it in a support group on divorce and separation.
I say we can love the sinner, while hating the sin. Finding the right way to balance these two is a daily challenge. I do appreciate the author's recognition that you get one with the other, when you love a broken man. But...I still believe that...some day...God's unconditional love will be powerful enough to change their hearts. I just need to stay tuned to the Holy Spirit's guidance on how much a part He wants me to play in the process. For my ex-husband, my part has dwindled down to a tiny trickle, as we don't communicate much at all. However, for my sons, my part is that of a faithful parent who continues to reach out with love. Actually, I have more influence on my sons, now that they're incarcerated than I have for many years. I trust God to continue working on all of us, in the wonderful way that only God can do.
We are NEUROLOGICAL BEINGS, with free will, YET we encode our experiences and RECREATE OUR EXPERIENCES from WHAT WE KNOW, all the time. Honestwitness, all the love in the world will not and does not erase your kids memory of the abuse they received at the hands of their father, someone who I have do bout loved them. Was your ex-husband himself abused? The missing piece in all of this is that we have been WIRED, but GOD or who ever you believe created us as a species, to HEAL.
Sometimes another's wound mirrors or uncovers our own past hurts, and if that is the case, yes we need to step away and heal ourselves. I think this is what mystified123's above post is speaking to ... SHE NEEDS TO HEAL, and honestwtiness you needed to heal and walk away. Not everyone needs to walk away to heal.
For someone who was sexual abused with my first kiss what I can say is all those who judged ME and walked away from me, including my family out of there own inability to know HOW to help me HEAL - HURT ME DEEPLY.
What healed ME, were the people who did NOT JUDGE my wounds and who were willing to STAY. There was one person in particular, Del Muzzillo, who I will honor for the rest of my LIFE because he stayed. He set boundaries with me in areas that I was in the dark or in denail about, please know that DENIAL IS NOT A BAD THING. It is HOW we are wired to NOT DEAL WITH THINGS WE ARE NOT YET READY TO DEAL WITH. I cannot say it was an easy relationship for either of us, but HIS LOVE allowed me to HEAL, not his judgement. He was a Buddhist and would always come back to seeing my TRUE NATURE, not my flawed nature. AND it was Del who introduced me to my Teacher of Sensory Awareness, Charlotte Selver, whose work allowed ME to do the work I needed to do on myself because I found a support within me AND FROM THE EARTH THAT NO ONE COULD TAKE AWAY, NO ONE.
My experience has been that FEW, even few therapists, know the healing power of LOVE and of how to access resources that HEAL.
My heart goes out to each of you in your pain and in your struggle to find your own answers. I have found mine, and what I KNOW is that when each of us GETS OUT OF OUR HEADS and into OUR HEARTS, THE WORLD WOULD HEAL, not just this dark issues of sexual misconduct, but abuses of ALL KINDS. It is how we are wired and our wiring - victim, perpetrator, witness and innocent by-stander - is all the same. How we all reach into our hearts and help EACH OTHER is the issue at hand.
... how we STOP the cycle of HARM or how we continue it ..
A friend of mine was once asked (in relations to her husbands addiction to porn) "if your husband had cancer and refused treatment would you stick around"?
You pose a good question mamabear82, how one should one stick around? Sometimes walking away is the best course of action, particularly when someone is not willing to see their "piece" or "part" of an issue.
Even prison sentences, at least in theory, are places for those in states of denial who have been acting out in harmful ways to come to their senses. Yet, a huge missing piece for American Culture is that we re-create and respond to the world from our ATTACHMENT PATTERNS, how our needs for survival and calming/soothing were met in our own infancy from those early ages of zero to three. If we were not met with a KIND AND CARING OTHER who could see our need and calm us CONSISTENTLY, we end up with an insecure attachment pattern. There are various types of patterns that we implicitly respond from, AND these can be changed to a secure pattern. Yet 85% of the population has some for of insecure attachment pattern, which means we do not feel our needs will ultimately be met by those closest to us. These attachment patterns are hard-wired into our neurological make up and become our neuropsychophycial BEHAVIORAL PATTERN unless consciously worked with and shifted with LOVING RELATIONSHIPS.
