Today I realize that it is best to tackle fear head on. As someone who is a bipolar with anxiety issues, it is much harder to do than most. It is as if I have the weight of the world on my shoulders. I have allowed these thoughts and fears to take over and I mean take over. It doesn't help that I have quite a few struggles including how I feel about myself. Is there a link between anxiety and how one feels about themselves? I do and now I wonder if I had dealt with the anxiety then I would like myself more. Maybe there is no link at all. I don't know.
That is how I feel meanwhile about why I have obsessive thoughts about infidelity at all. The truth is, I will never know. The best thing to deal with these thoughts is to accept the fact that I have them. I have my own thoughts about infidelity and I do come across as a hypocrite since according to the thoughts, a promiscuous wife is no wife at all. She is selfish and contemptible. I don't think of the cheating man in the same way as it is in his DNA. Men usually cheat more than women.
However, reality says different. Men and women cheat. While most women and men are faithful, I focus on those who have committed infidelity. I have to fight these thoughts daily. I am afraid of the triggers. The anxiety and the fear has had a control over my life for many years. It all started out within the past decade. Things have changed. My health has gotten worse, and my self-esteem lowered and I became more self-conscious. On the other hand, I became older, wiser, and more spiritual. If I could embrace aging then I could embrace anything. How hard can it be?
It has been hard to say the least. How can reconcile reality and how I feel about infidelity to what my mind says to me? It has been hard for me to reconcile fact from fiction. For example a fictional wife is caught in bed with another man, therefore I hate her and the person who plays her. The stories of actual cheating wives don't bother me anymore. OCD makes no sense and it probably never has. Trying to apply logic to OCD is impossible. The best thing I can do is not only to face the fear head on but to not rationalize or fight but to embrace it as a thought that goes against all that I have and all who I am. I have to just see it as a thought, nothing less, nothing more.
I know that infidelity is wrong and it is a selfish, sinful act in which there is no justification. I realize that one doesn't have to be pure evil or immoral to do wrong. On the other hand, it doesn't make one a good person either. I am not saying that adulterers are all evil, but if that were the case, so are the rest of us. I too am an adulterer. I am unfaithful, selfish, and have done some evil, cowardly things in my life. For example, a man who has said that his dead wife slept with everyone. I can dismiss it as a thought and that she did not literally sleep with everyone, but she should not have cheated with so many people. If the person was a man, then I would say the same thing. Having said all of that, maybe I should take the time to write out those thoughts and then replace them with what is real and what is mundane and what is true. What is true is that like Gomer and the adulteress in John 8, the two guilty women were redeemed and that unrepentant sinners like adulterers do not spend eternity with God. What is also true is that like the adulterer we all are against the Lord. I could just replace these thoughts with true thoughts that express what I feel about the situation and how I truly feel about said adulterer. I thought about it this morning and I realize some strategy has be be used to view the thoughts as illogical and something to embrace. It is hard to explain but the strategy is to not to let the fear and anxiety take over. I hope this "strategy" works.
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