W can't break EA - not sure how to handle it

[tristan]

Thank you Ketricken,

I am feeling better, but I can't help but think that this silence is killing our M. I know, there wasn't much of one before I put up these boundaries. However, our communication has dissipated to almost nothing. I know there is nothing more that I can do than to stay disciplined and follow the course of working on me. So I am reading books, staying busy, and trying to keep a PMA. One day at a time, another one starts now.

By the way @Kettricken, I looked for your thread and didn't find one. Do you have one on these boards? Thanks. T.

[Kettricken]

I don't, at the moment. I started out in SSM when my marriage hit a real rough patch, but things are immeasurably better now. I read some books and got interested in some marriage/relationship theory, so I still hang around and comment where I have something to say.

[tristan]

Well thank you all for spending your time to help others. I do not know what I would do without this site. I hope to be good enough at this sometime in the future to be able to give advice myself.

[25yearsmlc]

Don't get me started on the loss of family values. My 75 year old FIL said to me the other day about his own daughter, "I don't understand her, why won't she put more effort into this. It is way too easy for people to just divorce nowadays, I think that it has become too much of an easy, lazy way out."
Smart man.

ORICH, (Sorry for the slight hijack Tristan), aren't you guys going to Retrovaille soon? I'm crossing my fingers that you still are and that your wife's head and heart will be open to it. Let THE COUPLES there tell their stories, you don't have to say a thing to pressure her to want to work on the M. Please don't do that.
\
The stories and program will take care of that. No BS about how great divorce is... She'll need a whole lot of resistance in her to shut it ALL out...but that means that YOU let them do their thing and just get what you can out of it. See what happens.
j-
And Tristan, your plan on detaching has backslides for one of 3 reasons: 1) fear/weakness at setting boundaries and enforcing them, 2) worry that your strategy is wrong, or 3) a combination of the first 2...

As for #1, no matter what happens, getting past the fear/weakness is ALL up to you and no matter what happens, YOU have to do it...

As for #2, check results, A lot of what Puppy and Robx said seems to be helping you and maybe her...all you know is that what you did in the past was not "manning up with the balls, etc" and did not work, AND you have no control over your w anyhow....all you control is you.

Give the strategy a real test. As for when she discovers her "authentic" self....
um, she may just come to decide she's a MOTHER and wants to do what's best for her kids AND that she still is attracted to YOU and that she has a motive for working on the m.....or not.

But if her so called authentic self, turns out to be a selfish, irresponsible
B%$#& who puts her "Needs du jour" ahead of all others, including her own flesh and blood, then I say "SEE YA!!"

TODAY you sound like a great guy. Your past with your w was different though and you made some crappy choices that hurt the M, so in the future, avoid those errors and don't put all the blame on the past issues on HER. Today, it's on her. Yesterday...you learned from, right?

Enough said,
Good luck,
J

[Orich]

25, yeah that's me. Next weekend, sept. 11. I haven't been doing a good job detaching, ask almost anyone here, and I an probably putting too much hope into the weekend. But in reality, I just want her to begin to open a little bit and give us a chance to reconnect because lately it has been very quiet around here and I believe w is slowly distancing herself. She has removed me from her facebook lost and stopped wearing her rings. But as I said, I am not expecting a miracle, but I am hoping for the beginning of communication between us.

[robx]

I have started reading "No more Mr Nice Guy." Robx, I have nominated you to be one of my "Safe Male Friends" I am assuming you are male. If not, you put on one hell of a show. So, I am suppose to say what from my childhood helped in giving me the "Nice Guy Syndrome", which I am not yet convinced I have.

Really, my childhood was pretty normal. I actually had a pretty good childhood. But my parents did live a lot of their lives through us children. They were always bragging about our accomplishments to family or friends. It was something I really hated. Not sure what that would have to do with my current sitch, but the book said to share it with you.

LOL!
Yes I am male,
No I won't be taking pictures of the undercarriage and emailing them to you for your personal verification process - just take my word for it LOL!

As for being a safe male friend,
safe is very subjective ;-)

No more Mr.Nice Guy is a good book, read it.

