Divorcebusting.com Forums Open Forums For Newcomers WW in EA, NC w/OM(?), W's BFF interfering, part 7

Was primarily a response to Sandi2s earlier post. She has been following my sitch and thinks but is not certain that W has had a setback of some sort in her "recovery" from the A/OM. This was additional info. And, yes, there was a lot of it... primarily because we have a lot going on right now.



In a place now where W is in kind of a delicate spot. Gone over this I think maybe one or two threads ago, but I know I have a lot of stuff out there now so, nutshell: She is voluntarily NOT going out and doing things on her own, voluntarily keeping me apprised of her whereabouts pretty much 24/7 when we are not together, etc. Have had multiple folks on these threads, and also DB coach confirm my own belief that it may not be the best thing for me to be doing right now to be a) leaving her alone to stew and sulk and b) going out and doing a lot of fun things solo while she is "confined to quarters" (albeit by her own choice). As such, I have continued my less "social" GAL activities such as exercising and such pretty much full force, but "going out" I have pretty much always tried to include her or at least offer to include her unless she is doing something else on her own (which has been I think twice in the past month-plus)



I inadvertently omitted (long post) that I had asked her initially if she wanted to go out with me and get something to eat, but she was kind of "down" and noncommittal. The "I'm going out" to which she responded "wait for me" was later. So, yeah, I was trying to get her to come but was not really being manipulative or anything about it... I asked her point blank to come along initially.



Nah, not so much. Probably the re-telling. I have and have had a pretty good barometer of what are "good" days and "bad" days with her. Once we actually got out, this one was pretty good-- we did have a really good time. Overall from waking to bedtime, however, the day was kind of a roller coaster... Which is where we have been since her "setback" maybe a week and a half ago after several weeks of steady improvement.

Pretty clear she's still mourning the A/OM (unsurprising, given it's only been about 9 weeks, I think, and given her bff threw a wrench at her with that phoncon), but this is part of the territory. The hope is that she follows through with the IC to help her try and get past that. And otherwise she is definitely trying. A rough two weeks for both of us though, and especially her... Good college friend died, brother's wife had a miscarriage raising memories of our own very painful miscarriage, son arrested and near nervous breakdown, and her work being just hell on a warm plate.

Right now, I'm basically trying to balance "giving her space" with "not giving her too much time alone to dwell on all her stress points" including the A.

Final point-- I am very very much focused on myself and have gotten to a point where I am able to generally be significantly and clinically detached from my W's gyrations. BUT... she is also an essential part of this whole equation and I will, as with the above, fairly frequently have posts or even strings of posts that are primarily about her... It's inevitable with me just being in a much better place than she is. I don't have that much to work on right now individually.

Ginger, first, thanks for the kind words and the concern.

I feel like I need to clarify how I look at this board, currently, however. For some general clarity on this, you can look at my response to leahsue, above. I am actually not so "enmeshed in her every move". However, this, to me, is the "Divorce Busting" forum... which means I am trying to use it as a tool to help prevent my marriage from ending in divorce. Right now, this past week and a half or so, the primary variables in that equation have all been directly concerning my W... and so that is what has been getting posted. If you go back and check my threads and more recent messages you will see that I have for all intents and purposes not been keeping track of her at all... no devices, no recordings... although she keeps her phone tracker "on" voluntarily... for several weeks, now. I only recently put back up some intel gathering on her, and then only for a couple of days, and that was consistent with what many (including my MC/IC, DB coach, and Sandi2) indicated was appropriate. Heck, Sandi seems to think I'm a bit loopy right now to NOT have any surveillance up on her given where she is. So, given what was going on, I put that deeper level of tracking on her for the 24 hours we were apart and she was "home alone" To me, that seemed to be prudent research on what was going on with her, and didn't seem damaging or detrimental at all to me. I understand I can't control her but, and many seem to agree with me her, it is helpful from time to time for both me and the DB effort to check up on her to see what she is doing.



I appreciate the reminder to keep myself balanced and focused on what is important. However, rest assured that I have been plenty focused on my son here. As I mentioned above, however, I view this as the "Divorce Busting Forum" not as the "Wayward Son Correction" forum. If you'd like me to give you a detailed rundown of that latter sitch, I could certainly do so, but it seemed to me to be a bit off-topic...

No jom, this had nothing to do with you talking about your S and his crisis. I was honestly kind of shocked, between that, and your other S visiting colleges your worry was your wife going home alone and the need to track her. I am not saying you aren't attentive to your sons, but you are understandably really scared to let her out of your sight or by herself or "home alone" in fear of her going back to OM.

