Dear Juanita:

I wrote to you: “When we, unloved girls turned women, have a good enough man, but not perfect and powerful, we punish him, as if he did us wrong by not being the god we need him to be”-

– notice the adjective “a good enough man”? I thought maybe your husband has been a good enough man, but a “compulsive liar, for one.. says he can’t stop” is not a good enough man.

My point is that as the social animals that we are, we can’t feel that we are valuable before someone else values us first. We need our parent or parents to value us. When they don’t, we need someone else to value us. For many, it happens first in the context of an empathetic, professional psychotherapist. A person who is a compulsive liar cannot be that trustworthy mirror I mentioned.

It happens in other women’s lives (and it happened in  mine as well) when a woman has a good enough man, a decent, honest man, but the woman doesn’t appreciate him because he is imperfect and not all powerful. After reading your most recent post, I realize this is not your situation.

anita