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Gerda Offline OP
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My friend's restaurant I mentioned before is the Red Oak Cafe. There is always some ministry happening there just because people go there seeking a like-minded community. But for the actual standers group, here's what she told me --

There is a very small Houston-based group that has branched off a bigger standers Facebook group out of Florida called Standers United. The leader of that group is named Sheila Hollinger. The Houston area standers is also based on Facebook, and it is called Houston Area Standers. In that Houston Area Standers group, several of them will come in and meet at the Red Oak Cafe (in Friendswood) and have breakfast.


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.
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Gerda, I was thinking about you today and the longevity of your live-in MLCer and the difficulty with detaching. btw, I agreee with the crazy language of your Hs notes...who talks like that??

So, Ive had a really hard time detaching and wondered why for some time. It seems that others have an easier time of it but I just havent been able to wrap my head around it. Then, just recently, I felt it. I am truly starting to detach and I know it because it FEELS different. The thing that changed is that W is moving out. After a couple of weeks of W taking the kids to look at houses and being adamant about moving (after 18 months of live-in MLC), something clicked inside and I accepted that she was moving. After I finally accepted that she was moving out and that I would be alone for half the time since we will share the kids, I emotionally detached.

My point is that you should not beat yourself up about the detachment thing. It is REALLY HARD with a live in. I really think that has been what has what has made it so hard to detach for me. You are doing a great job!

On another note, I really like the idea of a standers group. I think Ill look for one in my area...or start one if there isnt one.


Me: 45 yrs
W: 43 yrs
Together: 20 yrs
Married: 15 yrs
Son: 19 yrs
Daughter: 18 yrs
BD: Jan 2017
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RESTORED POSTING FOR COLY

Hi Gerda, just stopping by to say hi and thank you for your great post on my thread.

I can't imagine what it is like to live with someone in crisis. My Sister has also been doing this for years and I only just realised it. She is very strong and although not detached she has never considered asking her H to move out. Like I say she is not detached at all because sometimes I cringe with what goes on between them. I think it must be very hard to detach when you are living together still.

sjohns, do you think it is easier to detach as this is the second time your W is leaving? I know at BD my H kept threatening to leave and I thought I had accepted that he would until one day he threatened again and I told him if he wants to leave then he should right now and he did. I thought I was strong and detached but afterwards I fell apart with the reality of it all! This was before I found this site.

Hugs (((Gerda)))

Last edited by job; 06/09/18 12:10 AM.

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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.
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Gerda Offline OP
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Coly, thank you so much for posting here! I am really happy if anything I said was helpful. And tell your sister I gave her a virtual high five for making it through the live-in MLC so far. Sounds like you need to help her detach; maybe as you gain wisdom in this, you'll be able to help her too -- and then you will realize there was an additional meaning to your going through it!

Also maybe you were strong and detached about the MLC. But when he actually left, you had to become even stronger and even more detached. You had gained a certain amount of strength already. So you might have thought that you fell apart but maybe it would have been much much worse if you hadn't already done some of that work. You are stronger than you think! I had a BD 2 and people on this board really helped me to see that I was stronger than I was at BD 1 and that I would keep getting stronger, wiser, lighter.

Not that I don't still post desperately here and check in to see if anyone replied to my thread with a similar desperation at times. But if I look clearly at the last five years, I can see that I have come a long way, baby. The first year I took up smoking again, for example! I was also like a walking battery juiced up on battery acid. Now I am much calmer most of the time, much more clear about when to lean harder on God and let go, I don't smoke of course, I started a side career I love, I am still walking despite all the impossibilities of my life, sometimes I even feel a little joy.


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.
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Gerda Offline OP
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Hello, Everyone out there in MLC land --

I have been doing a pretty good job detaching these days, ignoring insane e-mails, etc. Looking at the despair when it comes and doing something else so I won't sink into it.

I know that it is not very DB but I did give my H money from my savings this month. He is starting a job in a week and had a month with no income. I am not sure if I just don't realize that I gave him the money because I couldn't take the onslaught of e-mails and anger any more(e.g., too weak to detach) but what I had done was pray a lot about it and decided that if my project is to stand for this marriage, I would rather give away a thousand dollars this summer than refuse to help when H is out of work. It is totally unfair and not right in the eyes of the world or the tenets of DB but I felt peaceful about it.

Of course, with MLC, no amount of money will ever be enough. I know this. Still, I was a bit surprised when the almost $900 I offered in the last few weeks is already down to $12 in his account. I also gave him the famous spreadsheet Job recommended, which shows my circumstances to be a million times more dire than his, and he either hasn't read it, can't understand it or his MLC brain can't take in anything that involves caring about someone else.

I must be at a pretty good place right now because I am calm about it, doing my own thing, able to work without getting overly distracted. And this is in the context of a lot of bad behavior; I really must be detaching. I am only a little unsure if I should totally ignore today's e-mail because of the words of love in it and the fact that he seems to be trying so hard to have me understand him. We talk a lot about active listening to them so I was thinking about that. But mostly I have no desire to answer, I am much happier ignoring. And tomorrow and Monday are Father's Day and H's birthday so I will be showing some nice attention that way.

I am going to post the e-mail separately since the goblins of the board will probably make it disappear. the e-mail included screen shots of his bank accounts and a screenshot of the lyrics to the nursery rhyme "life is but a dream." Maybe it will also help some other LBS to see these pretty crazy things and see that I am at a point of detachment!


