It's All in the Head by Majella O'Donnell

Author:Majella O'Donnell [O’Donnell, Majella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Chapter 6

WHAT I LEARNED AND HOW I CHANGED

I am a very different person nowadays to the person I was before I married Raymond, and that’s a good thing because I was very needy and I had given control of my self-worth and happiness to other people. I was constantly looking for love and to be loved. I didn’t know how to be on my own and to be happy. I don’t think I would ever have found happiness had I not looked at myself and changed some fundamental things about me as a person. I learned that you can never truly be loved by someone else until you have learned to love and respect yourself. I started that journey when my life was catapulted in a direction that I wasn’t expecting.

I was devastated when my marriage broke down and at that time I would have been happy if my life had ended. I genuinely felt that my family would be better off without me, including the children. I thought that their father could bring them up and that they wouldn’t have to put up with this neurotic person, who was constantly miserable. I felt that it was my fault that their father had left and the guilt was almost too much to bear.

I hung on to the possibility that we would get back together for a long time after we had split. I was completely caught up in the past and unable to move on. I just couldn’t see a future that I wanted to be in without my husband. Until I stopped looking back and learned to let go of the past, my life was at a standstill.

I hated Raymond for causing me so much pain. I hated him for leaving our children. I hated him for lying and cheating and disrespecting me, but I still couldn’t let what I believed was my future go. I always seemed to be willing to give it another shot.

It took me some time to realize that I was disrespecting myself by constantly moving the boundaries of what was acceptable to me in our marriage. I had always said to myself that if my husband slept with someone else, I would forgive him once if it was a mistake. I rationalized it by telling myself that we all make mistakes and we should be given a second chance in life. So when Raymond had the initial affair, I forgave him. He had made a mistake, but then, when he made another one and another one, I just kept moving my boundaries of acceptability until I had none left and that is a bad thing to do. I was inviting him not to respect me because of my lack of respect for myself. That is a huge lesson that I have learned since then: you should always know what is acceptable to you in a relationship and stick to it.

During the time when we were separating, Raymond visited the children regularly. I was very insistent on that because he was their father and I could never deny that.

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