Never thought I'd be here........

[25yearsmlc]

Accuray (and other passers-by),

You are probably right. She has most likely gone into "SuperWoman" mode in front of me at this point. She has shown a few chinks in her armor (very, very few) but I think those are mostly tied to guilt at the book said and not a true sadness for the loss of a relationship or missing a spouse.

"Every interaction becomes an opportunity to solve the problem". Correct - I find myself slicing apart everything she says and does in an attempt to find some kid of meaning and I mostly just end up in a vortex larger than the one I started off in.


your mind reading ^^^^ is NOT a good thing. It will usually be off, and inaccurate and painful to you...so how useful is it? Um, NOT at all.

I'd argue it's actually harmful b/c you will usually be wrong AND

you are wasting your energy on mind reading HER

instead of creating YOUR NEW life and self.

At 38, I am still looking to solve this mess with that same logic and it is much more complex than that I am learning. If I use my BlackBerry too much, she'll leave - ergo, if I stop using it she will come back. Nope. Not really.


Make the change anyhow so you won't have another relationship harmed by excessive use of the Blackberry and IF SHE returns,

it will be a habit you have repaired and a change she can see!


And that is where patience comes in to play. There are far too many variables that got me to this place to be able to resolve them with a simple cause and effect observation in a matter of days. I get frustrated===but I digress.....).

TIME APART is a gift, in part. At least use that wisely.

DETACH AND GAL...there is a reason we veterans keep harping on it...


I do tend to see her words as final. She has dropped some pretty hard punches on me - "IT'S OVER! I'M DONE! AND THERE IS NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO OR SAY TO MAKE ME CHANGE MY MIND!".

ah but here you are simply mistaken. For 2 reasons....one, they don't know what they are saying/feeling, and second, we all evolve in this process.

1) When H went rampant in his decision to live in the tundra and expected us to join him WHEN he was ready for us, or later, or not OR whatever blah blah blah...

He does NOT recall many things he said, including that he was "willing to take the chance" of losing his family. I had said "there's a good chance you'll lose your family and marriage if you go there," and that was his reply.

Crimson, I believe him when he denies recalling that. He even said he'd "never say something like that."

I KNOW he said it. I can tell you where I was standing and what I was doing, (guest bathroom, taking wallpaper down and spackling) when he said it.

But nope, he has no recall.

2) As for ME, I kept a journal back them. I wrote at the time, how I felt. Some of it makes me mad now when i read it over again, so I'm not sure it's useful.

But what is useful, is seeing what I wrote then and how far I've come with forgiveness and handling anger. True, Sometimes I "tried" things out in writing to see how they felt.

But mostly I believed what I wrote when I wrote it. It was how I FELT AT THAT TIME....and now do not.

Meaning...we can change. We do change.

Nothing your wife says or actually feels now, is written in stone. It's not irrevocable, and it's not static.

You should assume her feelings will evolve, as will yours. Your goal is to be ready to show your best side, in the event life steers her your way.

And it will. You have a marital history she is partly suppressing, as I did when h was gone. In my pain, All I could then recall was our struggling (he was an MD and I had put him thru med school and residency, etc) and his endless "striving, never arriving"...

but when he was gone and I had the space and time to reflect, I let good memories resurface and saw that yes indeed, at one point we had a very special marriage.

I was not sure we could ever get it back but at least I could admit it was once very very good...

your wife has not had the space or time for those memories to resurface. She's busy suppressing them. AND the more you challenge the choices she is making,

the more you force her to defend them and cement them in,

and thereby suppress the natural tendency she will have, IN TIME-

to reflect more accurately on the time she had with you.

You are the father of her only child ...a man she once loved enough to marry, married to for 8 years, a man who loves her son as she does, who surely offered her something of value...trust that you did have a good thing once upon a time. Trust She'll remember it...give her the time and space to do it.

You are to pull back BECAUSE you love her, not despite it.


That one stands out in my memory pretty well. Granted, it was said in an argument, but still - she sure as h*ll meant it at the time and has given no indication that she has softened her stance. I am hopeful that time will help.


see above...as for what is said in an argument, I'd suggest you forget it ALL. God help me if my h recalls what I said when I felt cornered or furious and desparate. I have actively worked on "forgetting" what HE said, trust me there. OMG, seriously...

let it go!


Regarding giving strategies time - here is a question. So right now I am LRT/dim. Let's say I keep that up for 3-4 weeks and see nothing back? What then?


I would suggest going for a lot longer than 3-4 weeks. I read that for every year of marriage you need a month of CONSISTENT change to undo a belief.
That's 8 months for you.

I personally think 90 days is a good start. You are nowhere near that with your projections...

like YOU said though, patience is your goal. Keep working at it.


They don't call it last resort for nothing - I would figure there is no place to go after that. And since I am thinking that it is going to take MONTHS to melt some of the ice that is engulfing my W right now I think if I set a 3 week timer for results right now I am kidding myself.

clearly


Trying not to panic. Actually do MUCH better than I was 8 weeks ago. No more dry-heaving for 5 minutes every morning and no more cognitive paralysis in the office. That is a good sign.

Crimson

yep it's a good sign.

none of us KNOWS you

all we can is see if we can offer you insights based on our experience, and what you post, but which is still woefully inadequate knowledge of who you are or were.

You seem cognitively alert and articulate. I don't know what you look or act like or how you are socially. None of us do.

But if you bravely and truthfully tell me that you "own" part of this, I believe you.

If you say "25, I can't buy that assessment. I'm not that way",

I am going to trust that either you are accurate, OR you are not ready to see it.


I can be wrong and have no trouble admitting that. Like you said, we can only go based on what we think we know, which isn't a lot about any people here.

You took some time to respond to the questions I posed and eventually you did answer them, and I think that's growth.

It's just that when our families or friends (or mc's) tell us that our spouses are "wrong" or mistreating us, it is not helpful to OUR growth

or our marriages.

For me this board helped me see MY role in what superficially appeared to be a clear cut case of my MLC H going nuts and being uber selfish and "entitled"...but it was messier than that, and more complex.

And I could and did begin to react differently. And here we are.

NOT all is perfect, but it sure went better than I thought it would.

5 years ago I gave my m a "10% chance of success". And I thought that was being overly hopeful.

Nothing she says is permanent. There's a reason we say "believe nothing they say and only half of what they do."

Heck, you should not believe half of what YOU say for that matter....