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.
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RESTORED POSTING FOR GERDA

Also I have actually given him $900 in the last three weeks. They even rewrite current history.

Gerds,

Just to offer a direct sense of my experience of life, and I offer it absolutely independently of all the clever answers to questions that I or you can identify as the source of my experience of life,here attached below is where I stand monetarily today in June. With 12 dollars.

As I explained 150 of that 600 you provided more than a week ago went towards removing two negative balances. And as scheduled, this morning Greenpath automatically withdrew 225 for the month of June. I was left with 225. Definitively nothing exorbitant, merely expenses like buying staple groceries for a week's worth of breakfasts and dinners, train tickets to job, 8 lunches out, a 23 hair cut, 4 hair gel from K-mart, a crepe for D9, etc., abides in the explanation for why 225 comes down to 12 left to spend for a normal man in June.

I am not angry or frustrated. Nor does this email exist as a plea for more money. I'll get through this all on my own.

As I said, I just want to enrich your sense of the experience of my life with the totality of my own experience of what I feel as the maladaptive experience of an unequally shared life. I know it is the experience of what Plato called a quotes good man. Plato also said a quotes good man cannot suffer. Bound up in this total quotes experience of life, too, have been negotiations with the Federal Student Loan Commission and the New York Department of Labor. Both alerted me last week that they will be putting leans on and freezing my bank accounts in coming weeks.

Totally unequivocally unsustainable my situation apparently is for all human persons, and it is the situation of a man who for 15 years boundlessly gave himself over to the great risk of creating preeminently sustainable and good life.

But not surprisingly, for a person who believes in perennial wisdom, I miraculously have peace in the face of this unsustainable reality.

Quixotically and paradoxically, I have an everdeepening and profound evenness of mind and of love that I have never ever had before. I have this love, a love which knows no boundaries, for you, for the kids, for summer, for nature, for civilization, for June, for all the people I daily talk with at the Department of Labor and at the Loan Commission.

Peace, I am now sure, is an inner kingdom. Dickens never believed it even as Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare parentheses cf a naked Lear did. And so if my outer kingdom should grow apparently fruitful again I will know it to be a fruitfulness that grows on the soil of an creative-aesthetic goodness that is going on for me and which has always been going on for me on the inside.

I have always for better or worse really believed not what a name of rich friend or a name of a bourgeois friend or a name of catholic friend who has sexless marriage or my mother or your dad or even your status loving and wealth-seeking brother has ever really believed:

- artists, authentically creative persons are like warriors or like marathon runners,

- they take on monumental insane challenges and accomplishes them with remarkable skill, daring and endurance, and rarely do they get the recognition they deserve

- artists, authentically creative persons are also like lovers dash they lay their hearts on the line and make works of evolution and deeper adaptability with an unconditional love dash whether or not love for one's work is returned by onlookers

- artists, authentically creative persons are also finally like prophet dash shamans dash they make something out of nothing, or something new out of something old, and thereby transform collective understanding by moving people from mundane, outmoded, dysfunctional, unequal, maladaptive conditions of life to transcendent, ever new, adaptive ways and experiences of life.

Abiding in perennial wisdom is nothing if it is not a "way of learning how to face the challenges of being a person who is committed to creative evolution with a calm - evenness of mind, with an inner-kingdom love that knows no boundaries, and with an endurance that, in the face of horror, says yes, dash life is very beautiful."

H

Last edited by job; 06/16/18 07:52 AM. Reason: removed daughter's name

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.
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Gerda,

Have you given any thought to what I suggested about the lengthy postings? People are discovering that lengthy postings are also being caught by the system. So, please reduce the length of your postings, i.e., even if you have to post several times...just to see if that will help.

Also, when restoring your posting, I was completely confused by your typing of bullet, dash, colon, etc. So, I edited it the way I thought it might look.


Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to.
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I am sorry but has he hit his head against a rock or is constantly on magic mushrooms? This reads like a 15 year old writing cr*p they know nothing about but with an absolute belief in their own wisdom.

How do you keep yourself from slapping him silly?

Sorry, sorry, this is probably not helpful...

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Gerda Offline OP
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Hi, Marvin -- That made me laugh. Yeah, I did used to want to slap him and have done so a couple times when OW was mentioned. The money stuff turns me more into a frightened person than an angry person. The rest I can handle.

I only do whatever I do manage through prayer and a conviction that God is with me through anything that happens. I consider people in horrible situations -- the Holocaust, Syria, Rwanda for example -- and consider that we are not here to avoid suffering but that meaning may come to us through it if we are patient and trust. I feel that God made it clear that it won't be easy to do His will and I definitely feel that God called me through this situation. I remember all the divorces and remarriages I know and can't think of any that turned out particularly well.

But I do long to just be alone and totally separated financially, if there were a way I could do that.

Just got this in response to my not responding and I admit that my detachment got a whack. I notice that when H demands a meeting I get extremely anxious. Trying to figure out what I am afraid of.

When are you free to go to the financial advisor? He will have to call all our creditors and require your signatures to make positive changes, so you have to attend and sign on. There are rational and salvific financial relief opportunities that you are unaware of and which we should have in place right away, immanently. Let me know when.


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.
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DnJ, I just copied and pasted what you wrote for me in an e-mail to H. I am going to wait until tonight to mail it as that is my new policy, to wait as long as possible.


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.
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