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Living and Loving after Betrayal
of olive branch. If whatever you try doesn’t improve the situation,
change the way you experience it. In place of the self-denigrating
interpretation that she’s rejecting you or blaming you for the betrayal,
see her as a hurt woman trying unsuccessfully to deal with her own
pain. That doesn’t excuse her behavior, but it improves your experience
of it. Once again, we have no control over other people, but we
have absolute control over the meaning of our experience. When we
don’t make the choice to improve the meaning we give to our experience,
we’re likely to repeat the same mistakes and feel the same pain
over and over.
Keeping a log will help you focus on improving situations (or the
way you experience them) in the future. Title this log “My Attempts
to Improve Bad Situations,” and use it to track the things you have
done or will do to improve by 10 percent a bad situation or your experience
of it. (Examples: I have tried to communicate respectfully, even
when the other person is disrespectful; I enjoy music and recorded
books while in traffic jams; I will try to solve problems rather than
blaming them on others.)
Start out with a focus on relatively easy things to improve. As
noted in Chapter 1, skills are more successfully acquired when initially
practiced in relatively low-stress situations. In the beginning,
practice improving situations—or your experience of situations—that
are not directly related to the betrayal.
Keeping the “improve log” will help rewire your brain to think of
ways to improve when something bad happens, rather than dwelling
on how bad it is, which is likely to make it worse.