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#959186 03/05/07 12:49 AM
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Scouby

I read to understand as well. There are times where I still want to fix my XW and others. It is a challenge for me to resist telling them what they need to do. In order for people to heal themselves, they have to discover that it is only within there power to do so. No one can fix them other then themselves.

The sooner a LBS lets the MLC spouse go, the sooner they can reach a point where they may decide that the problem lies within them. I believe I helped prolong my XW's MLC. I kept trying to save her from herself and do her work for her. I was seeking answers to her problems when it should have been her doing.

As a former LBS, I was my own worst enemy. I was trying to be a fixer, healer and enabler all roled into one. I just needed to get the hell out of the way and alllow my XW to feel her pain from the choices she had made.

It is a whole lot eaier learning these things after the fact when you can look at things from a totally different perspective. While in the pain of a LBS you can't see anything even if it is right in front of you.

I was blind and dumb. It's pretty funny to think about now. Looking back I can say; "What was I thinking?" I guess I wasn't. I was in as much pain and confusion as my MLC XW. No wonder we couldn't get beyond the pain and confusion we were both experiencing.

I want to let everyone know that you can make it to the other side of this MLC experience. Things do get better. The wounds will heal. Love will return to your life.
But first you have to learn the lessons that this experience is all about.

Love,
Paul


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Paul,

THANK YOU! I want you to know that I may not always post, but I do read your thread and insights, about personal/spiritual growth and the MLC perspective (both as former MLCer and LBS).

I wanted to say how powerful your recent posts about the MLC mind have been. They are pieces of what we have all read before, but today, a few things you wrote really struck my side of compassion and understanding....and I have been struggling to feel that lately.

Mostly, it helps to know that this is not just in my life, that there is something to this on a larger scale, I'm not going crazy, and it's not all about the M or me.

Thank you!

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I am a slow study but I feel I am learning the acceptance and letting go part of this lesson little by little. I do get thrown off track sometimes by things going on with H but I get back on track much quicker than I used to.

I have a long way to go before I have it mastered but I never give up. I do, however, feel strongly that God wants me to stand for my marriage. I have not felt the need to begin another R for a very long time. I know that it would be a bad idea until I have totally resolved the feeling I still have for my H. I don't think it will come to another R but I could be wrong. Whenever I have asked for a sign, I seem to get one. Right now my balance is coming from the book The Purpose Driven Life.


Everything happens for a reason, maybe Dad needs to find that it isn't better out there, he needs to realize how good he had it here. Maybe he will find God and that is the most important thing when he finds Him he will know he is supposed to come home.
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DearPaul,

I agree that a MLC spouse does bury their true feelings of love. "I guess I am just wondering if my H ever loved me at all?"

When we married we were soulmates, completely connected in everyway. We both felt like we never knew what love was until we met. We said nothing would ever come between us and my H told me he was "never more sure of anything in his life" when he asked me to marry him. Was it just an act? Did my H really ever love me??? These are the questions I have been asking myself.
These thoughts haunt me everyday. If he meant anything he said to me - how could he leave me?

Now 10 1/2 years of M, he has filed for divorce. Doesn't want to even try to work things out. Says the love is gone and can't get it back. He says he is being honest with himself for the very first time in his life. He is involved with Ow and has been since before he left me. He has moved in with her and has begun bringing her around the kids. I have been replaced!

He lost his father just 3 years ago and shortly after that I was told I wasn't there for him and never have been. I began noticing him changing and was more irritable and unhappy with our life together. I believe the A started about 2 1/2 years ago. Emotional then turning passionate. He moved out 2 years ago this coming June 1st.

I read your post about needs and how the MLCer perceives that their needs aren't being met and then seeks to have their needs met elsewhere. I could relate to everything you wrote.
H's father was an alcoholic and was never very close with him.
H told me how he always felt an emotional void in regards to his R with his dad. H avoided visiting his father for fear that he would be drunk and verbally abusive to our family. We didn't visit the IL's very often with our children for this reason. Then FIL died and I believe H had lots of guilt for not making things right with his dad before he died.

I want to believe that my H did really love me, but I ask myself "does my H really know what love is?" "did he ever?"
It seems that my H felt that I didn't care enough about his feelings and has told me manytimes that he felt I "neglected" our M. I know he is justifying his A and for abandoning our family , but I also believe that he has convinced himself that this is the Truth. His reality is that I never cared and didn't meet his needs, our M was a mistake, etc.....

I want so badly to believe he really did love me and meant everything he said to me, but I don't know anymore. Maybe he doesn't know what love is or has he just rewritten history and is in a MLC. I am starting to wonder.

Would you mind letting me know what you think about my sitch? I believe my H's issues with his father have definitely affected his adult life and R's, including our M.
Do you think my H knows what love really is? H says that I don't know what love is nor do I know what loving someone unconditionally is. I feel this about my H not me as I still love my H in spite of all that he has done and said over the past 2 1/2 years of his crisis.

K










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ktfbb7;

First off, ignore everything your H is saying right now. As DB/DR says, believe nothing of what they say and only half of what they do. Your history with him is real, but his pain and confusion right now has put blinders on him looking at that history. He needs something to blame for the pain, and he can't blame himself so he has to blame you and your R. Believe in yourself and your feelings.


