The Mountaintop Moment

There comes a time, after you’ve worked through your sense of being a victim, that you’ve climbed a mountaintop and seen at the big picture. You realize the part you played, and it hasn’t been pretty. This doesn’t mean that you were not victimized, or you don’t have valid claims for restitution. It doesn’t mean that you weren’t hurt, or that someone didn’t act like an ass. It doesn’t mean that you deserve more or an equal proportion of blame; maybe he is still mostly to blame. It only means that you understand things better and can do something about them.

It’s crucial that you go from thinking you’re just a victim to knowing that you’re a perpetrator, at least a partial perpetrator. If you can admit you’ve victimized others, sometimes including the one who hurt you, then you can proceed down the Road to Reconciliation. At that moment you can get real; you roll up your sleeves and take responsibility.

Let’s say you caught your husband having an emotional affair with another woman. He didn’t disclose it to you; you discovered it when you were looking at his phone. His culpability is obvious, but, when you look at the context, the role you played also becomes evident. Maybe you haven’t been there for him. You’ve been preoccupied with the baby. Since that baby, you haven’t lost the weight you gained in your pregnancy. He doesn’t seem to mind, but you do, so you’ve pulled away from him. There might be issues between you, disagreements you’ve not been able to resolve, so you avoid them because there’s never been a good time to talk about them. When you avoid the issues, you avoid each other. He might have wanted to tell you about his growing friendship with this woman but had a valid fear you’d over-react.

I don’t know what your part was, these are just some possibilities. When you’re at this Mountaintop Moment, you see both sides of the problem. You’re seeing the big picture. Your side doesn’t absolve him of his, nor does his side absolve you of yours.

Here’s the thing about seeing big pictures, though. You can’t see everything at once. Your eyes travel around the big picture, first seeing how you were hurt and then seeing how you hurt her. Your feelings change with what you are looking at. You might feel like you are going mad, or frozen in indecision. Take your time. Take it all in. Once you absorb everything, it’ll all make sense. Everything will come together.

This is a moment of decision, or, perhaps, indecision. If you’re saying, “OK, I’ll apologize to him if he apologizes to me; he has to go first.” Stop it, just stop it. You’ll never get anywhere that way. He’s probably saying that, too. If you both keep saying that, you will stand at this moment forever. You’ll be another variety of people wrecked on the Road to Reconciliation, the Ones Who Can’t Admit They’ve Done Anything Wrong.

Remember, everyone starts off feeling like a victim. Your husband did, too. If he does any of the victim’s work towards Reconciliation, he’ll be at his own Mountaintop Moment someday. Maybe he’s already there and has been wondering what took you so long. How do things look from his perspective?

The view from the other side

Let’s examine how it all looked from the husband’s side of things. Let’s trace where he has gone in his journey.

His wife caught him having an emotional affair with another woman. He didn’t disclose it to her; she discovered it when she was looking at his phone. At that moment, she was angry with him, but she didn’t see the context. The role his wife played is evident to him, but she’s not having it. She hasn’t been there for him. She’s been too caught up with work and preoccupied with the baby. Since the baby, she’s pulled away from him. She says she’s ashamed of her weight, but he thinks she’s beautiful. Nothing he says makes any impact of her. She never makes time to talk. She used to be his best friend, but they’ve become nothing more than roommates. Why is it surprising that, when another woman took an interest in him, he let down his guard? He wanted to tell his wife about the woman, but, with her insecurities, he knew his wife would take it all wrong. She went snooping on his phone without his permission and found something she didn’t understand. Then the shit hit the fan, making him look like the bad guy.

You see, both the victim and the perpetrator start at the same place. When the husband felt injured and ignored, he made choices that harmed his wife. Now she feels injured and may make choices that harm him as well. Around and around it goes. If the perpetrator found a way to deal with his injury, he wouldn’t need to act out and injure anyone else.

When the husband stands at his own Mountaintop Moment, he’ll realize that he wimped out, big time. With a new baby, he needed to suck it up. Women go through their own travail when they give birth; a father’s labor pains come later, when he’s feeling ignored. He was supposed to be OK with this because he’s an adult. Instead, he found some other woman to mother him. That, by itself may not have been so bad, everyone needs support; but, when he didn’t tell his wife about her, he guaranteed she’d go ape shit when she found out. So, get real, man; you’re not just the victim here. There’s a lot more to it. There’s only one way to move on. Instead of claiming you’re the victim, claim your share of responsibility.

Ideally, you and your partner will lay down your arms together. However, if your partner has not done so, you may have to show her how.

Taking Responsibility

What happens when you see the big picture and identify yourself as both offender and victim. You go through the same process of guilt, acknowledgement of shortcomings, and restitution as the person who hurt you would go through if he did the work of reconciliation.

If you’re going to ask him to apologize for his shortcomings or to eradicate them, you have to do the same for yours. It’s only fair. It also only makes sense. When you come to terms with the things you have done to harm others, only then do you have an appreciation of what’s involved. You know how hard it is, so, when you see someone do it authentically, you understand what they went through and won’t dismiss it out of hand. If you see someone try to apologize unauthentically or make a half-assed attempt at restitution, you’ll recognize that, too, and won’t confuse cheap repentance for the real thing.

The choice you’re making at the Mountaintop Moment is between moving on, or not; between a sophisticated understanding of the problem or a simple one; between doing what you can about the problem or waiting for your partner to solve the problem for you.

It would be nice if others could solve problems for you. If only she behaved better, you’d be happy. If he wasn’t such a prick, you wouldn’t be angry all the time. If she were more trustworthy, you’d be able to trust her. It’s nice when that happens, but you don’t have to wait for it to happen. You play a part in how you feel. Actually, you play a bigger part than anyone else.

