When you catch this dynamic in play, just reassure your stepson that you are okay. Remind him that you're a big guy and that you can handle your business. Tell him he shouldn't worry, that you love him and always will, and that you and his mom have to work things out at your own pace. Tell him that sometimes life can be really messy, but that we just keep slogging along until we find the best solutions to our problems.
You can bond with him and still be a role model, right? The lesson here is 'Dealing with Adversity', and your job is to show him how to get through it without losing your priorities.
Remember too that people can't feel two feelings at once. Your WS can either feel shame or empathy when you remind them of a trigger. I was just talking about this on another post, but what I think could be helpful is trying to create a clinical understanding of the damage done. I'm going to save myself some time and reprint that post. Take what you need and leave the rest. You're really very early on, and some of these concepts are for later when you're much more established in R. Right now, you're still on the fence trying to decide if you want to be there or not... and that's a totally valid place to be. Take your time and don't allow yourself to be rushed. A very important part of R is learning to take OWNERSHIP of your choice. Well, you haven't even made that choice yet, but eventually, you're going to need to OWN that choice every day and know that YOU were the one who decides every day where he intends to plant his feet.
I think part of your frustration is that you're trying to swallow the bear whole instead of allowing for one bite at a time, and it's a process... particularly if you choose R. The work a WS has to do doesn't LOOK very contrite. From a distance, it looks self-absorbed, like the BS is an after-thought. But it HAS to be that way in order to break through the old, flawed programming. The WS has to achieve a healthy self-esteem and that just looks so self-involved and disrespectful from the BS POV.
Anyway, here's that other post. Remember it was for someone who is further along than you are though, so just take what you need and leave the rest.
Sounds like ignorance to me, not necessarily spite or willfulness. I'm thinking she just doesn't get it, and I'm not surprised by that. Most of us DON'T get it until it happens to us. And then, for BS, we end up brain-jacked by the inexplicable need to relive the trauma over and over and over again. We can't explain that because it doesn't make sense to us either, and yet, our injured brains compel us toward the behavior.
So, you have the WS saying, "I don't get it", and the BS essentially saying the same thing, "I don't know why. I can't explain it". Naturally the conversation is going nowhere until some answers are provided, right? So, why do you need to talk about it all the time? What are you getting from that?
What I found out after some fairly extensive research is that this compulsion to talk about it was fairly ubiquitous among BS's. It's a trauma response. It's our brain's trying to make sense of new information which has corrupted our old files. Our brains are kind of like organic computers, and this trauma causes a glitch. We get stuck. The information we had regarding our spouse was false. We thought we knew this person, thought we understood them, but that data is corrupted by the new information, that they are capable of deceit and betrayal. So, we get stuck in a loop, revisiting the trauma over and over and over again. The brain provides connection in otherwise mundane triggers. Same color car as the AP goes by?.. amygdala are triggered, adrenaline and cortisol flood the system. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every new jot of information must be verified, and reverified, and reverified, and reverified.. because the brain is STUCK and we were wrong before, so now the new files need to be challenged for authenticity again and again.
THIS is what WS don't understand. They don't understand how the brain has been hijacked by the trauma. It doesn't make sense to them. And when we're really honest, it wouldn't have made sense to us either before we experienced it for ourselves. So yeah, I think we need to be a little bit patient while we attempt to educate... that is, if R is something we want. If it's not, the WS can blow it our their ass. Why would we care if they get it or not if we're done with them?
Next thing is whether or not we should challenge ourselves when we realize that the brain is stuck. Rumination is a natural result of trauma. But should it be tolerated? Six years down the path and I say 'no'. Rumination is like an old vinyl record being stuck in a groove, wearing deeper and deeper into the brain. Remember, we GROW our neural network. We develop neural pathways in accordance with what we use the most, which is why it's so hard for us to overwrite the old file we had on our spouse. So, now we're wearing this deep gouge into our brain which is traumatic, depressing, pessimistic, anxious... and within a year or two, we've developed a nasty chemical depression from having our hormones, neurotransmitters, and adrenals all out of whack. And I get it, believe me I do. I fought my IC tooth and nail over rumination. Privately, I continued to believe that I would eventually wrap my mind around the problem and solve it, as if it were a solvable problem. It's not. We can ask ourselves relevant questions like, "Do I stay or do I go?" or "Does s/he really love me?" without holding onto all that angst 24/7. We can even revisit those questions later if we're worried we made the wrong call. But in the interim, yes... I think we should challenge and defeat rumination.