One more piece of advice,
every interaction you have with her, you seem to expect that your current situation should just 180 and you should have solved this by now and unfortunately that isn't the case. It took alot of time to get you into this situation, it's going to take you some time to turn it around if that is your eventual destiny in all of this.

Remember you can't control her or her actions or her responses or her reactions. When she says something and she appears cold, distance, sad, angry - that's all her and you can't do anything to change that or control that.

I remember reading your response about her leaving a voicemail about people coming over and it being "cold", that may suck but it is what it is, let it be.

Control how you are, that's all you can do, be a great father, you definitely have control over that.

Remember what we have mentioned about "dating" or "social interactions", seriously the sooner the better if you want to get her thought process changing in a way that shows any of this as her loss.

You will be ok, regardless of how any of this pans out, that much I'm sure of.

How are you feeling today Tristan?

[robx]

in my own situation, I can't describe to you how mean & cruel my wife behaved towards me, it was a heartbreaker and I had no one to tell me a few years ago that it would eventually get better.

We're not reconciled yet, mainly because of the fact that I want to see more changes from her before I trust her to have a relationship with her. I don't want what we had and I used to be the one that begged to have things "just like we used to have" and that is wrong.

There will come a time, when your education in this whole situation has come to a point where you will just get it. All of the arguments and points I made on my wife, all the time I spent begging & pleading and reasoning,etc. I look back on that guy I was that was walking around sad, depressed, hanging off every word my wife said towards, took the abusive treatment, the crazy rationalizations for her behavior, etc. and now I'm not that guy anymore and I never will be. Now I'm the one hearing the arguments from her like "... but I love you" (hmmm.. never heard that before), "how about how this is affecting the children" (didn't you tell me that was just me using a guilt trip on you when I said this?), "what can I do to show you I love you?" (stop pressuring me, I'm not sure I feel the same way anymore),"is it ok if I call you today?" (wow before you never wanted to hear from me ever, do you remember how mean you were to me?), "I was just wondering if we could talk about us?" (hmmm... I remember there was no "us" and you were glad to be free).

At one point you will become the WAS in all of this and she will be the LBS, the dynamic will switch over at one point provided you db and grow personally and learn more about yourself than you previously thought was possible.

I have rec'd 3 emails and 6 phone calls from my wife today (so far...), all of them asking me what i'm doing, how I am, that she's thinking of me, looking at some old photos of me & the kids when we were "all together and having fun" and "what are your plans this weekend, maybe we could do something?", "do you want to go out for some coffee tonight, I could get my parents to watch the kids..."

If you had asked me almost 2 years when she beat my sorry ass to a pulp and made me feel lower than the dirt on the ground and left me to have a great single life if any of this was possible, I would have said no and only a miracle could produce these results.

The only miracle was me finally standing up for myself, believing in my own personal value, respecting myself, setting boundaries with how people can treat me and learning that life is truly a gift and that you should live your life and enjoy every day of it - it's what you need to do to live an authentic life and what you need to do to show your kids how to enjoy life, you can't just tell them, you have to do it for real in your own life, that's how they learn and that's how you know you've been successful as a parent.

2 years ago I would never have considered dating either but I now know that it improved my confidence, along with everything else I was doing (personal counselling, going to the gym, losing weight, building muscle, eating right, getting enough sleep, shopping for myself, new clothes, new shoes, new style, hanging out with friends, making new friends, new me!)

It will be a personal choice for you in the end to actually go through with this, no one is asking you to sleep with another woman or get a new girlfriend or get married.

Take into account how you feel that your wife is having a relationship with another man, you still want her, if anything you may have even felt that you want her even more - we all want what we can't have and we also take for granted what we have and only realize it's true value when we lose it. How will your wife feel that way about you if you communicate you will always be there waiting for her till she gets her head screwed on right?

[tristan]

Journaling:
Monday:
Helped dad build a roof for his labradors' pen in the morning. Girl's spent the time playing with the dogs. It was something to keep my mind off my situation. After lunch, we took the girls over to the local farm so D5 could ride a horse. This is what she looks forward to everytime she goes to grandpa's house. This was the first time she got the horse up to a trot though. It scared her at first, but she got the hang of it pretty quickly. Went home and had some cake and icecream before leaving.

Noticed a text from w: "when r u going to be home. how r the girls."

