Tomorrow is Monday. Many people hate Mondays with an intensity. Fortunately, I’m not one of them. I suspect many people hate Monday since they are reminded of responsibilities and duties. They have to ‘get to work’. Getting to work stirs up many feelings. Dread. Anxiety. Worry. Monday stirs up feelings of the obligations we have in our lives. Our job, our family, our commitments. We have to do all of these things and it’s hard!
Monday also reminds us of the week ahead. The week is full of potential challenges and hurdles.
When you find yourself facing responsibilities without being inspired, it can be a form of drudgery. It may also trigger some angry feelings. Those angry feelings are what I want to bring to your attention.
A couple of years ago, an article came out from a writer in Australia addressing the pain of infidelity. The article claims that betrayed wives are not crazy, but are instead so angry that they go to extremes in their payback behavior.
This is one of the many controversies about affairs. Is the spurned spouse crazy or angry when they go to extremes in their behavior?
Sure, it’s easy saying they are the crazy ones, yet that amounts to gaslighting them. Anyone in such a situation would be upset.
If it is anger, then when the spurned spouse wrecks cars, smashes things with baseball bats, or other extreme behavior, the damage done is an indication of the pain. It’s a LOUD message about how badly they are hurting. The greater the drama and extent of the damage, the louder the message.
In my own life, after an enraged stalker arranged for an arsonist to set fire to our business twice, I immediately contacted the lawyer in Webster, Texas, who was protecting her. Rather than hold her accountable for her outrageous actions, or the damage she caused, he calmly dismissed what she had done, stating “She’s just angry”. I thought to myself, that’s not just anger, that is REVENGE!
She was angry when she stood in the lobby of my office building and cussed me out at the top of her voice. Setting fire to our family business was rage and revenge, not ‘just anger’.
Anger takes you to extremes, especially when it comes to affairs. An affair is a personal attack. When you’re attacked in a personal way, your emotions and reactions are intense. There is no, “Don’t take this personal” type of hiding what’s happened. It was a personal attack, it was a rejection, and there are personal and intense reactions to that. Those reactions include anger, rage, jealousy, revenge and insecurity.
Even Biblical references to the reaction of a spurned spouse to an affair talks about how intense those reactions can be. In Proverbs 6:32-35, the verses talk about how such a spouse will not spare (e.g. have mercy), regard any ransom, nor rest contentedly nor be pacified or bought off with gifts.
For someone to be so mad to where there is no pacifying, mercy or rest, it’s pretty extreme. You can call it anger, but with the description, it sounds to me like they are ‘losing it’. Not losing it in terms of going full blown mental illness, but instead a moment of madness.
The choice of the word ‘madness’ to describe both intense anger and mentally losing it is not by accident.
The words ‘mad’, ‘angry’ and ‘crazy’ are synonyms. ‘Lunatic’, another word for crazy, is heavily associated with the moon which can have an impact on mental health issues. The term lunatic comes from the Latin lunaticus “of or belonging to the moon.”
Although the intense emotions show no mercy, the reality of legal limits, awareness of long-term consequences and the long arm of the law are often the only things keeping such episodes under control.
I have known some spouses that use affairs with the intention of ‘triggering’ their spouse so that the intense reactions are on display. Once they’ve been triggered, the cheater assumes the position of “You expect me to live with a crazy person like that?” In such cases, the triggering gives them an excuse for the affair and evidence they can use against them for divorce and custody purposes. It was a set-up.
Handling those intense feelings is not easy. You may need some additional help handling those days when the intensity of emotions are overwhelming. This is where the ‘Dealing with the Affair Crisis’ video can help. Rather than giving into the intense anger and urges for revenge, you can instead, practice ways of soothing yourself.
You don’t have to dread Mondays and you don’t have to give yourself over to the dark side of intense angry reactions either.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