I know this is a divorce busting site. I have been here far too long. Never busted my divorce. ex is married to OW. But boy did I learn a lot from being here and going through this. I know you are going to speak of her quite often. And when you do, it's like you are always trying to jump in front a proverbial train to keep her away from OM. I think it just might wear on you both in the long run. You do what you gotta do, but I see you desperately trying to shield your W from OM and any temptation, but she has got to learn to do that on her own, else you'll crash.

FWIW, my ex was a cheater. When we were dating. never caught, but I definitely knew it was happening. I was very young, but I just kept trying to do whatever it took to keep him away from any OW. By that I became a woman only a fool would leave, but I also sacrificed a whole lot of myself. I never tracked him or kept him from going out, I just pretzeled myself into exactly what he wanted. I stopped doing that for a few reasons, but when I did, guess what, he found OW. I beat myself up at first saying I should have kept pretzeling myself. But I knew if he couldn't stay faithful if I wasn't the "perfect" wife, I had to find out. And I found out the hard way. But that is not the kind of guy I want to be with, you know what I mean?

One of the most spoiled brats (and I do mean a brat) I ever knew, learned how to manipulate adults at a very young age, and she was a bully to all the other children, I had a front row seat, so I saw things that simply floored me. As she hit her teens, her behavior grew worse. She didn't get into drugs, or trouble with the law, or any thing of that nature, she was just a bigger, more demanding, spoiled brat. After she got older, she was into GGW behavior. I always thought it was her way of rebelling against the lifestyle and dedication of her churchgoing parents. But that's JMHO.

She has been M four times, so far......and is the biggest b'tch I have ever had the displeasure of knowing. She has never had friends, b\c nobody likes her. If she ever cheated on her H's, IDK about it. I have always said her family ruined her when she was small. She was the only child and only grandchild and they allowed her to say terrible things to them and others, throw tantrums, scream threats, etc. They gave in to her demands, almost every time. She was never disciplined, and if one parent tried, then a grandparent stepped in and prevented it. Nobody could stand her as a kid or as an adult. Sadly, nobody could stand to live with her, either. To this day, she has not improved herself. She still wants to control those who come into her life. She puts her wants and needs above her children and her husband (if she has a current H). She still has no friends, and her parents and GP's are deceased.

Knowing the family she was born into, I don't know if she would have had much of a chance when she was a child. They were not bad people, but they did not do this child service by treating her like royalty.

As an adult, I think we can evaluate ourselves to see why people don't want to be around us and be our friend.....and why we act so ugly to our family. I see where her life could have been so much better if she would have just stopped the selfish and controlling ways.

Yes, to answer your question, I know cases where the W already has the format for being a wayward W. In other words, she may have been a wayward teenager or young adult. She already has the selfish nature; resents anyone that crosses her; was already rebellious toward her parents (or some system). She doesn't have respect and uses manipulation, controlling and bullying to get her way....as her usual MO. The poor guy that marries this type of woman is just asking for a miserable MR. There have been many cases here on the board like this, and adding infidelity to the mix is not a long stretch for her. I have little hope for her, b\c this has been a lifelong behavior. It may be possible for her to change, but I think she would need to want that change more than anything in life. It would take a lot of work and training. She would need a new heart.

Unlike the W who becomes wayward later, as the result of resentment, disrespect and rebellion directed toward her H.....the lifelong wayward (for lack of a better term ATM), does not have a previous "self" she can relate to as being the unselfish, giving, respectful, undemanding, truly loving human being. She has little to no experience with relationships that she didn't control with her moods. Her manipulation is second nature for her. So, IMHO, she would be tackling lifelong ingrained behaviors that would require more than experiencing remorseful feelings and asking for forgiveness. It would require her to completely remake herself inside out. Good intentions doesn't cut it, and the reality of just how hard it is to change, comes smacking her in the face very quickly. Can it be done? IDK, quite honestly. I think age might matter.....and how badly she wanted to change. Once the heart has radical change, it helps the actions produced. However, it takes strong determination to stick to improvements.

Arrggh.

Okay, look, I reeaally don't want to get into a back and forth on this, because I think you have your opinion of what I am thinking and doing here and not sure I will convince you otherwise, however: If I was "really scared to let her out of my sight", as a general proposition, I wouldn't have let her run around for month with no tracking, phone recording, etc. (As a reminder, the "tracker" she has enabled on her phone does not keep continuous track of her phone, it will tell you where her phone is at the moment when you send the request to the service but does not paint a picture/track of everywhere the phone has been. And rest assured I am not sitting there everyday hitting "F5" on the tracking page over and over and over.

Do I "care" WON she goes to see OM? Well, hell yes I care. I mean, who wouldn't? Am I obsessing about it? Clearly not. What i am going to do, however, is take periodic temperature checks and also check her out when I have good reason to suspect she might be up to something-- consistent with what the professionals counselling me as well as some folks here like Sandi have indicated it is appropriate for me to do. If she goes back to OM, I've told her "we're done", and we will be done. But I am no longer going to tell her she "can" or "cant" go anywhere. Honestly, at this point, if she prefers that guy to me, she is not someone I think I'd want to be with. And I guarantee you I'll have other options in the female companionship department...

