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Grace, you know the letter is a bad idea. He isn't going to receive it in the manner you intend it. Write the letter for yourself and then put it away or burn it. It will just make him mad or be perceived as pursuit and let him see you sitting there nicely on the shelf.

You have to figure out what works for your thoughts. Some people snap a rubber band on their wrist, others picture a stop sign over the head.

What I do is a bit radical and might not work for everyone (or even anyone). I just walk through the thoughts and put them in what feels like a proper place for me. Then I think of having that mean, resentful man back in my house and I shudder.

Trial and error. At one point I thought about making myself do 10 push ups every time I thought about him (like a Pavlov dog training kind of thing). I never implemented it, but I thought about it. For a while I thought of him as dead. That was somewhat helpful. Mix it up. Stay busy. Do meditation, listen to podcasts, walk, cry in the shower. Just do. Doing something usually feels better than doing nothing.

Grace,

Write the letter, but then burn it and/or tear it up. Your h will not receive it in the way that you intended. It will make him feel guilty and shame for what he's doing and yes, may even make him a tad angry. He will look at it as a last ditch effort on your part to sway him to your side.

I know you would like to reach out to him and tell him your thoughts, but now is not the time. Sit quietly and the answers will come.

I would add to the advice you had here yes, wait wait wait, but not for what it will or won't do for your H.

Your H can't hear you right now. He is inside a glass box. You can yell all you want, you can cry, pound on the walls of the box, kiss the glass. He can't hear you.

But God can hear you.

And God has told me that same message he gave you many times.

Wait.

Patience.

Imagine what might happen if you truly waited. If you went about your day, and every time you wanted to fix or to doubt or to despair, you said, "Lord, I trust you," and went back to what you were doing. When the pain hurts too much, you say it again, and you put on some Jenn Johnson and sing at the top of your lungs.

And the reason to wait is not for your H or for your marriage. It's for you. God wants you to get close to him. You can only do that when you are in a free fall of trust and not knowing what is going to happen, like a child just learning to walk and running forward into her mom or dad's waiting arms.

All the questions you are asking, all the fixing you are trying to do -- if you surrender yourself to God, you will not be asking those questions. You will have peace. You will have pain but also you will have peace.

I know you see me here at times in a chaos of confusion, but I assure you that when I trust God, I don't have that, and I don't visit the boards.

Right now when I read your posts, I see your mind racing. You are trying to solve everything your own way, your own time. You are trying to rid yourself of the pain. My catechist once told me, Don't be so afraid of suffering. You will find God there. And I have found this to be very very true. It is terrifying to accept suffering, I know!

Your H going crazy is NOT the will of God. But God will use it for the good. He can use it to change you. He can't change you if your eyes are always on your H. Put your eyes on God.

If you don't know what to pray, try a book of prayers or a novena for nine days. I know you aren't Catholic but those prayers are really valuable when you are confused, they give you a direction for your thoughts, and then they do their work on you without your trying to figure out the words.

If you want, I will do a novena with you. We can pray the same prayer everyday for nine days. We can pray for clarity for both of us, clarity and peace.

OneArt, Job, and Gerda.


Thank you. As for the letter, it was one of those runaway thoughts, and I won't do it. I might write it in my journal, but I realize the uselessness of giving such a thing to H.

Hs birthday is next Saturday. My friend tonight was encouraging me to ask him out to celebrate. I'm thinking he probably has plans with OW. I feel like I should mark it in some way, though. Send a generic card? I know. Too much thought on H again. *sigh*.

Gerda, I appreciate you support in my faith journey. I could use some direction in my prayers, and accept your offer to do one today. I'm curious. Any special reason for nine days?

Hello Grace

It is pretty intense. It ok to have doubts.


Writing a letter to clarify your thought is a good idea. Don’t send it. Put it away, burn it, something other than actually giving it to him.

Like feelings, your thought on this will change as time goes on. However, your words on that paper will not, H will have tangible wording from you, and no matter how well intentioned he will twist them and use them against you or for his own purposes. Your meaning will be lost on him.

You have received very sound advice - Wait.

Your feelings to set a few things straight will fade. Honest.

A plain birthday card is a good idea, and appropriate if you wish too give one to acknowledge his day. Keep expectation at zero, he may or may not respond.

DnJ

Don’t know what happened there.

Once I submitted my post, the other ones flashed onto the screen all at once.

Oh well, similar viewpoint. Bird of a feather I suppose.

Hi Grace - I thought I'd write it here rather than on DV's thread. I didn't realise you had moved to the ML forum. I need to learn how to follow people as had just assumed you'd stopped posting ...



Replace the "He" with "We" and this could have come out of my H's mouth. It smacks of depression and victimization. The infinite blackness that they can't see past.



And this is the future they see. Anything is better than the blackness.

