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Yaowen
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Default Nov 18, 2021 at 01:24 PM
 
I am so very, very sorry you in the situation you describe. How heartbreaking. I wish I knew how to help but sadly I have never been good at relationships.

I do know that strong emotions can cloud one's judgement. I wonder if anger may be affecting your wife's thinking and whether sadness is burdening yours. I know strong emotions make it difficult for me to keep perspective.

Is the therapist helping you? I would think a therapist would be able to help one sort out truth from the fog engendered by pain.

I think anger has a tendency to cause a person to have selective attention, seeing the negatives of a person they are mad at and forgetting the positives. It can also cause a person to over-estimate the negative, magnify it and exclude any positives in the person they are angry at. Do you think that might be the case here?

Sadness can have a tendency to produce excessive feelings of guilt and shame. When I am sad, I begin to doubt my self-worth and my past. This is also a case of selective attention and selective inattention. I see negatives in myself but can't seem to access the positives or I minimize or discount them.

I think situations that are emotionally charged can do this to people. I remember a time when I was angry at my parents. I could only access negative things about them and my past with them. Only later did I realize the thousands and thousands of beautiful and wonderful things about them.

Good and bad form a range of values. In emotional situations, people can forget this. They can lose perspective.

Take the idea of "bad." There have been a couple of men in the last 100 years who caused the destruction of tens of millions of men, women and children through genocide and campaigns of forced starvation. I am thinking here of Hitler and Stalin.

Now I don't know what you are being blamed for of blaming yourself for but I am sure you have not caused the destruction of tens of millions of people, or the destruction of millions of hundreds of thousands of people, or the destruction of tens of thousands or thousands of people, of the destruction of hundreds of people.

So I think it is important for us to keep our weaknesses and mistakes in perspective so we do not take on a sense of guilt that is inappropriate to our situation.

There is something called "Fundamental Attribution Error." Angry people tend to excuse their own actions as being driven by circumstances but attribute the actions of others as being caused my malice and bad moral character.

People who are sad and in grief tend to attribute unfortunate things they have done to flaws in their moral character while attributing the weaknesses and mistakes of others as caused by circumstances. This is how emotions can cloud judgment.

Sadly I do not have enough experience with relationships to be able to offer you anything very helpful. I hope your therapist and this site will prove helpful to you. There are a lot of people here going through relationship hell and I hope they see your post and respond to it in a kindly, compassionate and helpful way!
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