Beyond that, it is useful and helpful to the both the counselling and reconcilliation processes for me to know "where she is at" WRT her affair recovery, to help guide me in how much space I should be giving her.... all within the context, of course, of how I am already living my own life.

As for the relative weight i gave my concern over her being alone when she was in a weird mood, acting like she had in past when she was thinking of going off to see OM, relative to what I was putting in to helping my sons, i can only tell you this: The convo we had deciding on who was staying/going lasted no more than 5 or 6 minutes, and took me about 30 seconds to grab the tracker out of my trunk and stick it on her car. Oh, and about 60 seconds to check the track record once I got home yesterday. Pretty much every other second of the period between 3 PM Friday and 3 PM yesterday was spent, in one way or another, entirely focused on one or the other sons. And that "worry" (for S18) never left my mind, not even during the convo with W to decide who was staying (obviously which was focused on S18) or during the 30 seconds I was affixing the device to her car. It just wasn't that big a deal-- extremely easy to do, no panic, no distraction, no diversion from the more important issues surrounding my son.

I appreciate the concern and I understand what you are saying, but I also believe you may be overstimating my obsessiveness on this and/or the disruptiveness of it.



And I also grant that that belief on your part would be not entirely baseless due to the way I have handled things with W in the past. But things are different now.

Wow. This explains so much about my sitch.

And, I should add, what I fear being lost in this discussion is the entire purpose of me posting that somewhat lengthy description of my and my w's weekend, which was to offer hopefully some additional insight into w's current state of mind and to ask sandi2 if, based on what she had told me previously and on my w's current demeanor if she thought my idea to offer to W to postone counselling sessions scheduled for this Friday would be a good idea or if we should continue as planned based on counsellors stated intention to talk to W in IC at that time..

Gotcha. I'm going to shush.

No, no! Please don't feel like you have to shush! Quite honestly, I have come to understand that it is very helpful for me to have my stances and practices and opinions challenged on these boards... even when I don't agree. It has caused me to on balance be much less "reactive" and precipitous in my interactions with people in all walks... not just with W, and that has helped me be a better, happier person with better relationships with those I care about.

Sometimes I think I come across on here as too angry or obstinate or whatever... and I am also trying to temper that these days as well. I am very grateful for all of the time and care and effort and thoughtfulness that most everyone puts into their interactions here... and in a spot and regarding a topic that is pretty much universally painful oh, about 95% of the time :-/

Thanks, Sandi2.

Well, counselling day is upon us (tomorrow). 4 sesdions, HOPEFULLY a couple of IC for W.

I asked W on Sunday if we were still going to counselling this week or was there too much on her right now, especially with work. Her response was "alot going on with our boys right now to be away" to whichI responded "the one at college is already away from us, we could use the trip to check in on him again. She kind of nodded and said "isnt it out of the way" and I said "only by about 30 mins".And we kind of left it there. Then, on Tuesday, she asks ME if we're still on for Friday, and I said yes, unless something comes up.

So, she seems willing, but not necessarily eager. I think, as you do, that the individual counseling for her should she decide to go ahead with it may prove to be invaluable. Plus, the joint sessions always make us each come out feeling better about things. So I think, on balance, it will be a good thing to go, especially if she agrees to do the individual sessions.

Do you have any last words of advice about what I should say or should not say about her going to the individual counseling or as to what I should or shouldn't be saying right now in the joint sessions. I recall that your recent take has been to play it cool and not put any pressure on her. And to validate and empathize as much as possible without going overboard. Which have been my plan. So if you have any more color to provide I'd certainly be glad to hear it. We will also be in the car together two and a half hours driving down tonight and then two and a half hours coming back either tomorrow evening or Saturday morning.

Would like to convince her to hold over for a day at the nearby Beach just to decompress some after the sessions, but don't know if she will go for that right now.





Oh, and one more thing to add. A lot of her hesitancy seems tied to actually driving all the way down there, close to 3 hours, to see the counselor. Even though the counselor has said that the in-person sessions are definitely more effective and helpful, as well as easier for her and for us once we are there. On a couple of occasions previously, though, my wife has made it a point to say we don't have to go down there, we can just do the telemedicine the sessions. So I think some of her hesitancy has to do with either the travel or with actually being there with the counselor, possibly one-on-one with nowhere to go. She has expressed hesitancy about Individual Counseling in the past, even as she has said she knows she probably needs it. But, There is definitely a stronger willingness in her to do the sessions, at least the ones scheduled for tomorrow, via Skype as opposed to in person. She has so far very actively tried to help find days and times when we can do the telemedicine sessions, meaning my wife.