My concern is, and it is what I witness in my friends case, is that FEAR and SHAME, which are natural response to threat, are also culturally conditioned into us, due to the media particularly when it comes to sexual offenses. YET, all of us wound in the ways we were wounded at children, because it is what we KNOW and how we are wired.
LOVE has a completely different circuitry. There are neurological connections from the Heart to Head, through the Vagus Nerve and the Autonomic Nervous System ... and that is why I often suggest that those going through any sort of strong negative/angry response CALM THEMSELVES.
The problem that we face with loves ones who have been abused is that they need EMBODIES HEALING FROM THOSE WHO LOVE THEM, not shame, judgement, ostracism, and abandonment. Anyone with any sort of attachment wound NEEDS the same. Yet, because of the Myths keep in place, this has yet to happen.
The real problem is NOT the offender, or the victim, the problem is in how we treat those who have ATTACHMENT ISSUES, i.e most of us.
This is where I have decided to focus my attention. I know there are researchers in the field of sexual abuse/perpatrator treatment who are looking at these issues and these are the issues that need to be healed.
It is a difficult choice to make, but yes, sometimes one needs to walk away. AND we need to educate those in TREATMENT and the PUBLIC, that not all child molesters are BAD PEOPLE, nor are those who stay necessarily enablers or wounded people either.
We all all wired to heal when we receive enough and the right kind of LOVE, that is researched based FACT, and is substantiated by all spiritual traditions, even non religious, across time and space.
I say YET, because I believe it is happening, that more people from many walks of life are learning about Brain Science and how attachment and environment impact brain development.
Even the Daiai Lama recently posted this on 9/10:
All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
He has had a yearly summit on Brain Science for a number of years now ... and even he knows ... WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN HOW WE RESPOND AND INTERNALIZE OUR EARLY EXPERIENCES, HOW WE RESPOND TO THREAT, AND HOW WE RESPOND TO LOVE.
Each of us need to KNOW that our experience is a MIRROR to our OWN LIFE FIRST, not necessarily the "others' life. And sometimes that "other" cannot help us heal our attachment wounds because they have not done their work. This is why I believe so many marriages fail, we want our partner to do for us what we need our parents to do for us as children. And sometimes they cannot, sometimes only trained therapists can do the work of helping us and our loved ones heal.
And sadly enough to say the way those who have acted in ANY culturally inappropriate ways sexually in America or their loved ones RARELY get the help they need.
... and only by WAKING UP TO THE MIRACLES THAT WE ARE, and knowing that we psychoneurobiologically take "in" every experience we ever have and record it in our Embodied Self AND only through Kind and Caring Relationships, not - that AMERICA at least right now doesn't want to give anyone serving time for a sexual offense or their loved ones heal.
I believe it is a BIG CALL that those of us who are here, if we stay or if we go are called to answer.
It is a call to HEAL humanity from LOVE, and LOVE ALONE.
I believe that is why we all choose this experience of Human LIfe, and if we don't get it this time around we are either going to KILL THE PLANET and KILL EACH OTHER and so many other life forms in the process, OR LEARN TO LOVE AND HEAL, not only ourselves, but our families, our communities, and THE EARTH.
The Earth is a forgotten piece in Psychology, which is based on Human Behavior, not our connection to all that is.
I know, because I have done it, how the Earth can heal, even when our families judge us and abandon us.
Yet, it was those FEW HUMAN BEINGS who choose to STAY and MIRROR MY TRUE NATURE, that know at our cores EACH AND EVERYONE OF US IS A GIFT AND IS BRILLIANT.
It was my teacher Charlotte Selver and my Buddhist practice that taught me my interconnection to EVERYTHING that is from WITHIN .... these teachings and clear mirrors from others, which insidently are a RIGHT to every person on this planet because of how we are INTRINSICALLY WIRED, that allowed ME to become the person with not only the knowledge, but the deep inner knowing that can only come from experience - THAT IT IS THE RIGHT OF EVERY HUMAN BEING TO HEAL, even those most judged by cultural shame based harmful patterns.