I have a feeling that your h has been stuck for quite some time because rewriting history is an indicator that he could still be in replay. Some are very slow in moving through the stages and others progress quite nicely. Your h could very well be a slow one and is inching his way along. Your h reminds me of HaWho's h. He lived at home, wrote her letters and communicated w/her via text, email and phone. He finally took the plunge and moved out earlier this year. You may want to take a look at her threads.
There is nothing you can do to help him or push him along. He's got to do this all on his own. You will need to keep GALing and doing for yourself and you family. I know focusing on yourself is difficult w/him in the house, but you have to take care of yourself. Treat him as a roommate. Do not do his laundry or any of those wifely things you've done in the past. Start out slowly in ceasing this activities and if he has fired you as a wife, time for the "old boy" to be accountable for himself and his surroundings.
I know you don't like to do things like this, but in his mind, he could very well think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and he needs to discover just how good he has it at home and the only way to do that is treat him like a son and make him accountable for his own things.
As for counseling, continue to go by yourself. He won't listen to what the counselor has to say and he's no where near being ready for this step.
Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to. The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
Thank you for the advice, Job. Still hoping that some people will post stories here,but I guess those who have succeeded usually don't come back. I took a look at the thread you mentioned and it sucked all the life out of me! I had better stick to prayer but I did learn a lot from my foray back onto this board, and gained a lot of understanding of what is happening, it was really helpful and helped me to detach again. I realize now that he basically rebombed me, that he is "in monster" again, and that the whole MLC just started over. This is helpful to realize, because I had gotten confused and was actually listening to his words! Now I can detach. He is out of money so he may try to divorce me now so that he can get money out of our house, the last two days he is nonstop threatening that and spewing all kinds of monster like the early days. It is horrible, a living nightmare started all over again but I have some peace and feel a little ready. I will keep standing for our marriage even if through divorce.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
Wow. I just read this current thread. Unbelievable. Having a live-in MLCer for 5 years sounds just unbearable. I've been living with my MLCer for a little over 2 years, I can't imagine what you've been through. You have the patience of a saint.
May I ask, where does he physically reside in the house? How often does he interact with your children? Does he leave the house often? What is an average day like?
You can feel crazy living in their insane life that seems totally normal to them. Hugs to you.
M: 49, W: 45 T: 22 M: 15 S14, S11, S9 BD: Jan '16 W files: Oct '16 D final: June '18
Hi Garda. I can’t even imagine 5 years with a live in MLCer. I am a year and a half in with one and I can’t imagine the endurance and patience needed for that long. You are a ROCK! I really wish I could comment on your withdrawal question. I feel like mine runs through multiple stages at once sometimes, but I don’t think she is in withdrawal. The hardest part for me is to not cycle up and down with her. I hope someone can chime in on your question because I am intereted in hearing an answer too. Sorry you are back here again, but at least there are new friends here to make. Not really much of a consolation, but I’m glad you decided to start posting again.
Brubeck and sjohn6, thank you for writing to me. It actually means a lot to me that you are both men. It's hard for me to imagine there are men who would be faithful and true, though I do see many here and in my marriage ministry. Not that I think it's about men -- I have even more trouble trusting women since some woman took my husband all these years while still having her own husband and kids. It is surely a lonely venture. It means a lot to me that you read my story and think that I sound kind. I am so full of doubt in my house, about myself. I feel so ugly too, and aging.
I feel very blessed in my relationship to God and am totally sustained by that. I am grateful for this journey that brought me to him. But I am very very tired and at the end of my rope. Lately things are so very awful that I don't think my answers to your questions are going to be as accurate, because for a while it wasn't like this. He is back to being a monster but all is being presented as his new unconditionally loving powerful self who has to protect himself from my control of everything (e.g.,money) and become a man again.
For the last couple of years,I was pretty strong and hopeful. Right now, though I keep returning to faith and hope in prayer, I am drowning and afraid in my own house -- not of physical violence but of his words. I hide in my room and avoid the house a lot. He has slept on the couch or in my daughter's room there are two twin beds there) since 2013. I have been alone and chaste the whole time.
Now he is obsessed with leaving us but in this really wacky spiritual way where he keeps talking about the God of his heart. But I guess he is no longer a Christian, it's some spiritual mumbo jumbo, and I get the feeling he is seeing some counselor who told him to leave me, I guess because he has painted me as such a monster.
That is what I find hardest. I doubt myself when he says these horrible things to me. I know I wasn't a perfect wife before, spent the first year changing myself and apologizing, and then when he went crazy I had to keep him out of the bank accounts and everything else, so it is true that I did end up blocking him, but I kept giving him money out of my own meager salary all the time, whenever he needed it, so that he could finish his dissertation. He still hasn't finished it and I guess has forgotten all the money I gave him, or thinks it was just part of my controlling plan.