But this way of thinking, if you are not strong, can be infectious and drag you down into the pit with it. Get strong. Build yourself up and get to a place where his sadness isn't your sadness. His baggage isn't your baggage. Then, if you still want to, you can help him. Not from "will this save my marriage" but "I want him to be better".



It wasn't a lie. Don't for one minute think the things that you thought were wonderful were anything less than wonderful. Marriages ARE imperfect because people are imperfect. But there was love and it was real.

I found an anniversary card, given to me two months before BD. It had two penguins on it (the mate for life reference) and inside he had written "Thank you for another wonderful year. I love you now more than ever". It floored me. Was he unhappy when he wrote it. Yes. Did he love me then more than ever. Yes. Both true. It isn't that love isn't enough, it is that the darkness twists it because that sort of pain needs to have a source.

Again, get strong. Don't write the letter. You say you want to articulate your thoughts on everything. Do you really think he can handle your thoughts on everything? At best it will make him feel bad, resent you for making him feel bad and feel manipulated, at worst, he will get defensive, turn it around so that he is the victim, resent you and feel manipulated. There is no win there.

However, I would give him a birthday card. Keep it simple, "H, I hope you have a great birthday, Grace".

Now, if anyone can provide me with instructions on how to follow people ...

Hi Grace

This came into my mind when I read your recent posts: You have decided to stand at this moment in time. But you're a standing my hovering over him and watching his every move and trying to second guess everything that he is doing. You must stand aside from him. You must view yourself as a separate entity.

I think you need to treat him in your head as an adult child going off to University. We worry about what they may be getting up to, but we also know that we have to let them do it. AND they would only resent us if we were constantly checking up on them, watching what they're doing. Spending days obsessing about what they might be getting up to when you can't do anything about it is only going to serve to drive you insane. So, we untie the apron strings.

The kids know we are there if they need us. Mums or Dads or Mums and Dads will apply a band aid when asked. Kids need space to realise that they are their own people, and that is what we give them. They can learn to think differently to us, act differently to us, but they know (and we know) that we will accept their emerging self. Sometimes, they say and do hurtful things but we know that they still love us despite that.

Stand, but stand aside. Silently support him from afar. He knows you're there. Some kids decide to come home from college, some don't and set up their lives elsewhere.

Now, I don't use this analogy because I think your husband's a child but to try to explain that there is a difference between standing and waiting and hovering. Whether or not you can stand by and wait whilst he acts as he does is your choice to make. I chose not to because I realised that my Hs behaviour was just an extreme version of who he actually was. The clues had been there for a long long time. But, that was my choice.

If you love him, truly let him go. Work out what your fears are and then realise that you are a separate living, breathing and thinking entity. You were husband and wife, not co-joined twins.

If he choose to come home that's because Grace is great. If he chooses not to then Grace is still great. H does not make you great; you already are.

I was doing this so very well until I found out he was back with OW. And she was trying to convince him to buy a place together. That just really put me in a bad spot. During round #1 with her last year, he was so worried about anyone finding out, he said he would have to move. Now he thinks he could live with her? As you can see, I am not only hovering, I'm immersed. I would like to know why that hit me so hard. I feel I need to understand it. Maybe my IC can help me. I wish I didn't have to wait yet another week to see her.

H is good at making me feel like the bad guy. I am having doubts about my asking him to move out. But then I remember how depressing it was around here. I know all this is MCL behavior. You've seen it all before. Lived it, probably too.

It hurts. But, I appreciate your message Yorkie. I need to find that again, and go back to the life I have been making for myself.




I know that he reached out to her because she is better than the blackness. I want him to reach out to ME. Logically I know he won't/couldn't, because he thinks our marriage and I am the source of his problems.

You are correct in that I am letting his blackness be my blackness. I'm a freaking mess this week. Can't eat, can't sleep, and cry too much. Over what? A man that is such a mess he's not available to be a H in any sense of the word?

Or more likely facing the failure of a marriage I don't want to fail, the worry of the collateral damage his shacking up with her will likely cause my kids, and the difficulty of splitting up 30 years into 2 pieces.

I'm tired.

I need to regroup in a serious way. I have no plans today, except bootcamp this morning.

I think I'll get busy tackling another closet. A closet a month was my 2019 goal. January was the office. February is coming to a close. Time to get busy. Time for more boxes that say "H's stuff".

Good Morning Grace

Ever now and then we just need to go back to basics for a bit. Breathe. Focus on you.

Get that closet cleaned out.

I have thought about a similar resolution when you shared your’s, mine are such a mess. However, I know me, and I have to much other higher priority jobs that need doing. I put a lot of stuff off getting through this mess.

How is your knitting? And did you bake your February loaf of bread?

Grace, if it wasn’t for the storm, we wouldn’t know the peace.

You are doing great.

DnJ