Unconditional Positive Regard

My therapist has used the term "unconditional positive regard" to describe the amount of grace I have extended to my ex-husband and the rose colored glasses view I have had of him for so many months post-divorce.  She has watched the evolution in me as I have processed and started to heal.  I think when we first started working together towards the beginning of the year, I was still talking very highly of him with little negative.  Bit by bit, I've gained clarity.  And seeing myself in his new girlfriend a little over a week ago was really impactful and likely a turning point.

So tonight she asked me whether my unconditional positive regard was starting to fade.  I found it interesting that I didn't automatically say yes.  I paused.  I said, "I don't like him very much anymore."  And then I went on to say that I no longer assume he had good intentions.  I feel like that last statement reflected something new in me, something I had not yet (until that moment) been ready to say out loud.

A big part of my unconditional positive regard was this assumption that he didn't mean it, that he didn't intend to hurt me in the ways he did.  I had every excuse ready on the tip of my tongue for why he behaved the way he did.

I'm sure I held onto that assumption for so long because I didn't want to believe that the man who promised to love me forever would intentionally cause me harm.  I didn't want to face the fact that I could have been that wrong about someone.  I didn't want to believe that someone I had given so much to could be that cruel to me.

That's not to say I'm going to sit here and try to parse out his intentions.  They don't actually matter.  But I do know that he chose to ignore the impact his actions were having on me.  He chose to stay in a relationship he wasn't willing to invest in.  He chose not to communicate with me.  He chose to misunderstand me.  He chose to silently hold onto resentments for years.  And he chose to lay all the blame on me.

So, yes, my unconditional positive regard is absolutely fading.  And maybe my hesitation to automatically name that tonight was that I fear when it is gone, I will no longer understand what I saw in him in the first place.  But maybe that speaks more to how far I have come and how much I have grown, to the point where I struggle to recognize the girl I was over two decades ago.