Dear Samantha:

I re-read all your posts in the first thread you started on this relationship with this man. This is my understanding:

You were not necessarily deceived by him. Maybe, but not necessarily.

The way you saw him: “a kind, honest, calm, conscious person” was based on looking at the trees, not the forest. That is, you looked at him here and there, in isolated, short periods of time when you met him, communicated with him. Those short spans of time are the trees you were looking at. But you ignored, did not look at lots of trees- didn’t ask him questions, maybe didn’t thoroughly listen to him- so you made assumptions about how the whole forest looks like (kind, honest, calm, etc.) You connected the dots to create a picture, but had too few dots to create a reliable picture.

Your intuition, gut feelings about him are based on those dots that you connected, on those trees, but not on the real picture, or the whole forest.

Intuition, gut feelings, these are good indicators, but need to be combined with looking at the whole forest, the bigger picture, examining and determining more and more dots in the picture before you connect them.

What do you think?

anita