I hope I maintain being an empath as well after all this pain and nonsense
I have a younger friend who has a 6 yr. son who I'm sort of a Grandma figure to. Now that I've been schooled by my 75,000+ friends here at S.I., I'm amazed at the difference in how I view the shenanigans of a child. And this one is a super manipulator. Well, to be honest, the others in my past probably were, too, but I wasn't schooled then. Anyway, he does it all. But my favorite is watching him start the false crying when he doesn't get his own way. It's actually very convincing but I learned the little secret about tears.
You'll still be an empath. You'll just be a smarter one.
That said, your time trying to R was not wasted because you had to learn this lesson and some of us have to learn it the hard way. I'll bet the vast majority of BS's fall into that category. Why? Because we're empaths and we worry about their feelings before we worry about our own and they have to get meaner and uglier before we can bring ourselves to believe they're actually being mean and ugly. If that makes sense.
My "advice" to the newly found out is always to kick the cheater out, go see an attorney, begin caring for themselves and go NC with the cheater. Then let the chips fall where they may. Because we're empaths, we can't bear their pain so we immediately try to R and to improve everything so they can get better. But it should be the other way around - they should be doing the work and they should be the ones to figure out how to fix everything if they even want it fixed. But by rushing to offer R, we hand them all the power and we get burned far too often. I'm all in favor of the BS taking back their own power. Which starts by believing that if the cheater gets mad about it and bails out, it's not because we took charge of our lives. Marriages don't dissolve over one disagreement.
So congratulations to you and may this be the start of your new and best version of yourself the life you live. Go for it.
<signed, She who held on for far too long>
[This message edited by josiep at 10:41 AM, April 11th (Sunday)]
BW, was 67; now 74; M 45 yrs., T 49 yrs.DDay#1, 1982; DDay#2, May, 2017. D July, 2017