Let’s go back to the husband who had an emotional affair. You confront him, and he admits it. He promises to end it. He says he’ll never talk to her again. You demand access to his phone and his computer at random intervals, so you can check on him. For a few months you do just that; but, if that’s all you do, a funny thing happens with your feelings: nothing. You continue to be just as suspicious as when you started. How do you know he isn’t just deleting the correspondence? How do you know he doesn’t have another email account or a second phone or another laptop stashed away? How do you know they’re not carrying on in a motel room, so they have no need to text or email one another? You don’t and that’s the point. Your feelings are your feelings and there’s only so much he can do about them.

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To really change the situation, you have to confront the circumstances that created it. If you had been ignoring him, you created the conditions under which he chose to have this affair. It’s true, he could have chosen differently; but you could have, too. Taking on the underlying problem will do more to restore your trust in him than any amount of surveillance ever will.

The Mountaintop Moment is when you’ve waited for the other person long enough. You’re ready to get started. Well, get started. Maybe he’s done everything he can do to restore trust, but the rest is up to you. Maybe he’ll never take a single step on the Road to Reconciliation; but, if you fail to do your part, if you fail to admit your faults and begin to work towards restitution, that’s something you’re going to have to answer to.

The truth is, we never know how reconciliation is going to go. Maybe, you’ll succeed in getting back together, stronger and better than you were before; or, maybe, you won’t. Either way, you could use the experience to become a better person, to have learned from the experience and evolved; so that if you do break up, you don’t make the same mistakes in any new relationships.

So, what does it mean to come to the mountaintop and identify yourself as both offender and victim? It means you accept your part of the blame. You change the conditions under which your offender offended you. You don’t just put all the responsibility for change on him; you take responsibility for yourself.

What’s the Difference Between Responsibility and Blame?

Not everything is your fault. In fact, most things are not your fault; you had nothing to do with them. You didn’t ask to be born to these parents or at this time or this place, at least so far as we know. You didn’t invent the language you speak. You didn’t have a choice about your genetics, nor your early childhood experiences, nor ninety-nine percent of the experiences you have now. You might have chosen the person you married, but you chose him from a very limited field of possibilities. Unless you adopted and are remarkably prescient, you didn’t choose your children.

You don’t know all the consequences your actions will bring before you set them into motion. If you didn’t have that second cup of coffee and left your house ten minutes earlier, you might have been hit by that truck that barrel-assed through an intersection with no brakes. If you had a third cup and left twenty minutes later, you wouldn’t have been caught in traffic caused by the accident and would have gotten to work on time. There is no such thing as a fully informed choice.
Because of all this, many people say we don’t have free will. They claim everything is completely determined by neurochemicals and the accidents of particularity. Well, maybe they’re right. It could be that you’re entirely blameless. Even if you’re the biggest jerk on the planet, it’s not your fault, it’s your genes’. But, here’s the thing:

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You may be blameless, but you’re still responsible.

Response-able

Take the word, responsible, break it apart, and you’ll see why. Response-able. You have the ability to respond. In fact, because you have the ability, you’re obligated to respond. People are waiting.

You’re obligated to respond because you can’t not respond. Even if you say nothing or do nothing, that’s a response. It may be a piss-poor response, but it’s a response. Actually, nobody is waiting, you’ve already responded; but, they are waiting for you to claim responsibility.

Claiming responsibility means admitting that you have the ability to respond. It’s called getting real.

You didn’t choose your parents or the time, place, and circumstances of your birth, but it’s your job to do something with it. You didn’t choose the cards, but you play them. You didn’t choose your genotype, but your phenotype is a more complex matter.

You didn’t choose the life you were born into; but, as you age, you begin to get the life you deserve.

Culpability

I want to congratulate you for coming this far. You’ve avoided getting picked up and carried away by your emotions. You’ve managed to keep from cracking up on the Road to Reconciliation. Or, if you did get carried away or cracked up, you got back on track, arrived at the mountaintop, and see the big picture. Everything is in context now. The part you played is there, but not everything is about you. That being the case, you can relax a little. You’re halfway to Personal Peace.
How do you make it the rest of the way? Well, you’re on a mountaintop, remember? The only way to get anywhere is down.

From this point, you can always go back down to feeling like a victim, or you can continue forward. Personal Peace is down below in a beautiful valley at the foot of this mountain. In order to get there from here, you must make a dangerous descent into what I call the Chasm of Culpability.

In other words, in the process of seeing the big picture you’ve come to understand your own shortcomings. You’ve got to do something about them. Personal peace is incapable with culpability.

These shortcomings could be anything. Maybe it was you who started all the trouble with your partner in the first place, all the things she did to you were in response to what you did to her. Or maybe you committed your wrongdoings by attempting to get justice for what he did to you. They are all mistakes, no matter who started it. If you got carried away by your feelings or became an Impossible Martyr, a Person Who Can’t Steer, a Denier, a Discount Pardoner, Helpless, a Big Baby, an Ax Grinder, a Righteous Idiot, a Scab Picker, Re-Traumatized, or One Who Can’t Admit They’ve Done Anything Wrong, then you have something to feel sorry about.

Making it right is going to take more than saying you’re sorry. You’ll need to acknowledge what you did wrong and why it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then you’ll have to develop a plan to prevent it from happening again.

You are descending the Chasm of Culpability, a treacherous trail where you must pay attention. You are met by two guides who offer to direct you: one called Guilt and the other Shame. Beware, only one will take you to Personal Peace. The other will lead you over a cliff.

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Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice and the author of The Road to Reconciliation: A Comprehensive Guide to Peace When Relationships Go Bad, from which this article is adapted.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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