Before that, we shared everything, even a cell phone and e-mail address. We really were very in love. Looking back, I guess he had the seeds of this. He had a few small breakdowns, including one in our first year together.
After BD, before I understood what was happening, I tried to share all the bills and give him all the credit cards because he said was I was controlling everything and I thought that must be true. But he couldn't stop spending, so I cancelled the cards and blocked him. If he got a hold of my credit cards once MLC hit, he just started spending. He would take money from my wallet a lot too. But now, even tonight, we had a huge fight and he denies all that from the past, says I kept him down our whole marriage before he snapped, and says that he "showed people the books" and they said I am a chaotic mess and I am not so great with money but just keep blocking him from everything. I am not sure what he is talking about but I think it was something from five years ago when he first went crazy and took all the bookkeeping stuff to show to some friends. He wanted to take over everything then too, it's like we're just on repeat of a horrible movie.
I do not think it would be possible to stand for your marriage in my circumstances without God -- and specifically without Christ. There would be no way to make meaning out of the extremely intense and constant suffering. I have a lot of peace in prayer, and clarity. But by the world's standards, what I am doing is insane. And I am really struggling. I don't want to divorce or ever remarry, but I want to be alone. I am very scared of him being with my kids; he has ignored them all this time but it feels even scarier to have him alone with them without me nearby. Again, not because of violence, just because he is so intense and says such crazy things.
I don't usually do this and will probably regret it, but I thought I would paste the two letters I got from him today so you can see what I mean. I guess I want confirmation that he sounds totally crazy. He is trying to make me sell everything so that he can have "his half." We have a house with a business in it and selling it would be extremely stupid, we'd lose so much to capital gains tax and have to buy a much less valuable property as we have no cash and huge debts; but it's especially stupid because he wants to sell it so that he won't have to work. He makes very little money and gives me none. In between semesters, he makes nothing and that is what is scaring him now, because he knows it's coming and that I am done supporting him.
Here is the first letter I got today. Most of them are like this or way worse. I changed my real name but used "Gerds" because he was using a very intimate nickname for me.
Gerds, This is a personal letter.
I loved that — despite the current unfolding — we were able to be kind and civil with each other this morning around D9 and around (my friend) last night. It fills me with immensities of peace and hope to know that love can abide in the context of deep differences between persons. And so I write because I want no ambiguity or false-sentiment in-between us but only reality and truth in-btween us, specifically the reality and truth (for me anyway) that love can coexist even between persons [i]separating.[/i]
I am going through with this. I am moving out of (our house). But, for my part, I have zero intention of moving away from you or from my children on the level of what I understand and what I definitively feel as love. Possibly for the first time in my life I believe I am capable of true unconditional love— love for myself, love for all human [i]others, love for nature, for work, for career, for all things.
I'll enlist a mediator, yes, once (his friend) provides me with a name. And in light of my final commitment to the reality that the nature of our relating with each other is irredeemable, I am motioning to claim my half of our total shared assets. I won't, Gerds, face another summer in poverty and humiliation before my kids, and I won't face the humiliation of often having less than 20 dollars in my account for about 5 days before my next paycheck, and I won't face the humiliation of debt collectors breathing on me from all angles—[i] I won't defile the renewed image that I have of myself as worthy of love and life by living anymore like a beggar, when, partly owing to my own initiative, I am a man who can claim arguably a 1.5 million dollars in assets (this is an inflation of half the equity).
Ambitious, pragmatic, practical, business-like I am?
No.
I am nothing short of a man who is investing everything he has in his commitment to construct for himself a healthy, loving, redeemed image of self, of home, and, most importantly, of "Father."
I finally now, as of the last year, live no longer, Gerds, with the "old-man" in me, with the image of incompetence and servility and gross dependency that my old man put in me and which — even if its by the felt-life of my account only — you did very little to overturn and a lot to strengthen. By my account — and I freely grant that possess an opposed account — I feel that I was very wrong to allow myself to remain complacent before all the forces under our roof that potently reified my readiness to remain servile before your exorbitant power, ambition and heft with regard to the basic unfolding of a shared life; and I feel that you were very wrong to kindle my latent readiness to be servile and adolescently dependent, for whenever I dared to trespass the old-man in me by exerting initiative I was silenced, for too many years in a row.
I can live no longer in the image of a victim, and under the assumption (erroneously held by you, by my kids, by parents, others) that I am incompetent on matters fiscal and economic (and should therefore never in 15 years have the slightest bit of final control over bank accounts, over how our money was channeled and used), that I am incompetent as a caregiver, that I am incompetent as a father, that I am incompetent as the overseer and final decision maker of the very nooks and crannies of what a home and a family looks like and what its destiny may be.
