<< Agree with her unless she starts to tell you what you think or feel.
I've always wondered where the fine line of "abuse" is when these WAWs are ranting and raving with all sorts of personal attacks where history gets rewritten? The most natural response for a man when the pressure cooker goes off like this is fight or fright. Either you quickly put the weight on the pressure cooker valve or you run a mile. So when you start saying "sorry you feel that way, ..." they smell a rat.
At any rate if the above happens say: "Who know's better how I think or feel? You? Or me?"
Nobody is saying you have to be a prick or an a$$hole when the WAS/WAW goes off on an anger spree and starts saying hurtful things. You are the best person to know when they cross the line or not. If they are communicating you will know, if they are spewing forth crap just to hurt you, you will know as well and when it's the latter, you can either stay and join in the argument or you can try smiling and walking away.
In fact I've taken it one step further and I'm not saying anyone has to do this but sometimes it helps when setting boundaries with how someone treats you.
My wife at one point used to be extremely cruel when talking to me, she would say things that a few years ago would literally make me misty and I felt so powerless. I got a kick in the a$$ from a friend who was tired of seeing me get hurt & being treated/abused in this way.
How did I stop her in her tracks? Well while my wife was going off on one of her verbal assaults on me (and they do get cruel & spiteful), instead of joining in the argument I just stood there with my hands on my hips and started shaking my head and looking at her with disgust & utter annoyance but I didn't say a thing, after a while she stopped her rant and asked me if that's all I was going to do. I told her that when she acted poorly,extremely cruel and angry towards me that I found her physically unattractive, I was literally getting disgusted & repulsed looking at her and I couldn't stand the sight of her anymore. I then told her I wouldn't reward her crap behavior with my attention anymore and that if she wanted to bully someone, she could go down the street to the local elementary school and pick on some little kid more her size and then I walked away. I continued doing this everytime she started her verbal abuse against me and reminded her that she was a bully.
Bullies tend to do well against those that will just take their abuse repeatedly, people who have low self-esteem - it's like they can smell it/sense it.
When you make a stand (and it doesn't have to be angry or violent) and tell them you won't tolerate their crap anymore (specifically WAW's that treat their LBS poorly), you communicate that you respect yourself enough that you are willing to let go of the people that don't love or respect you. There is no trick involved in getting this to work, you just have to mean it, it has to be genuine - if you're just saying words but there is no real meaning behind it, they can tell, they have great intuition with this stuff. Telling her she was unattractive during rant was a double whammy: while they're out having affairs, they feel very attractive with the people they are seeing plus they know you're at home frantically trying to get the marriage back on track - it's an ego boost, and they feel very powerful because of it. When you tell them they're unattractive and you don't want to look at them anymore (again you have to mean it, I know I did), it wakes them up a bit and brings them into reality. When the LBS is no longer sitting at home pleading for them to come back & hoping the marriage will one day be reconciled, the affairs that the WAS's are engaged in aren't as exciting as they were previously. Cheating on a spouse who loves you and is actively trying to save the marriage makes the WAS feel guilty but they still do it, affairs are exciting. When the LBS stops pursuing the WAS and gives up and assumes the marriage is over and starts moving on with their life, the excitement that the WAS experiences from their affair is diminished quite a bit to the point where they question why they're doing what they're doing. That's why GAL, going dark, 180's and LRT are effective - once you stop pursuing, you get a life, start to move on, act as if life is great and even better now that things are the way they are - you kill the excitement that the WAS is having, you generate doubt at their end and they start questioning everything they're doing.
