Are you a positive influence on your MP?

[cocorico]

What I'd like to focus on today is the subject of influence. Did you, as an OP, have a positive influence on your MP, and if so, do you know or suppose the BS in your triangle currently benefits from the influence you are or were on your MP? Have you heard feedback on whether the BS is aware of any positive personal changes and of how they came about? Does the BS have any clue at all that the positive change was due to your influence? Does he/she applaud/downplay your efforts? Or does your MP take full credit of his/her self-improvements in order to keep the peace?

 

This thread is for those who have experience with a MP's personal growth in a positive way. If you're a BS and can honestly share positive changes you personally witnessed and know that that influence came from the OP feel free to share. I thank you in advance for keeping this thread on topic and considerate.

 

I suppose this comes down to who considers whether an influence is positive or negative.

 

In my case, I would guess I influenced a number of positive outcomes:

• He sought counselling
  
• He took his kids to family counselling
  
• He reconnected with his authentic personality
  
• He made contact with his own emotions again, instead of merely mirroring hers
  
• He overcame his long-term depression
  
• He reconnected with his extended family
  
• His relationships with his parents, siblings, and kids improved, dramatically (by their assessment, as well as his)
  
• He became more engaged in his work again
  
• His Rs with his colleagues improved
  
• His social life took off again
  
• He developed new interest and hobbies, and started learning again, and became decades younger in outlook
  
• He started living again, instead of merely treading water
  
• He left his toxic M.
  

 

His long-term friends, his family, his kids, his colleagues, his IC and he himself have all stated that they consider m influence to have been overwhelmingly positive.

 

But I guess his xW would issue a minority report contesting that. His personal growth was not in her best interest, and so she would have experienced that to be at her expense, and so she would definitely not have benefitted except in ways she chose not to recognise (such as having her narcissistic supply removed, affording her an opportunity to confront her narcissism and establish a healthier way of relating).

 

So I guess it would all depend on who you asked. Ask someone who cares for, or about him, and they'd agree. Ask the fBW, and she'd demur. Unsurprising, and not uncommon, I'd imagine.

[White Flower]

Guys that cheat on their wives and create girlfiends out of those women don't suffer from anxiety. The balls it takes to create an entirely separate relationship and keep it from your real family are astronomically big.

 

A guy like that is more than capable of playing wolf in sheep's clothing to get what he wanted from you.

 

"Create girlfriends out of these women"? What women, and how are they created? I'm fairly certain most Rs are mutually developed rather than created.

 

Yes, I agree it takes courage to create a secret life, but not so much when you know there will be no real punishment for it. In my case the MM had nothing to lose. 19 Ddays with me alone proves that.

 

Anxiety usually sets in when he has to lose one or the other or both, not at the outset of the A. And the A is usually started when issues in the M cause anxiety for the WS who wants a cure for that anxiety, wrong or right.