Some of us break the dramatic, toxic and dysfunctional cycles, and some of us don't.

It’s been a while since I’ve written an actual “blog” instead of some dopy article for this other network that’s filled with some of the most toxic human beings I’ve ever happened upon. With as much as I used to love blogging and how therapeutic it was for me, I’m quite surprised that I actually gave it up for a while. So here goes,,,

As I used to say, I was out fashizzellating by sunlight and thinking about how much I’ve changed in the past 16 years of my life. I remembered how when I first met my ex, all I could think about was building a life that somewhat resembled my father’s. Little did I know at the time that I was attempting to perpetuate my parent’s toxic and dysfunctional behaviors.

In looking back, I can see that I was terribly incompatible with my (then) future wife and grossly out of alignment with my authentic self. I think I knew at the time that I was aware of a severe degree of darkness that existed within my future bride, but because of my ignorance, my naivety, and my desire to replicate my father’s life, I was basically distracted and resisted and/or denied my truest feelings about this young lady that I would eventually marry.

Time goes on and we become married. For the next ten years, I lived in complete denial as I was regularly tormented by the darkness that influenced my ex and her behaviors. During this time, I refused to acknowledge and surrender to these suppressed feelings and I think the primary reason why was because I felt that marriage was final. But why would I have thought that marriage was final?

I believe it was on my wedding day that my mother approached me and said, “Shawn, you do know that there will be arguments between you from time to time, right?” I remember that her saying this to me sparked a quick flash through my memories of all the frictional moments throughout my parent’s marriage. Since their marriage was my primary example of what love and relationships should look like, what my mother said to me seemed quite logical at the time. It was this sense of mischaracterized logic that led me to believe that it was ok for a marriage to be regularly frictional (ahem, “dysfunctional”) and to just accept it.

Since my divorce, I’ve written several hundred blogs, group topic threads and “articles” relative to love, relationships, and toxic and dysfunctional behavior. Some of these have been shared with my mother and they’ve led her to suggest that even though my ex committed malicious adultery and abandonment, we still had some good times. Because I tend to have a metaphysical mindset about many things, I find that just because something seemed like a good time as it happened, doesn’t necessarily mean that it was ultimately a good time. And thus, I find these good times to be more or less a lie that contributed to the continuity of perpetual dysfunction in my marriage.

While I was out walking, I started thinking about the fact that I’m a 38 year old single man without children. There’s one thing that my ex and I did share a noticeable degree of fundamental compatibility on, we both didn’t want to have children. Going beneath the surface, we didn’t want children for very different reasons, but during my marriage, I never considered these deeper differences and how they could have actually attributed to the overall incompatibility between us.

Suddenly my mind shifted gears as I started daydreaming about what might have happened if we did have children. It was during the initial stages of my separation from her that I come to witness what the darkness within her was capable of. The lies that she fabricated about me in her desperate attempts to justify her adultery were very devastating. But what really frightened me was seeing how a woman, whom I once believed I loved, could demonstrate some of the most sadistic and malicious behavior I’d ever seen at the time. A horrific question I’ve often asked myself was; if we had children, would she have maliciously manipulated the minds of our children and convince them to hate me?

I found myself having a bit of a fantasy about what could have transpired thereafter. Given the wicked lies that my ex would have told them about me, it seemed logical that my children would have wanted to distance themselves from me. Painfully and out of my love for them, I think I would have actually given them the distance they wanted. As neglectful as the might seem on the surface, it seemed to be the only way that I could actually persuade my children to eventually come to understand the truth.

When a parent contests their ex spouse throughout legal custody battles, it has the potential for a person to expose and demonstrate their worst. My ex would have capitalized on that giving even more false substantiation to the lies that she would have told our children about me. That said, if I were to effectively influence my hypothetical children to one day see the truth, they’d first have to see the lies before the truth could ever be exposed.

My hypothetical day dream went on and fast forwarded many years into my child’s young adulthood when they were finally able to start piecing together the inconsistencies and falsities that typically accompany a person’s lies. I imagined my daughter coming to me one day, finally confronting me on what really happened between me and her mother and why I never stepped to her to defend myself. I imagined myself saying to her that I gave her the distance she asked for purely and painfully out of my love for her and prayed every day that she’d finally come to see the wicked ways of her mother and then come to me.

I suppose by now you’re actually looking for a point in all this b.s. that I’ve typed so far. I suppose the only point I have to offer is that some of us are able to break the cycles of perpetuated toxic and dysfunctional behavior, and some of us simply aren’t. Each day that I go out for a walk, I find myself thanking God for helping me to finally wake up to an elevated awareness of what-is in the world around me. If I were to have ever had a child, I think the one good thing my essence would have given them is the ability to one day break the unhealthy cycles imposed upon them from birth.

Wishing everyone a beautiful day!

Peace, Love and Harmony,,, Shawn