"I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you."
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matt,

I know my feeling were real and always have been. It's just hard not having doubts about how my H claimed to have felt about me before he said those dreaded words "I'm not in love with you anymore!" If someone once loved you as much as my H said he did-where does that love go? This is where my doubts come creeping in... My gut tells me H's feelings were real too, but he has been gone 2 years and no signs that he is even close to waking up to those feelings.

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Paul, if I may, I'd like to jump in a confirm what you've said here. And what Matt said afterwards in simple terms.
Get out of their way. You'll drive yourself nuts trying to fix something you cannot, because it is only the MLCer that can fix themselves. You're the enemy. You're the target for their internal anger. You cannot hold up a mirror in front of them and tell them to look at the enemy. They look right through it as it does not exist. They only see the person holding it, you the enemy, the cause of all their problems from the day they were young even though you didn't enter into their life until twenty or thirty years later. Makes no difference. You are the problem, it's your fault, even though you didn't exist in their life at the time that now causes their pain.
Fractured logic? Of course. When you learn logic does not apply in the realm of MLC land, only then do you start to understand.
And understand a little of their world, maybe you will. But, you cannot apply the "rules", logic etc. of this world.
They don't exist in MLC land.

Much was thrown at me years ago when x went over into that realm. There were times I could not follow what she was saying, because it had no connection with any conversation I was in with her. Question is, was it just a bad case of MLC or did she really go off a very deep end? I don't know to this day.

But, picking up bits and pieces from friends and aquaintances over the years, despite my x's rants, non sensical accusations, deep denials of the existance of physical things right in front of her, no one says she has ever had a bad word to say about me. They go out of their way to say she did not say a mean thing about me personally. She instead "explains" we had different views, didn't get along etc. but no direct attacks these days or in the last couple of years. Of course the people that knew us well in the years before marriage and during, can see through the BS and history rewrites and quickly determine her revisions don't add up.
The easiest is the "he never wanted to go on vacations, take some time off, etc."
Our friends and aquaintances were almost envious of our long weekends at least four times a year, the week or weeks we would spend when I took her along on business in far flung places at least twice a year, and the family vacation we could always squeeze in for a week out the four weeks possible in a given year (because of the children's commitments).
A very simple example of history rewrites and skewed memory.
As simple as those may seem, forever etched in history of friends and family and in photographs and credit card bills for air tickets, hotels etc., they simply did not exist. Never happened. You could spread those out on a table for them to see, and they would not, can not, see them, simply because, if those documents exist,those photos exist, that alters the MLCer's perseption of history.
Trust me, it's an unnerving experience to sit down with a MLCer / or off the deep ender , to try to share those tangible things and they tell you (in all sincerety), they don't see anything in front of them.
Such is the world of a person in MLC.

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Paul - what you have said here [and in the subsequent posts], seems so true to me. I instinctively KNEW immediately my h dropped the bomb that I had to get away and stay away. The only contact I have had have been initiated by my h.

Despite much evidcence to the contrary, I do believe that my h loves me, but cannot access that love. It is buried. He is getting his love back for his kids - although they are being tough with him.

At present as he emerges from the tunnel it as if he has two versions of reality before him - it is a bit like old glass window, where as you move your eye across the pane, some parts give a clear view, and then there is a big distortion.

My h writes and reviews, I have noticed the whole time that he has been in MLC that what he has written has been so much less good than the way he used to write. I thought, maybe I am being bitchy, but then I looked at things he had written previously, and he is writing less well. Soemthing he wrote in January was much better than what he produced last June/July, but it is still far from his former clear style. Similarly his political views have become rigid and simplisitc, when he was a man of subltely and humour.

He is not consciously lying - he believes his version of reality - that is what is scary. They leave out any parts that don't fit, and when presented with an incontrovertable fact, will shift their story to fit the facts. If anyone comments on this, they are being 'nit-picking'.

He is shifting in the tunnel - it is still a step back for every two steps forward, and teh pace is frustrating, but he said to me in January 'I feel as if someone else has been living my life for the past eighteen months, and I don't like it. I want my life back again'. He has retreated again, but I don't push him. He will emerge, I believe, in his own time.

In the meantime I have shown him that there is unconditional love
A lesson that we both had to learn, I think. I didn't think I was capable of it, and it is sobering. Love really is the greatest thing. God is love, truly.

Angelica

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WOW Angelica, you sound so good....just a little while back I remember you saying that maybe you didn't want your H back anymore after all the pain an misery he put you trough, but you have found your unconditional love again...I am very happy for you, he will be lucky to get you back I think !!!


Love Cinders xxx

"In the depths of my winter, I realized there is within me an invincible summer" Albert Camus

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Cinderellaman - A lot of praying, by me, friends and family. It is the toughest thing I ever did. Everytime you think you hit the bottom, . . . but as several posters have said, when you have finally had enough you can walk away, knowing that you did your best, and that what you are not doing, is for you, the best. Remember I am 17 months post bomb. his affair went on 15 months PA and longer as an EA, so it has been tough

Beleve me, I still think I am crazy to stand, a lot of the time.

LOL Angelica

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