Buffalo66

OK. I was just wondering how the SR group feels about this...

I am trying to have as little contact as possible with my A, and have to have some due to our son.

I am struggling. Some days it is easy, as he can be a royal d*ckhead. These are the days that he makes it easy.

Last night, after saying he wanted me to die, and to not show up at his family's Thanksgiving (I am closer to much of his family than he is), he called drunk and left a message saying that he was tired of doing hard labor (its been four months..first steady job since he was 23, he is 31) and thought he was going to take the BAR exam. he feels he would make a fantastic lawyer, and he is smart enough to do it. He then said,"so, if you could go ahead and look up what it would take for me to do that it would be great. I am too busy."

He was at the bar, I could hear the familiar din in the background.

I smiled to myself. I thought, "What a total whackjob.."

I know he is really smart. Genius IQ, actually. He is the best at anything he tries,but then abandons it. He is stricken with this intelligence, yet lacks emotional intelligence.
I guess I just felt like, OMG!! he is so crazy, and I felt so much more grounded and clear than he will ever be.

I sometimes think of all the horrible things he did, and that I allowed myself to come back after, and I think, aww, what a poor soul.

My question: Is it OK to capitalize on, and even purposely exaggerate this feeling of superiority that I feel sometimes to help me stay away. Is that healthy? Does it matter?

I do feel self righteous. I do feel he is so wrong and I am mostly right. I feel like I am a better parent, a more well rounded person, friend and family member than he could ever hope to be.

But am I making a deal with his devil if I use this sense to belittle him out of my heart? Even if I do it in the privacy of my own mind (or here on this forum)?

Just wonder how you guys feel, and if you have been in this phase of the process.. Thanks!

Learn2Live

Quote:

My question: Is it OK to capitalize on, and even purposely exaggerate this feeling of superiority that I feel sometimes to help me stay away. Is that healthy? Does it matter?

I do feel self righteous. I do feel he is so wrong and I am mostly right. I feel like I am a better parent, a more well rounded person, friend and family member than he could ever hope to be.

But am I making a deal with his devil if I use this sense to belittle him out of my heart? Even if I do it in the privacy of my own mind (or here on this forum)?

Just wonder how you guys feel, and if you have been in this phase of the process.. Thanks!

1. Weigh the pros and cons of each. Do you really NEED, at this point, to continue to use a feeling of superiority over him in order to stay away from him? Which is the healthiest choice for you at THIS point and time? If you have gotten yourself healthy enough to stay away from him and not get sucked back into the sickness, then I would recommend ceasing all the judgment and trying to learn how to accept him for the human being that he is.

2. I applaud you sincerely for being so conscious and aware of yourself and the mechanisms you use, to the point that you recognize that you are doing this! That is simply amazing to me, as I started using that mechanism some 10 years ago or so and it was only this past weekend that someone here on SR pointed it out to me. EGO, by Ago.

3. I have reached a point in my life and my Recovery that I do not believe in either "right" or "wrong" and realize that there is NO ONE to blame. When we blame, shame, and guilt that is VERY unhealthy. Better to work on that than to continue to expend your precious energy in negative thoughts and feelings. Negative thoughts create a negative reality for yourself. And negative feelings produce hormones that are BAD for your body. Let go.

4. Are you making a deal with the devil, even if you do it only in your mind? YES. Better to find your integrity and compassion, and operate out of those things IMO.

Still Waters

I think we fool ourselves if we no longer recognize that yes, red really is red. It's not blue, it's not yellow - it is red.

There is a right, and there is a wrong. Murder for other than self defense, in my opinion, is wrong. Abusing children, wrong. Stealing, wrong. Etc.

An abuser is wrong - blaming the abuser is necessary to see clearly. Blaming the victim is wrong. Etc.

It is WRONG to let an alcoholic abuse or put a child in danger. Who is to blame for the alcoholic putting a child in danger? Not the child. Not the neighbors.

So yes, I think it's perfectly normal and healthy to see clearly what is happening so you can make informed decisions.

Learn2Live

Sorry, i was unclear; I meant "right" and "wrong" as in "correct" and "incorrect." Not "moral" and "immoral." I agree with you regarding morality.

LaTeeDa

For me, self-righteousness was just another form of external validation. As long as I needed to feel better than someone else in order to feel good about myself, I was still stuck in my unhealthy patterns. I had to learn to find my self-worth from within.

L

naive

i don't think we need to put someone else down to make ourselves feel good; rather, the sense of who we are must come from deep down inside of ourselves, not from anything or anyone external.

