Quotes found on Divorcebusting (II)

[Ready2Change]

I know it's not easy to put the focus back on oneself - it took me a long, long time - and I was helped along the most by just a couple simple words written by Coach - those words were: wasted energy.

[Coach]

More insight from Carlos.

My mistake...and I think it's a common one...was to think that I could "save my marriage" through the DB techniques. I could not do that...all I could do - and for this I am grateful for having found the site and the books - was save myself. It took me many, many months to come to terms with the idea of saving myself - and allowing B to travel her journey on her own - but once I did, I understood so much more about what it means to be detached and what it means to love someone in a healthy way.

[lost&confused]

I ask these questions many times a day:
1) Is what I am about to do or say going to draw this person (spouse) closer or push them farther away? Make your choice wisely.
2) Is the decision I am about to make in the best interest of my kids? If it is, then the decision is good for ME.
3) Has this method worked in the past? If not, do something different, maybe a 180....

[/quote]

Thank you so much for this. I'm new here and I've not had any responses to my post, but I've gained so much from everything I've read.

Something happened that upset me today and I thought of this. Numbers 1 & 3 in particular. Number one made me keep my mouth shut, which appears to be disturbing him. LOL! And, number three made me realize that I've been doing the same thing over and over again and, of course, I'm getting the same results.

Thanks again. Keep the quotes coming!

[Ready2Change]

25YearsMLC words of wisdom

[Ready2Change]

– 90 yrs young – a columnist in Ohio.

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me... It is the most-requested column I've ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:


1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone...
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first pay check.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ’In five years, will this matter?'
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

[Coach]

From SmileyPerson

As just about everyone else has already said, you're doing quite well, though you may not know it. For me, the key to unlocking the process was the thing @aliveandkicking referred to -- this notion that in some sense I'm already divorced because the marriage that I had, the one that started 18 years ago, is over. It ended the day I was told ILYBNILWY, etc. Now that's somewhat against the internal logic of the DB principles, but it worked for me.

I've come to this place where I simply live my life as if the past is past and my current situation is my current situation. In other words, I accept the "brutal reality" of the present.

The one theme I notice recurring in your posts is your focus on WAH and what he wants / needs / does / thinks / etc. And that's pretty typical -- I know I was there. "Should I move away or stay here to be around for H?" What I've found helpful is to frame questions like that as: "Is it better for me to move or stay here to be around for H?" where "better" is defined as "better GIVEN THAT I AM ALREADY DIVORCED."

That, too, was part of it for me; accepting -- not recognizing, not knowing, but affirmatively accepting -- that I am absolutely powerless over WAW. She will make her decisions based upon her evaluations and her needs. While it is true that I can, at least theoretically, influence her evaluations by GAL'ing, etc., at the end of the day she will decide X if she wants X. So I needed to make MY decisions for MY life based on MY evaluations and MY needs -- not hers.

Some have challenged the logic of my process because they suggest it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, the purpose -- at least, the "ultimate" purpose -- of Divorce-Busting is to "Save Your Marriage."

I see the validity of that challenge, but I'm willing to accept the risk because one fact is incontestable -- WAW does not want to be married to me as I am, as our marriage was, at this time. So I grew weary of swimming against that tide. Perhaps -- perhaps -- she might want to be married to me as I am becoming, but that too is beyond my control.

What I understand is that what I was doing wasn't working, either during or after. SO that had to change.

You've got a number of things to cope with. Until you're 100% traveldane, H is pretty unlikely to want to "come back" to someone who was, say, only 50% traveldane. But to get to 100%, I think it's useful to consider that there are some doors you have to go through alone. There are times in our lives when we're not meant to be with anyone but ourselves.

That, too, was difficult for me to get my head around. It was The Fear that had me in its grasp -- I was running. Running from everything. Fearful that any given thing I would do would "ruin it" and be the "final straw."

Until it dawned on me one day that it had already been ruined! That the final straw had already been stacked! How much worse could it get?

And when I stopped being afraid, things got better. Not "marriage" things, mind you -- me things. Which was something else I finally got my head around.

I was not my marriage.

My marriage was not me.

I was part of a marriage; my marriage was part of me. But there's a Whole Lotta Smiley's Person to go around (the line forms on the left, ladies ), and like the Cameron character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off says, "I am not going to sit on my a** as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand." I took a stand to recognize that my getting married didn't make my life "start," and my getting divorced won't make my life "end."

Now do I hope that my marriage doesn't end? Of course. But hope is not a plan. I have to have a plan in the event it does end. Because WAW had a plan, didn't she?

In your sitch it doesn't sound so much like WAH has a plan. More like he's flailing away in The Darkness. And as much as you'd like to Bring The Light, it's not yours to bring. HE needs to find his way out of The Darkness.

And if he's lucky, he'll find you there on the other side.

But the Luck will be his, not yours, because you will have created The Light.

[Ready2Change]

Journaling

Someone very close to me just reminded me that it is so important to not lose one's perspective. I am starting to think that perspective is the key to a lot of the doors in my life that seem to remain closed to me. I use the word "seem" intentionally...I think they may not be closed at all. Actually, I think there may not even be any doors there at all.

I am constantly telling others not to get too close to their own situations, to take a few steps back so they can see what they are doing and how they get in their own way. Time to heed my own words.

I realized something today - I admit that to everyone who knows me, this would sound so daft, as it would have been so obvoius to them and even to me in a sense - I have an intense need to control anything and anyone that has the potential to hurt me. Okay, this I have always known. Here is the thing I realized today...I am going to get hurt again, and again and again and I am not always going to see it coming and I am not always going to be able to prevent it and if I do not stop trying to do so, I am going to hurt myself far more than would the thing I am trying to prevent.