I texted back "Leaving now. We had a good weekend. Thank you."

As you can imagine, it was an emotional departure for my parents. Girls were good for the 4 hour drive home. W was happy to see girls when we arrived, but distant to me. After we had been home for about 15 minutes:
W: "Why didn't you call back?"
M: "You mean on Saturday?"
W: "Yes."
M: "You didn't ask me too."
W: "I said I was calling to ask how the girls were. That means I want you to call back."
M: "Sorry. I misunderstood."

After putting the girls to bed, I asked W to talk in our room. I needed to talk to her about what she was going to say to the girls. We went over it, it felt so horrible to be going over this stuff. After this conversation, I began to backslide:

M: "What has happened? We don't communicate."
W: "You have changed."
M: "Its difficult. I need to put up these boundaries, but I don't want us to block each other out completely. We need to communicate."
...
M: "Right now, I need to focus on the girls. They need a strong father."
W: "I am glad to hear that, because I plan on being the best mother I can be."
M: "You have a wierd way of showing it."
W: "What is that suppose to mean? You don't think I am a good mother?"
M: "I didn't say that."
W: "For me to be a good mother, I need to be strong."
...
M: "You make moving out look so easy."
W: "Just because I don't cry doesn't mean I am not hurting. This is very hard for me."

The rest of the conversation is blurry, but at some point I held out my hand. She grabbed it, squeezed, and started sobbing.
W: "I remember one night when D5 was crying in her crib and you told me to let her go for another 15 minutes. I understood fifty minutes and called you a horrible horrible person. That made you very upset. I cried all the way too work that next morning, I felt so bad. I told OM (this is before the A) how bad I felt and he took your side. He said that you sometimes have to let babies cry. You were my life. When people would ask why I was in this country, I would say it was because I met you. Now when ever I start to feel that way, I think of something else and get angry. I have so much resentment. I don't blame you for that, I blame myself. I should have told you sooner."
...
W: "I want to feel again."
...
W: "I texted X (someone that was going to help her move Saturday) at 1 AM on Saturday and told her that I was not going to move. I ended up moving anyway, I had already paid the kids to help move me."
...
M: "Thank you for sharing."
W: "Thank you for listening."

She was still crying, I had tears in my eyes. I gave her a hug. I know it crossed the boundary. As I said, I was backsliding.

Tuesday:
The backsliding continued. I kissed W this morning. Not extremely passionate, but not a peck either.
M: <dissappointed with self> "I shouldn't have done that."
W: "No. Thank you. I havn't felt like that in so long."
<pause>
W: "I hope you didn't do that out of pitty."
M: "No. I feel for you. I know you are hurting and am concerned, but it isn't pity."
W: <sobbing> "I don't know why I am doing this, I love you so much."
...
M: "You are a good woman."
W: "No. I am a piece of sh--. I can't stand myself."
M: "Don't think that. If you think it, you will become it."

D3 comes in. I finish getting girls ready and take them to daycare.

Before leaving for work, we touch.
W: "You are so deep in my heart."
M: "Why do expend so much energy supressing it?"
<silence>

So I talked to IC today. Obviously, he said that I had crossed way too many personal boundaries in the last 24 hours. He asked: "What if you are still doing the same thing 1 year from now? How good will that be for you? For her? For the girls?" I know I fell apart. And I have no excuses.

However, the IC was curious about the "I don't know why I am doing this, I love you so much." comment. He says that is an unusual comment in situations like this. He said that she is likely "emotionally confused". I am not sure if I understand exactly what that is. He said that emotions are likely flooding her to the point that she is unable to make sense of them.

[tristan]

Robx, Puppy, Ketricken - About the previous post, I am sorry. I don't only feel like I let myself down. I let you all down as well. I know you have spent a lot of time on me and today I feel like I wasted your advice. Its not wasted, I know I just need to turn myself around (again).

Robx - I told the IC that I was reading "No More Mr. Niceguy." and he said that it was a reasonable book for me.

[tristan]

How are you feeling today Tristan?

Right now, I am at a strange calm. I am going home to accompany W in telling girls about seperation. I should be anxious, but am not. I am sure I will be there when I sit down with them.