How well do you know your partner? Your best friend? Neighbor? Brother or sister-in-law? How well do we really know anyone? How many times have you heard yourself say, “Oh no, he/she would never do anything like that?“ And what degree of certainty would you place on your assumption? We all think we are pretty good judges of character. We would all know if someone in our circle was kinda ‘off,’ right?

I love those real crime shows like 48 Hours, Dateline, Forensic Files and 20/20. I love the way they lay out the evidence, so one minute you think the perpetrator is this person, but the next minute, it could be someone else. For all of us amateur detectives we’re able to use logic and reason and our gut instincts to come to our own conclusions. Most of us watch these kind of shows because we want, better yet, we need to understand what drives a person to commit such heinous acts.

The most common theme for murder on these shows is a spouse murdering their partner for money, a new lover, or both. It’s unfathomable to us how someone could justify killing the one person, they should love the most, for selfish gain. It’s like they perceive this person as their personal object, a toy that they no longer want to play with, that they are free to discard at any time, and in any manner they see fit. Another common theme is, the jilted lover, who comes back to exact his/her revenge by murdering the object of their fury.  In this scenario it’s your life for my wounded pride.

Human beings are a lot less complicated than you might think . The great motivators for most people, are the desire for survival, sex and love, and power and money. There are other motivators too, like revenge, but usually when you find change, it’s being driven by one of these.

Introspection is the ability to look deep inside and examine your own feelings, thoughts and motives. It’s necessary for growth and change. Surprisingly, not everyone can do introspection. Many either lack the ability, or the desire.

When we don’t look inside at what drives us and others, you’ll feel a sense of disconnect and a separateness that makes us feel alone. Not being in touch with ourselves, can keep us stuck and in a state of denial.

For most of my life I didn’t do introspection. I walked around believing that I was a normal girl, from a normal family, doing normal things and I believed that in my relationships, I was the normal one, I just always seemed to pick the wrong men. I even remember throwing around

“It does give you an extra bit of a thrill. It’s forbidden, so it feels a bit more naughty and erotic, which makes it so much harder to resist.” – Chantelle The Other Woman (TOW) 

In our minds, the other woman is a mysterious femme fatal, who uses her whiles to manipulate and connive. The other woman is a thief and when she seduces your man, she has stolen so much more than your partner. She’s taken your self-esteem, your future and your sense of security, peace and justice and in return, she’s given you gut wrenching heartache, humiliation, jealousy, rage and crippling fear.

We love to hate the other woman. It’s easy to hate her. What is surprising is how we are able to brush aside our mate’s indiscretion and make her the focus of our malcontent. We do that because a part of us expects it from men, the other part wants to believe that he is a victim too, that he wouldn’t purposely betray us. She must have done something, promised him something or seduced him somehow. She has cast a spell or some kind of a web, that he just couldn’t free himself from. She used her sexuality to coerce him into doing things he wouldn’t normally do. She should know better and she’s broken the sister code, so it’s all her fault. She knows the vulnerability of his biology, and for all these reasons we save most of our outrage for her.

“I liked the feeling of being chosen over someone else. I really wasn’t thinking about his wife, or her feelings. I was just thinking about how I felt and when he wanted me, I felt really good.” – Jessie -The Other Woman (TOW)

We all want our relationships to workout. We’ve all grown up with the adages that relationships require work, compromise and sacrifice. The problem many of us have is knowing when to keep fighting and knowing when it’s time to let go and move on.

De-coupling can be complicated and scary. Certainly there is a great deal of fear and uncertainty involved, but staying together when you are both deliriously unhappy has equally negative repercussions.

Staying with someone, for reasons other than love, commitment and happiness, stops you from living a full authentic life. For one, it means that you’ve accepted that the romantic aspect of your life will remain unfulfilled and that there will be an absence of intimacy for the rest of your days.

Your home is supposed to be your castle – the one place where you feel safe and comfortable. It’s supposed to be the place where you want to be – your sanctuary but, if you live in a hostile environment, you won’t get through without battle scars.

When the person closest to you treats you like an enemy – what does that do to your self-esteem?

When the one person that should love you the most doesn’t – how do we explain it to ourselves or others?

Imagine for a moment, that you were an emotional predator and that, in order for you to just feel normal, you needed people to like you and to want you. You’ve got to con your way into your target’s life, heart and/or bed, in order to obtain this objective, and you need to do so quickly and with the least amount of effort. What would you do? Where would you go to achieve this?

Online dating sites are ripe with emotional manipulators. At the touch of a button, you can sort through a myriad of profiles, just like you would leaf through a catalogue. And at the same time, you can create your own profile, whose sole purpose is to attract as many prey as possible. In this imaginary online world, you can lie about your age, your profession, your income, your education, your likes and dislikes and if you’re a somatic Narcissist you can even post muscled body pics, or highly provocative cleavage shots, for just the right effect. 

“I typed in the nickname he uses on his Xbox and social media accounts. This search led me to his profile on the free dating site, Plenty of Fish…his profile was filled with so many

The whole concept of forgiveness sounds like a huge cliché doesn’t it? Somehow, by some stroke of magic, forgiving someone, who has done you a terrible wrong, is supposed to make you feel better. That sentiment has always sounded a little ridiculous to me.

We’re probably all familiar with Buddha’s famous quote, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

That sounds logical in principal, but the reality of giving someone a free pass after they hurt you, just doesn’t sit well with a lot of us. It’s like saying, “You know what – it’s all good. Don’t worry about it. It’s just my feelings, my life, my self-esteem and my heart that you crushed – but hey – no biggie.”  I would equate that with the doormat-like behavior I’ve fought so hard to get away from.

Forgiveness just doesn’t seem to give a sense of empowerment. The whole idea of it makes a lot of people mad, because you know what?  Hurting me – is a big deal – it’s not all good – and there should be some sort of universal justice that holds people accountable.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Yes,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I logged into Pete’s Ipad and I found all these email addresses that I didn’t know he had.”

“Ohhhhh. I don’t like where this is going.” I replied.

“The emails are linked to all these dating websites. He was not only talking to other women online, but he was meeting up with them. There are emails making plans to hook up and then emails afterwards, saying how hot it was. And they go back to before we got married. He’s been cheating the whole time.”

This was the phone call I got this week from a dear friend of mine, pretty much verbatim. I felt sick after I hung up. Sick at the feelings that I knew my friend was going through and sick at the fact that her partner Pete, had fooled us all.