Why I Care About My Memoir (and you might too) Part 2

Ever heard of crazymaking? I thought I'd processed all there was to process about my difficult marriage, but today my mind has been blown. 

As you may know, my memoir, God, the Devil, and Divorce is finished for now, and I'm working on some marketing strategies to include in my submission letters to agents. Those include identifying comparable books. Divorce and recovery and Christian divorce are two categories I'm exploring. There's a third category I believe is important. In the memoir, I tell of a session with a new counselor who identifies my husband as a crazymaker. So, today I decided to look at recent books about crazy-making behavior.

I didn't find any books, but I did find a few articles. In reading the descriptions of crazymakers, I realized for the first time the extent of my husband's crazymaking. Incident after incident with that seemed random and often confusing at the time came under this definition. 

This description struck me as the core of what I was dealing with. "We end up taking that person’s behavior personally, and believing that the crazy-maker in our life could change if they wanted to. But they can’t." (https://www.psychologytoday.com /experts/kimberly-key) He couldn't change? No surprise now that I was wasting my efforts trying to fix our marriage, dragging us to counselor after counselor over the years. If I've had any lingering doubt that I could have done something more to make our marriage work, this puts the nail in that coffin ... an unexpected benefit of writing my story.

So what is a crazymaker? Here are two more articles that detail that behavior.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/ten-examples-crazy-making-relationships.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-paul-phd/crazy-making_b_5860048.html

Have you had a crazymaker in your life or know someone who has? What did you do about it? Are you a memoir writer who has discovered something surprising about your past? I hope you'll share that, too..

Blessings,
Linda
#memoir