Rejection

Maybe this issue of understanding the difference between shame and guilt is a much bigger problem than it was in my upbringing. I must say thank you to my grandparents and especially to my dad & mother for being such good parents. The longer I live life the more I am realizing just how fortunate I am in that I truly did have an emotionally loving and extremely stable upbringing. And I am realizing more and more just how devastating and difficult the struggle can be for others who did not.

Too, I have come to realize those with the deepest wounds are often the best at covering them up and pretending they have it all together, that others have problems and not them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Truth be told, such individuals are in intense emotional pain and fear there is no hope, but there is, there really, really is. Taken from personal experience “Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them: Breaking the Cycle of Physical and Emotional Abuse” was written by Paul Hegstrom.

Paul Hegstrom states “Shame is a perception that locks me into a belief system that says, ‘I’m bad, I’m wrong, I’m no good.’ It comes out of a tendency toward perfectionism and leads to the expectation of rejection, rigidity, and despair. When I operate from a shame-based worldview, my value is buried under my dysfunctions, fears, anxieties, behaviors, mistakes, imperfections, rejections, feelings, powerlessness and sins. I am satisfied with nothing less than perfection. I live on a performance basis and place unrealistic expectations on my partner and those around me as well as myself. No matter what I do, I feel I’m never good enough. Shame and rage are interactive-where there is rage there is shame. Rage comes from helplessness. It hides shame. Rage keeps a person from being exposed. It is isolating and disconnecting”.

Forgive me for so heavily quoting the author, however I am hoping his words, carrying so much more value than my own, will effect a heart change in others, and if need be, in your heart as well.

I am in total agreement with Paul Hegstrom when he points out how an adult who was shamed as a child”…fears punishment, abandonment, and rejection. He…feels overly responsible for circumstances”. All the more this explains why these adults seem to try so hard, come up short, exhausted and angry so much of the time. And why they want to hope but fear hopelessness, why they live in pain and rage.

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My efforts to work on my ‘fixing’ as Mort Fertel, Marriage Fitness expert, likes to call it, has been rewarding to say the least. There are no shortcuts to a healthy marriage. Those three-easy-steps methods will not do it, certainly not long term anyway. However, it only takes one spouse to make this decision, to stay focused and committed, to believe and dream of the future.

As Mort Fertel has pointed out, it is not a spouse choosing to have an affair that causes marital problems, but it is marital problems which lead a spouse to have an affair. And as Mort also points out, marital problems don’t just all of a sudden happen, but have been brewing for many, many years. Certainly we had the typical relationship issues to figure out as any young couple does. And it is absolutely staggering, all the crazy stuff we have survived during our thirty plus years of marriage. An affair is just one more of those crazy things to work through together.

My initial efforts to work on myself and our marriage led my husband to understandably think I had a selfish plan. Lots of things had been said, misunderstood and repeated. Despite our dysfunctional marriage and family issues, I love my husband and would never leave him. However, all my initial crazymaking attempts to fix our marriage (translation; fix my husband) only led him to fear my rejection.

Despite my husband being the man of my dreams I certainly was not honoring and respecting him as I knew I should. I was no longer the independent college girl who he fell in love with. I wasn’t fun to be with anymore. No, this was not what either of us signed up for when we fell in love and married, dreaming of a life together. And this is exactly why I made the decision to not only work on my “fixing” but to work on healing our marriage.

Why, being so madly in love did we gradually get to where we couldn’t relate, couldn’t really connect anymore? Nothing is right in a person’s world, no matter how much money in the bank, no matter how healthy, no matter how many friends, no matter what, if the most important relationship is not what it should be. Again, I must give Mort credit for this powerfully accurate thought.

So what, an affair is part of our story. Some people go through several affairs before they decide to get off the merry-go-round of rebound relationships and get on home where they know they belong. While I am praying my husband’s affair has ended, I am also preparing for his return. I have no reason to ask details surrounding his time away, only what he feels convicted to share with me. Too many details about his affair will only leave haunting images that serve no productive purpose. Again, thank you, Mort, for teaching us this.

I choose to view my husband’s affair as a major warning sign he was hurting even more than I realized and we were in deeper trouble than what most of those fix-yourself-relationship books could handle (Christian or otherwise). I choose to dig deeper, to work on my own fixing. I choose to forgive and ask forgiveness.

And, I choose to continue to be thankful for my husband who, after all these years, has finally been able to speak out and admit he too is a very emotionally caring person, he too has a very tender heart. What’s not to love about a man such as my husband who is brave enough to admit he is a real man, emotions and all.