And then there are bids for attention and care. The 'ask' for empathy. Like I said earlier, I don't believe that most WS are capable of understanding in full. How could I have required my fWH to understand something that I myself failed to understand before it happened to me. Because I've had friends go through this, and I felt great sympathy for them. I thought it was empathy, it felt like empathy to me. But no... I wasn't even close to imagining what my friends were going through. And that's all empathy is really, walking the proverbial mile in the other guy's shoes. That's just not possible for this though. We can't account for the brain-jack of trauma.
So, what I figured in my own situation wasn't too much different from what I decided about questions. I filtered through the lens of "How does this help ME?" It's part of the brain-jacking that we want to know every single detail. And some people swear by that No matter how many additional triggers they have to deal with, they want to know everything. And same with this, some people want the WS to know every time they have a feeling or a trigger. But what does that accomplish besides making the WS feel shame? For some BS, they need to see that shame. For others, no. I didn't decide to keep my WS so he could wallow in shameful misery until I could somehow be satisfied that he had suffered enough. When I got past my anger, I didn't want him to suffer. I wanted him to UNDERSTAND. But now, we're back to beginning, in a circular argument because even the most contrite WS is unlikely to REALLY feel our feelings. The WS isn't traumatized. How can they fully empathize with traumatic rumination and the compulsive need for verification and empathy? The only answer is to educate them the best we can regarding TRAUMA so that they at least have a clinical understanding. This clinical understanding can LEAD to real empathy because it doesn't ask the WS to feel shame. Remember, the WS can't feel their own shame and our grief at the same time, so.. the just end up feeling their shame.
For my own situation and after YEARS of rumination followed by a very nasty bout of depression, I finally decided that enough was enough. My feeling are MY feelings. My WH only needs to hear about my feeling when there's something he needs to be DOING about my feelings. Feelings aren't FACTS. They come and they go... IF we allow them to go. Like clouds in the sky, one feeling will drift away to be replaced by another. All I need to do is simply ALLOW.
It's not right and it's not fair... but after an intimate betrayal, we BS have our own work to do. When we are confident that our WS is doing the work required to CHANGE the broken bits of their character which allowed the cheating choice to be made and when we can say without any particle of doubt that our WS would change it all if they could... I think we're safe from the charge of "rugsweeping". IOW, we don't have to expect the unachievable from our WS. No one can peek into anyone else's head and see if they're for real or not. We just have to take that leap of faith and make the call. And that leap isn't about the WS. It's about US. Do we trust our OWN judgment enough to say whether we're safe with this person or not? For me, I know that I've grown and I'm no longer fragile. I can handle whatever comes my way when it comes to this marriage. I am no longer intimidated by the threat of loss because I've faced it already and I know it can't hurt me. So, I'm free to enjoy whatever perks I find in it and I don't suffer anymore over what it lacks. I think so much of what we fear for the future is just pointless anxiety. I was so afraid to get hurt again that I didn't realize I had already dealt with all those sharp, pointy things. My grief had purpose. The things which were lost, the innocence, the specialness, are in the past, dead and grieved over. They aren't rearing up again under ANY circumstances to get me again. I am safe in my OWN hands.
Anyway, long post made shorter. Why not try working on developing her clinical understanding of what you're going through as a means of eventually connecting to her empathy? If you haven't read it already, try The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk. He's pretty much the world's leading expert on trauma. You might also try The Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson. It's geared more toward those who have experienced a walk-away spouse, but the author does a great job of connecting with van der Kolks points regarding the body/brain connection of trauma, and also pulling in our innate fear of abandonment which is still with us from birth. I found that once I could explain WHY I was feeling the way it was, it was so much less threatening to my fWH. He could understand it without either falling into a shame spiral or tuning out.
