just some thoughts from B

[cat04]

I'm not B (no where near as kind or gentle ), but I would like to chime in...

Much of what has been said here is so common among MLCer's and ourselves.

My H told me "it is time for me to be selfish" about his crisis. He has always been somewhat selfish and selfcentered. That one actually made me laugh.

Personally, I am the one who is missing childhood memories...

My childhood, like many, was not the best...

Seeking,

Why didn't you have the MLC? Why didn't I? Truth...

I had a crisis. I ran from everything, destroyed much in my life and I did it in high speed. For about a year and a half, when I was 20. I said much of what we hear from our beloved MLCer's. I acted much in the way that they do. And I was miserable. Not only was I NOT fixing my problems, I was hurting people and creating more problems. I knew things were getting worse instead of better and I missed my friends, my family, my BF.

I woke up one day, with people who were abusing drugs and drinking (which I had done very little of, this was not a period of drug addiction for me) and were way beneath the way I wanted my life to be, I looked in the mirror and asked myself "what the fcuk are you doing?"

I made changes. I went back and asked for forgivness. I did what I could to repair the damage. It took a long time and it was scary. I still didn't look as far in the mirror as I should have, but I was young and didn't really know that I needed to. I changed things, but I didn't do much about the underlying causes.

I didn't recognize this as an emotional crisis until much later. For a long time, I wrote it off to my youth. When I saw it for what it was, it gave me the insight to understand what my H, and all of our spouses here, are experiencing to a degree. It also allowed me to finally deal with and put to rest for a last time, many of my demons.

Exorcising my demons, allowed me to also release my anger at my H. The anger I had for his actions before and during his MLC. To see him with the compassionate heart that Brooklyn talks about. To still hold love for him in my heart.

So Seeking, are you so sure you didn't have a crisis or a transition? I think we all go through stuff at different points in our life...

The abuse list is great, I am not going to say that it isn't, however, we have to be careful to NOT see every action as abusive. That allows us to step into the victim role too easily.

No one here says to "excuse" the behavior of our spouses, or ourselves. On the contrary, the key is to learn to understand it for what it really is, change anything that you don't like about yourself so that you don't have to try to "excuse" anything, and be able to have compassion for those we deal with that are not yet able or ready to deal with their own demons.

I can promise you all something...when you really kill your demons, I mean really really kill them, they don't come back to haunt you...

So if something keeps popping up every now and then, it is time to dig deeper...eventually, you will find the bottom