These are some impressive posts that seem to convey true will to own bad choices and to make genuine amends for them. The first thing is to recognize that this sort of true will is the foundation for everything (not just reconciliation, not just your BS's health, but *your* health) and it is only good. I'm speaking as a BH here, but I don't think the answer to your question is gender specific, and I've given it a great deal of thought in relation to my own situation. Here is my thinking.
Q: "How does an abusive spouse now make up for more damage than they thought they had done?"
A: The gist is that you have to think of it as more than just a game of balancing out the wrongdoing. You must make every effort to do that, too. But it is only the beginning. The rest of the work involves truly understanding, fully and without deflection or denial, A) the very real and permanent effects of the bad choices that you have made, and B) that making amends is actually a gift that your BS is giving to you, the WS, and *not* the other way around.
1) First, you absolutely must understand what emotional abuse is. You cannot do enough reading on the subject. Search for psychological studies. Read the pain and anguish that is being poured into the posts on this very website. You must own completely that emotional abuse is every bit as horrific as physical abuse, and many would say that it is *more horrific*. What is so insidious about emotional forms of abuse is that they cause the abused person literally to question reality. That is a degree of horror that you should never wish on anyone. I have thankfully not experienced physical abuse, but try this thought experiment: imagine a physical abuse situation (beating, for example). Now imagine that the inflicted wounds (bruises, cuts, scrapes, broken bones, etc.) are actually *invisible* to the naked eye. This is what you have done to your spouse. Now imagine how the abused person should make sense of his/her situation. The abused feels the cruel effects of being beaten, but looks down and sees no bruises, no welts, nothing apparently cracked. "Did it really happen?" The abused feels intense pain from the beating, but sees the abuser act as if they have not done anything egregious. "Is the hurt that I am feeling really caused by someone else?" the abused spouse begins to wonder. The abused sees friends and family not be able even to see, let alone understand the hurt and pain that he/she is feeling. And this makes the abuser's lack of feeling seem almost normal. "Maybe I'm imagining the pain I feel? Maybe I shouldn't really be feeling it? Maybe I deserve to feel it?" And the insidious downward spiral continues from there. "Maybe my wounds aren't really real," the abused person starts to think. "Maybe this is just normally how I should feel." It is very, very hard for most people to keep their internal compass pointing toward true north when everyone around them, including themselves, cannot physically see the wounds that have been inflicted upon them. Just like grievous physical wounds, though, emotional wounds leave *permanent* marks. Your BS will bear the scars of the wounds that you have inflicted for the rest of her/his life. Like many wounds, most of those scars can heal and the BS can resume a normal life. But they will never disappear, and they will *always* be a reminder of what happened. You must never allow those reminders to lead to the fear that what happened might happen again.
2) Second, you must understand that making amends for abuse is *never* a game of reverse abuse quid pro quo. That is, it is not about performing in return a degree of suffering equal to what you have inflicted. You may think that your BS wants to see you suffer in exchange for the suffering that you have inflicted upon him/her. Your BS may even think this. But what he/she really wants, underneath all of the pain and hurt and confusion, is to get back what you have truly stolen: his or her self-esteem and dignity. You cannot give that back to them by inflicting pain on yourself or performing that you are suffering. You may be suffering. You *should* be suffering (not in a moral sense but just in the sense that as a feeling person this should be a consequence of your actions). But you are suffering from a self-inflicted wound. Your BS will resent being expected to feel something positive within themselves from seeing you suffer from the effects of that wound, too. For this your BS must see that you understand the devastating magnitude of the pain and hurt and confusion that *you* have caused, and that you completely understand that the abuse you have inflicted is WRONG. It is unequivocally and without wishy-washy hedging, WRONG. Your BS did not deserve *any* of that abuse, for *any* reason.
3) Third, you must understand and own, unequivocally and with absolutely no illusions of expectation, that the opportunity to make amends is a gift that your BS is giving *to you*. In making amends, you are not giving anything to them that you have not already illegally stolen, that is not already theirs by right. The way for you to get there mentally is to own the fact that you may *never* be able to give back the dignity and self-esteem that you have stolen from your BS. That's right: you must own the fact that it may be *impossible* to make amends for the pain that you have inflicted, to give back the self-esteem and dignity that you have stolen. The reason that this realization is so important is that it will help you, again, to come to grips with the fact that this is not a game of reverse quid pro quo with all of the commercial expectations that this entails. My WW has said to me in the past few weeks that she doesn't want to try to repair the marriage (read: the damage that she has caused to it and to me) if there is no chance that I'll want to reconcile. I resent the hell out of this line of thinking, because it's saying, "I made a huge mess and I'll only help clean it up if you'll forgive me." Absolutely not the right way to be thinking about the world. Healthy people clean up their own messes for the simple reason that they are responsible for making them. Your BS, if he/she is still talking to you, likely wants to find a way to reconcile with you, but has no idea how to make that work in a way that will make him/her feel happy, strong, and 100% safe from the kind of abuse that you have proven you have the capacity to inflict. It may seem like what I'm suggesting here is forced groveling, but if it feels like that, you have more self-work to do to empathize with the pain that you have caused. It is *not* a game. You are not making amends so that your BS can love you again, can give you the things that a spouse should give. In this transaction, you are trying everything you can to give back what you have stolen, but what you are receiving in return is an even more precious gift: a chance to heal yourself. Healthy people do not cause harm to other people, especially not the people whom they love the most. Healthy people think about the consequences of their actions, both direct *and* indirect, and they think about those consequences *before* they act. Your betrayed spouse is giving you a chance to be healthy, to look in the mirror and be proud of what you see reflected there. From my own WW, I hear so much that "she didn't want to hurt me," "she wasn't trying to hurt me," "she doesn't think of herself as an abusive person." She is fundamentally missing the point. The point is that she wasn't actively trying *NOT* to hurt me. Healthy people actively try *NOT* not hurt others. They never forget about indirect consequences and collateral damage. The wounds suffered from indirect abuse are just as painful as wounds suffered from direct abuse. You may not have inflicted pain on purpose, but you were purposely neglecting to make the protection of the person you love your priority. And this neglect is very difficult for sensitive people to understand when the neglect has led to real suffering on their part. This is an egregious thing for a person to do to anyone, let alone a loved one. It is abuse. It is abuse. It is abuse. Abuse is abuse is abuse. Only when you fully realize all of this can you fully embrace the fact that you are lucky, lucky, lucky even to receive a chance to make amends.
4) Last, you must never forget, for the rest of your life. This is the only thing that you must perform for your BS. For the rest of your life, you must vocalize and demonstrate the absolute fact that you have never, ever, forgotten. Again, the pain of the wounds that you have inflicted as an emotional abuser will hopefully not be permanent, but the scars will be. For the rest of his/her life, your BS will bear them. You, in return, must bear the responsibility for inflicting them. The question is whether some deep dark part of you will feel guilt for the rest of your life and you will simply do everything you can to ignore it, or whether instead you will know at the deepest, most sacred part of a healthy core that you once made horrible mistakes, but you have returned what you have stolen and learned that you can never, ever steal such things from anyone, ever again.
It is never okay to be a physical abuser. It is never okay to be an emotional abuser. It is never okay to be an abuser. Never.
Abuse is abuse.
[This message edited by 84CF at 9:31 PM, August 13th (Tuesday)]