Thumper

That really rings true for me LaTeeDa. I often tell myself I am better then my AH. I do not like that about myself. The thing is, I don't really feel like I am better. I'm always worried that I am selfish or not seeing clearly, or that I don't deserve this or that, or that I am some how faulty at the core and just to stupid to know it. I worry about what others think of me or that they are hiding their real feelings. I am always longing for someone to tell me I am right. That will not happen and the search itself tells me what is wrong.

I can see it intellectually but I want to be able to feel it, to believe it.

Your posts help me a lot. They give me focus on where I want to be as a person.

JenT1968

for me I wonder if I chose people for intimate relationships who I deep down consider/recognise as more damaged than I consider/recognise myself to be, in order to feel good in comparison. So maintaining that feeling of superiority would be dangerous, as it could maintain me in a relationship with them: I don't know, I'm working it through at the moment.

I can think I am better at something than someone else (an activity, a skill etc) without feeling superior (I am a better driver than tbxH: he can't drive, that isn't a feeling, it's a fact).

nodaybut2day

Jen, your post got me thinking about a lot of my past relationships, both romantic and friendly, and I can see now that I generally gravitated towards people who I sensed were damaged, so I could "help" or "fix" them. I always thought I was being a good person by seeking out those weaker people to help them along, but honestly, for me, I think it was a good deal of ego stroking and external validation. I think my mother taught me that helping others = being a good person...so wanting to be good, I was helping other to the point of self-destruction, all the while feeling superior to them!

It's an unhealthy dynamic I'm very careful about now and that probably explains why I don't have a lot of friends at the moment. I don't want to repeat the pattern.

Thumper

I've only had one 'healthy' person in my life take a romantic interest in me. Scared me half to death and I ran ran ran. I had no idea what to do with a man like that. I was ill at ease and self conscious and chose my current alcoholic husband to date instead. I knew them both at the same time.

Very eye opening post you gave me - I'd not really thought of that until right now.

Buffalo66

Thanks for all the feedback. You guys are great.

Obviously I am using other unhealthy "tools" in my feeble attempts to detach,LOL. I am not by any means together.

Ultimately, my goal is not to get Back to someone I was, since I am learning that I have ALWAYS been a leaky bucket, but to create some new foundations to lay my new self on. I know I have to jump track, and I can see it almost in a visual sense: I want to be over THERE, but I am still stuck over HERE...

Keep in mind, I am not putting him down to him, or talking him down to others, just allowing myself to wallow a little in a sort of smug little pool that is, for the moment, keeping me from calling him and engaging in a dance that would perpetuate this awful pain for both of us.

I saw a spiral when I woke up this morning, and I was traveling up it... But each time I came to the east side of the spiral I was revisiting the next level up of whatever emotional tangle lives there inside of me. I feel like I will have to unravel through a lot of levels, here. I know from the outside it looks like I am repeating and having to repeat learning things that seem like they ought to be common sense.

I imagine I may have to engage in a few less than perfect behaviors to get to a place where I am happy with my head space with regard to him.

They may be distractions, but does that make them bad tools?

I want my A to heal, to REALLY heal. Not this -false sense of power- healing he is tripped up in right now.

More than that, I WANT TO HEAL. I want to remember how it feels to breathe easy, to wake up without worrying over when his mood is gonna swing or the other shoe is gonna fall. I do not WANT to HAVE to feel superior, but, I kind of feel like, right now, it is just helping to distract me from obsessively pursuing the drama that makes me feel connected to him in a really sick way.

He pulled the plug on me after years of my inability to do that to him!!
I feel so stupid. I am just feeling my way through, and trying on different ways of coping with that. The regret is profound. The embarrassment is profound.

Buffalo66

Not to mention the total inability to state clearly that I will not be swayed back into the severe dysfunction again.

I feel like one part of me is my own drunk that I have to deal with, and that I dont know what SHE is going to do next, and I cannot count on HER, EVEN THO I WANT TO, to take care of me, and take me out of harms way.

tjp613

Regret and embarrassment about what?

As I read your post I was thinking, "heck YES it's alright to let yourself feel superior if it gets you where you need to be vis-a-vis this relationship". It won't always work for you and later on down the road you'll have to simply forgive him for being human, forgive yourself for being human and learn the art of compassion. But for now? Ah, ta hell with him! LOL

BTW - That was pretty darn funny, "so, if you could go ahead and look up what it would take for me to do that it would be great. I am too busy." W...T...F????