WAW - Very confused and devastated - pt 10

[confusedinpa]

I don't follow the strategy of telling her to do whatever she feels she has to do and not to try to change her mind. Now remember, I am, as you had pointed out, a DAM :-p

Nothing hard about it. It is the same thing I have told you all along......"drop the rope". I think she protesteth too much! I feel that she is telling you this same old stuff over and over to work you (as I said before) like a puppet. At any rate, from where I see it, that is the best route to take. I know you think you have dropped the rope.....but in your heart you haven't. When you truly drop the rope you will be able to feel peace and not worry and be able to move forward with you life whether it includes her or not. Until you reach that level of mentality, you have not really dropped anything. The point is this......SHE KNOWS IT! I may be as wrong as sin, but I think if you were to call her bluff.....she would make a turn about face quicker than you could blink. If she thought you really did not care if she divorced you or if you "wanted" a D, then she would suddenly see you as unavailable to her and you would become more attractive and she would want you IMHO. I am just thinking like a female. You guys may be a DAM, but we are just plain crazy in how we think! Stop and think about this. If there is no other man in the picture, why would she want to D you? Oh, I know all those old excuses she is using, but I don't buy it. If you have not seen any of the MLC symptons in her (and I don't know that I have) then what is the deal with her? Women don't usually get a D unless there is another person, abuse, MLC, or just can't take living with no love in return. She may think you don't "listen" to her, etc., but she knows you LOVE her. So again, I ask you.......what is the real deal with her?

Talk later,
Sandi

Sandi

I think part of the problem with calling her "bluff" right now is that if I sign the divorce papers tomorrow, it will be final as soon as it is filed since we are now past the 90 day waiting period.

I think I'm beginning to understand what you mean by "dropping the rope". I was actually at that point for a couple of days many posts ago. Not sure how long ago, but I will reread my threads just to figure out how I got there. I know I haven't been there in a while.

I do agree that she is just using the same stuff over and over again. I had my therapist appointment today and she agreed that I need to stop letting her lay the guilt/blame on me everytime. She had a good suggestion, which I will definitely take, of rather than focusing every moment on my long term goal of saving my marriage and bringing the family back to together to an immediate goal of the next time of have my kids, to have fun with them and not to have anything related to my situation (particularly things related to the adult relationship) be a distraction.

She really stressed that when I told her about my 7 year old and the house issue as well as how on Friday nite after I tucked the kids to bed, my 3 year old called me back into the room to give me a hug so I would feel better from being sad.

I do agree and will make it my goal for their next return home.

My therapist also said that it feels like my wife is avoiding therapy and is using me as a shoulder to cry on, which is very bizzare behavior on my wife's part. She then said that it was even more bizzare behavior on my part for ignoring my feelings and allowing. Now, I've always been confused about my feelings, but she said that it must be hurtful to me to keep getting the "pity party" dump from my wife. In thinking about it, it is. She said it was very disrespectful of my wife to disregard my feelings by continuing to do that, as well as how she is hurting the kids by tearing apart the family.

Sorry for the tangent, but this goes back to what is the deal with my wife. In the beginning a few people here thought she was going through a mid life crisis as she was going through the pity party all the time of how she wasted 10 years of her life being miserable and now that she has "baggage" (kids) she will never be able to find true happiness. My therapist also thinks that my wife is depressed and really needs help in letting go of anger/hurt and has a unrealistic view of how men and women relate. She thinks that comes from her father abandoning her family at 7.

I truly think my wife's deal is that I hurt her feelings by ignoring/neglecting her and taking her for granted. She said that I would never talk to her and made her feel like I didn't want her around. She said that she thought I prefered to be alone watching television or doing work on my laptop, than to be with her. She actually felt I was emotionally abusive how I withheld my love for her and became very controlling and did not respect her. I look back at it with clear eyes now of how "mean" I was to her by not only making her feel unloved, but unlovable. I didn't realize that was what I was doing (my therapist said that I suffered from mild depression as well when I got overwhelmed by stress at work, home and family). I get it now, but my wife says its too late. Nevertheless, my wife has an issue of forgiving and letting go. She never forgave/trusted her dad again and has the same issue with her sister from something in HS.

When we started getting serious, one of the things my wife really stressed/cried about one time was how she worried that I would hurt her (I was a player type of person back in the day and she knew it based on the girls I had dated before her). She actually made me promise.

So now my wife feels that she can't trust me enough to be vulnerable with me again and has closed off her heart so she can't love me like a wife should love her husband. She says that every time she sees me she still feels hurt. Either because she remembers the hurt or it hurst when she sees that I get it now, but didn't back when she actually cared or would have made a difference.

She actually slipped once of how she's frustrated that she's not going to be the one to enjoy the time with me now that I get it as she knows that I'll just move on and find someone else.

She has very low self esteem so I think that also weighs on her as she thinks that once she comes back, I will just go back to the way it was and she will be hurt again. When my therapist/marriage counselor suggested that I was suffering from a mild depression, my wife was very animated as to what if it comes back. It took filing for divorce to snap me out of it, is that something that she will have to do everytime it comes back. I think the final nail in my coffin was when one of her friends husband, who suffered from depression, made her and their daughter's life miserable, right up the point he committed suicide at 46.

So in short, I think my wife has been very badly hurt by the person she made herself totally vulnerable to and is now afraid of experiencing that pain again. She even said how she sees I've changed, but know that I will not be perfect and feels that the first time I slip up, no matter how sleight, it will crush her. I know she needs help. I can't do the work for her. She does. I just don't think she's in a place where she will/can/wants to.

That's just my humble opinion....

So with all that extra "info", what should I do?

I feel that she's not bluffing and will actually be hurt when I say that I've given up as well and want a divorce. She had said that was one of the two reactions she expected from me when she filed. The other would be I would get so angry that I would be violent (where I have NEVER been violent and only raised my voice less than 5 times in the 12 years we were together). She was totally not expecting that I would want to work on it as she felt I gave up loving her years ago. She said that she thought about withdrawing the divorce when I told her that I wanted to work on it, but said that she was just too afraid of getting hurt again.

But then again, I'm just a DAM so what the heck do I know.....