Gerds, I know it may hurt you to hear it but I have to justify and public voice my present choices: you have to know that you have an inordinate amount of power and ambition and control on matters practical and pragmatic and domestic that in the end — for the last 4.5 years — functioned to first cripple and then put to death my desire to recover myself as a father and as a husband and as a home-maker. So, finally my present choice to leave (our home) constitutes the image of man who is for once being truly practical, and for once being courageous enough to face the truth: that love can coexist even between persons separating.
I do nothing more right now than give expression to my painstaking commitment to an evolved image of love, of family, of home, of father. I genuinely — without the slightest bit of equivocation or apology -- exist painstakingly to put love between us, and between me and everyone I know. That — the lover — is the image of myself that I am going on — and no other image anymore.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
And then we had a big fight after that letter, because I came home and he was there and I was too stupid to not engage. And I left the house and shortly thereafter got this one --
Gerds, I want it known: until I the day I leave — and I will be leaving, in however many months it takes to legally effect what I am working now to effect — I’ll be here in (our house) every single day with a readiness to love you and my kids, and with an elevated intention to spend more time with my kids then I have in the last 4.5 years. I want to meet with you to establish a schedule. I will talk to S12 and D9 about my plans and about my view of fatherhood, and love— strictly and principally in ways that do not disparage you one dot, but in ways that can provide a glimpse onto who I know myself to be. I hope I’ll have your cooperation— and not your resistance — in my attempt to get closer to them during this time.
As for D9’s party tomorrow, I’ll be here.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
Also i never answered Brubeck's question about the kids -- for the most part, total withdrawal from both. Much worse withdrawal from my son, who he adored and who adored him. He barely interacted with either kid for a long while, but a tiny bit more with my daughter. In the past year, he was spending a little time with her here and there. Nothing with my son and he can go days with nothing but a hair tousle and yelling at him for using his charger. My son is now a truant and is very rageful and horrible most of the time but at night needs to lie next to me to fall asleep and is obsessed with making sure I will not die. I have to spend 2-3 hours per day trying to get him to go to school (and you can imagine the effect on my work life) but I often fail, he skips school 2-3 times per week and is late the other days. I am working on getting him into a special school but have to hide this from my H, who disapproves of my mothering. My H just tunes it all out or tells me to let my son create his own destiny and stop pushing him.
But just a few months ago, we seemed to be co-parenting more and sometimes he would help me when my son was raging, he would come and put a stop to it. Not in a loving way, but helping me.
And then all that changed. I think that his current financial situation has caused a total relapse and he is back to bomb drop. I am in the same boat or worse, financially, as I am paying everything myself including our joint debt, but I found a lot of jobs and just work my ass off to keep the kids and the house afloat. My H doesn't want to work and so he wants his half of the house so he can have money. In thinking about it through the many posts I made today, I realize that the financial crunch coming to a head basically pushed him back into the tunnel, and it seems like he is starting the whole MLC cycle over.
I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
I have deleted three postings this morning of yours because you only had your signature line posted and nothing else. I also checked my emails and sure enough you had a posting out there you wanted me to copy and paste to your thread. When I attempted to post your response to your thread, my entire posting was not accepted by the system. I then retyped my response concerning your three (3) postings this morning and my response was then posted. Evidently, your posting was not accepted/censored by the system and I do not know why it wasn't accepted.
Unfortunately, moderators are not always informed as to why postings are not approved, deleted, etc. Sorry!
Gerda, I am so sorry you have to go through this. Those letters are very cold and selfish and the wording is just bizarre, not even taking in to account the content. Who talks like that?
I know how you feel about how the conversations break you down. I have always been a very confident person, but this thing has broken me down. Me and W had a great relationship before so I don't even get a real excuse as to why this happened to us. I cooked, cleaned, did laundry, helped with all the kid stuff, took care of the cars, and the yard duties. I also have a good job and not to toot my own horn...but am told that I'm a looker too. Not to say I did all that stuff on my own without her, but we shared all the responsibilities. Her only complaint is that we lost out connection to each other and didn't go out enough as a couple. That may be true as we have 2 teenage kids with full schedules, but it was something that I wanted too and tried to work on once I realized it was an issue.
My point in telling you that is to say that they will find an issue to justify their "feelings" even if there isn't one readily available. Please try not to take the things he says personal. Sure there may be a kernel of truth to what he says, but this is not how couples handle these things. I've owned up to my part, and it sounds like you have too...but it hasn't been enough to turn things around. That's because it isn't really about us. Its all about them and the demons they have to wrestle.
In the end, they just have to work through it themselves and we need to protect ourselves in the interim. I wish that were as easy to do as it is to say. I struggle often. Try to put the focus back on you and do something that makes you happy and I'll do the same.