I am limiting myself and the things and people in my life when I try to control them. Worse, I am allowing myself to live in fear. Here is how I do it and I am a master at it. I let down my guard long enough to let something or someone new into my life, just long enough for it or him or her to matter to me, just close enough so that if I were to lose it, it would really hurt. That's when the fear starts and rather than acknowledging the feeling and just letting it be and pass, I turn all of my attention to it. I bring all of my intellect to bear on ways to prevent the thing I fear from coming to pass. In so doing, ironically, I set in motion the very things most likely to cause the thing I fear to happen. I do this not because I want the thing to happen, I do this because I am convinced it will happen no matter what I do, so I make it happen under my control. Doing this creates for me the illusion that I have spared myself some pain. But I am so, so wrong.

Back to perspective. As I was saying, I was advised to take a step back and get a little perspective on what it is I have been doing. Here is what I see from a few feet back...the reason my behavior is so harmful is because it prevents me from living in and enjoying what I have in the present. I have a lot to be happy about right this very minute. Living in and accepting that all I have is this present moment has been a hard lesson for me to learn. Enjoying something is the very thing that triggers my need to control its loss. Problem is, to engage in that behavior is to assume it will be lost, then, acting on a potentially faulty assumption, set in motion the course to actually lose it. So dumb.

I am writing this to remind myself that this journey we have all undertaken on these boards is to save ourselves (and for some their marriages - no longer the case for me). It is so easy to start believing we are done working on ourselves. We are never done...there is always more we can do.

Thanks for reading this.

Veronica V.

[Ready2Change]

Greetings, PC;

The best way to utilize these forums is to think of us as an on-line "support group," and then tell us your story, as if you were sitting down in front of a group of friends and telling them what happened. How did the relationship begin? What were the early days of your marriage like? How did having children affect your relationship? How did it deteriorate into its current state? You'll start to get good, practical advice when the helpful folks here have as many of the details as possible....paragraphs and pages of them.

So far, we don't have much to go on, and therefore can't give very good advice. All I can suggest to you, from what you've shared is:

(1) Begin a Get-a-Life (GAL) campaign.

If you're depressed and just hanging around in the house, you need to start investing a lot more time and energy on YOURSELF. Improve yourself physically (weight, fitness, health, hair, clothes, etc.); improve yourself mentally (pursue interests, hobbies, sports --> NOT watching TV); improve yourself socially (go out with friends, join a new club or two, sign up for a course or a class -- get out of the house!). There are other ideas and suggestions about GAL activities that can be found on this website.

(2) Read and research your situation.

Pick up a copy of Michele's Divorce Remedy and really study it. Pick up a copy of John Gray's old classic Men are Mars and Women are from Venus, and start educating yourself on the sometimes *stark* differences between men and women and how they interract in relationships. If arguments and unresolved conflicts were a mainstay of your marriage, then pick up a copy of John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, and study that. Once you have a good notion of (a) where you made mistakes in your marriage, and (b) what you can change about yourself that will make you a better partner in the future, then start applying what you have read and learned in small, easy to maintain and monitor steps.

The only person you can change in your marriage is YOURSELF, so that is where you begin. Let your wife do what she's going to do, for now. Take advantage of the break to improve and work on yourself, and your relationship skills.

-- Bagheera.

[Ready2Change]

Next time he starts criticizing you on the phone, say "I refuse to listen to your criticism of me. This conversation is over." click.

[Ready2Change]

Coach's 2009 Game Plan

After reviewing last year, where I started and where I ended up I need to plan for improvement in '09. DBing works because the work is all about you - doesn't matter how it turns out. If you need hope then know that if I can be a "success story" then you have the possibility also.
This time last year was awful. I was not at home over the holidays. We were both very frustrated and nothing improved until after I got D papers and she moved out in July. We did not have to deal with the OP issue (thank God)on either side. I have come to learn she missed me and was struggling inside like I was. Looking back I can see some signs of this but at the time the negative emotions (anger, fear, frustration) blinded me. If you think you can't go on because the heartache is killing you - it get's better and things get better in a quantum leap when the true giving begins. You can hang on one more day but take a step for the better for yourself while doing it. So here are my three resolutions (changes for the better)
1 - make it all about her
I remember reading this and the guys were debating the women whether this was healthy or productive. I struggled with this idea. But I am learning if you make it about her, it's like voting for Pedro - all of your dreams will come true. All this means is "true giving," if she needs it then it is my duty and privilege to provide it for her. Not what I need but her needs. I am not losing myself in this, I feel better than ever about me. It is healthy and productive, she is happier because she is getting the love she needs. I have no expectations in return, it's my responsibilty as her husband. Love your neighbor (spouse) as yourself.
2 - Be not afraid. Part of working on myself was "killing snakes on the brain." Thoughts that held me back or kept me from giving for fear of rejection. I have started risking more of the inner me and it is paying off. I have read it here as well: "fear knocked on the door, faith answered and no one was there." Faith - in God, my wife, and myself.
3- Continuous Improvement
Physically, mentally, emotionally and spirtually
Physical goals - workout 3xwk, run 4xwk, train for next marathon in fall
Mentally - I constantly am at work here: books, clinics, on-line info, feedback, church, friends etc.
Emotionally - listen better (this has been a great change for me that I still need to work on) , learn from feedback, let my thoughts and feelings out to my beloved, communicate in healthy ways, and don't hold onto negative thoughts or stress - get it out.
Spiritually - be grateful for my blessings, love God, keep my family engaged in prayer

Cheers
Coach

ps You can handle it.