Does the intent of our partner matter to the betrayed? To me – others may differ – the answer is “no” with one initial exception.
Handsome and I have been doing a “Transparency of the Day” exercise to improve our communication and, frankly, to get him to exercise his integrity muscles. The idea is for each of us, every day, to very briefly share something that we are feeling or that happened and that may not be obvious or known to the other. At least twice a week Handsome is supposed to share a transparency specifically related to his recovery. Most days the exercise is quite helpful. On a few days the transparency or the resulting discussion has turned into an argument, but I’m seeing that the arguments usually stem not from the transparency shared, but from the editorializing that follows.
Handsome was recently officially diagnosed with ADHD. He is 57, and the understanding that he has lived with this throughout his life – and the impacts it has likely had on everything from his distaste for school to his interpersonal relationships and his addiction – has been somewhat overwhelming for him. In particular, the fact that ADHD is so readily treatable with a variety of meds led him to sadly question whether his self-esteem, judgment, and impulse control would have been any better had he been appropriately diagnosed long ago. He wasn’t throwing out the ADHD diagnosis as an excuse – in fact he noted that it was no excuse at all – but rather he was sharing deep sense of sadness over “what could have been” if he knew and was treated earlier.
Looking back, I’m not quite sure where the word “intent” popped into the discussion, but it did. (Again, the transparency wasn’t the genesis of the debate, the discussion that followed was…) Handsome opined that I should take his intent into account in assessing his actions. I told him that his intent is utterly irrelevant to me except for my initial decision to stay and to try to re-pair with him.
Why did his intent matter then? I had to believe that he did not intend to hurt or to destroy me with his acting out (even though the harm he caused was an obvious and inevitable consequence to anyone with half a brain not mired in disordered thinking). If I believed that my husband meant to hurt me, or that his behavior was vindictive and targeted at me, I would have left. It was clear to me though that wasn’t the case as so much of Handsome’s conduct focused on hiding his secrets and keeping me from finding out the truth about him. He could not have been trying to hurt me because he never wanted me to know.
After that initial threshold decision though? I could care less what his intent is. The analogy that I drew was as follows:
– If you shoot me in the heart on purpose, I’m dead.
– If you shoot me in the heart by accident, I’m still dead.
To me, the injured party, the result is the same either way. Dead is dead. The shooter’s intent is utterly irrelevant to me. It may matter to the shooter, law enforcement, or other people, but I’m still dead no matter what.
The same is true with betrayal trauma and recovery. I really don’t care what Handsome’s intent was in striking up a conversation with the Flame. It doesn’t change the harm to me. I’m not going to try to invent some reasonableness test based on his disordered thinking. I’m not going to waste time trying to justify or figure out the crazy. I can only judge his actions for what they actually are, not what he intended them to be.