I went through a lot of different emotions when the accusations started to fly: incredulity and credulity, anger and sadness, resentment and remorse - I was all over the map and not just once. My heart pinballed around with nowhere to settle for at least 18 months and to be honest it hasn't fully settled yet. At times I wanted to defend myself, to my bride and to others. At other times I wanted God to be my advocate so I could hide in a hole. I wanted alternately to stand up for myself and to turn the other cheek. But the common thread, sought at various angles, was to find the truth.
I don't want that to come across as anything noble or principled, that's not the case. It was more like the thrashing of a drowning man desperate to find anything to cling to before he goes down for good. Whatever the honest truth was, even if it temporarily hurt me, was something I really wanted because I found myself suddenly unable to make sense of my world and that was terrifying.
I'm the kind of guy who processes stress by collecting information so my first reaction was research. I did a lot of reading but the topics and terms were fuzzy-edged at best. When I read in one place that emotional abuse exists when a person feels abused (in other words a person can feel abused by a bedpost in an empty room) I at times despaired if truth even existed. In other cases I was working with words and ideas that we all think we know, but are hard pressed to really define. As an example, I started asking, "What's the difference between persuasion and manipulation?", of several articulate people and most often get something like, "you know...I never really thought about that."
In hindsight I was utterly unprepared for what was happening to me and around me. Even the terminology was unfamiliar and vague so I often found myself playing catch up on the jargon but by the time I could find a definition (like for manipulation above. Hint: the difference lies in the motive) the conversation had moved on. But more importantly I was just terribly and chronically off-balance which made time for study or thoughtful reflection a very rare commodity. I should point out that such a state is pretty rare for me. I'm pretty good at thinking on his feet. It's hard to get me off-balance. It's really hard to keep me that way. But here's the thing, the trick to thinking on your feet usually comes down to commitment. Just pick something, anything, and stick to it. Don't be like Buridan's Ass and 9 times out of 10 it'll work itself out. But I just couldn't find my feet, not for indecision but for something like emotional vertigo. It's only been in the last few months, since the divorce was finalized really, that a few stones have started to appear in the turbid stream.
It wasn't too long ago that words mattered in a different way than they do now. When accusations of character flaws weren't thrown out lightly nor abided casually. There was a shared public value in evaluating statements for veracity. By contrast, one of the most common descriptors of the modern discourse is in the weakened interest in objective truth. There's a popular principle in psychology and counseling that says "whatever a person is experiencing is their realty." In other words, if I'm feeling depressed, threatened or angry then my actions will reflect my perception regardless of whether or not they are accurate. The point is that a counsellor does well to work from their patient's perception, even if it's broken, as opposed to confronting them with "No - you are NOT Napoleon. Snap out of it man!”
Unfortunately the principle has slowly drifted, in practice, to something like "whatever a person is experiencing is THE realty.” (see emotional abuse above). The difference shows up in an emphasis on being "heard" to the extent that a search for accuracy is cast as aggressive or even bullying. To ask, "Why do you feel that way?" can easily be construed as insensitive. To ask, "Is that characterization or accusation fair or accurate?" can easily garner a secondary accusation of defensiveness. This habit of unconditional sympathy can turn a misunderstanding into a situation where someone is expected to apologize for and "own" another's misperceptions that they had nothing to do with. Another manifestation is when emphasis is given to how something is said instead of what was said, the delivery becomes more important than the substance. In this death spiral the person who's in control is the one who expresses the most distress. Their pain is the most "real" thing in the conversation and every other consideration circles around it, including a value for truth, fairness, or perspective.
To be clear, I totally agree that sensitivity and empathy are genuine virtues, but they are minor virtues wholly contingent on deeper virtues. I suspect we got here partly by mistaking sensitivity for love and empathy for wisdom.
Another point of clarification is that I don't mean to imply that my bride was disinterested in truth. I think that she found herself in a position partly like my own, trying to navigate through an impossible tangle of confusion, pain, and fear while trusting friends, family, and a well-paid experts to do the hard work of truth-finding.
Alas, too few people seemed to actually want truth, or at least not enough to chase it down, not for themselves and certainly not on behalf of somebody else. What most of our friends and family really wanted was for this uncomfortable conflict to go away and leave them alone. Barring that, a modestly acceptable explanation and preferably one that required the least from them. They wanted quiet and for this difficult thing to go away. That's why it's so common for people in such cases to just believe whoever's story they heard first.
Some truths set us free, but others - if we really accept them as truth - obligate us. I know a woman who's father in law was convicted of child pornography and spent some time in prison. She also has young sons. There is the settled truth of the man’s past and those facts require certain precautions and restrictions on her part when it comes to grandpa and the boys. Not just the practical and wise restrictions mind you, but legal ones. However the broader family is remarkably eager to let bygones be bygones and go back to what used to be their normal. In other words the truth in this case is remarkably inconvenient and it pressures them to change certain things that are undesirable, uncomfortable and sometimes just mildly irritating. So instead of accepting the proven and admitted truth about grandpa’s proclivities and all that such a reality entails the path of least resistance is to pressure this young woman to get over her concerns and come back to the normal where none of that ever happened and grandpa gets a chance to babysit the boys once in a while.
In our case I think something almost the opposite was happening. A friend sat down with me over a beer at one point and, with well intentioned thoroughness, tried to "hear my side" of the ongoing conflict. I told him that I didn't really have a side. I wasn't angry, I wasn't pushing back, I wasn't trying to win. I was, in fairness, feeling as though a lot of the mess was coming up from the kinds of misunderstandings and misperceptions that had become accusations in the process. So to that degree I admit I was frustrated and tired, perhaps feeling embattled and, on a bad day, slandered, but in the end I was mostly confounded. After another beer he concluded, "this just doesn't make any sense..." and I agreed, but what could be done?
This post's title is of course an allusion to the famous saying that "in war, truth is the first casualty." A divorce can be very much like a war and its another worn line that "there's his truth, her truth, and the truth." - which is undoubtedly wisdom - but I wasn't talking about the loss of objective truth with the title. I was thinking instead about the way such conflict tends to almost force people to take sides, attempt to be "supportive" by not asking too many questions and trying to stay clear until it's over, one way or the other. As I've stared to come out of the fog I find myself feeling that things might have gone differently if a few folks had asked a few sensible but admittedly difficult questions designed to get to the truth of our feelings and motives and actions. Of course that may not have changed anything in the final result but I do wish more of my circle had helped me tease apart the difficult questions sooner if for no other reason than the mercy of rescuing a man drowning in confusion.
