Please help me

[25yearsmlc]

I agree that your H will notice your changes when it's time. Working on you can take a few weeks or months, until you develop new skills, a new wardrobe, a positive attitude, etc. We have to resist the urge to show every little step along the way so as to surprise them later with a new person.

The deep changes in us usually take a long time. The changes the WAS will believe in, will take longer. The biggest fear of most WAS's is that if they reconcile, WE -the LBS'ers will revert to our old ways. Seems ironic b/c WE feel so much fear about reconciling b/c how will WE KNOW if they are sure?
But see it from their point of view, b/c for them to have left a marriage in which we felt love for them, they must have felt very lonely and or hurt/rejected for a long time. Longer than we care to admit...

In that case, I think her h has a deep rooted fear that m to her requires celibacy of him, and physical loneliness he's not willing to live with. He's not unusual in that trait.



I agree it's awfully difficult to be patient in the meantime. In fact, you're ahead of me because taking actions to make changes is much harder for me than doing the "passive" things like not communicating.

And it's important to be honest and fair in assessing this^^ "approach"...it does take the least amount of effort on our part. And IN terms of what they see from us,

What is the difference between us "not communicating" and us just "giving up/not trying"??

Not much difference, I'm afraid.

I think the passive "ACT" of just "not communicating" can also look like passive aggression,

and or "Conflict avoidance"---- (which ironically, almost always leads to far more conflict, in the long run)
and it's simply another way of choosing to do nothing but calling it something.


@25yearsmic Thanks a lot for your answers; they are inspiring even if they're not about my own situation. I'm very interested to read full stories of people who went through it with the DB method. Do you have a thread where you tell your story? Thanks!

I don't know if my thread got purged in the "Great Purge" of DB land a month ago but I had many threads. And I hate reading them again b/c I was a slow learner.

I spend so much time (at least a year of my life that I won't get back) asking questions that had No good answers, like "WHY??"

and spending energy wondering what my h was doing/thinking/planning/ feeling and NOT enough time on ME and MY life and my kids.

Til about a year or 14 months into things when I realized my m was probably over.

My goal was to get my oldest d thru high school and then figure out my course of action.
I Came to believe I was really, truly going to be alright in the end. I even felt sorry for my h b/c I knew he was losing more than I was. I made the needed changes in myself, (no more bitter resentment from me, no more crossing my arms, figuratively or literally, b/c I did not want to 'reward' my h for his bad behavior--working long hours and choosing his career over family when I should have realized my approach was NOT working -even if I had a good point, it wasn't being made--and so I should have tried something new. Like maybe giving him a warm loving home to miss!!

Anyhow, the peace I came to feel inside, began to radiate from within and I GAL like crazy. I think I began to look like the good catch I believed I was...

Before our oldest d had graduated, h had his own awakening....but I can address that more later on a new thread of my own to recap things.

Suffice to say I wish I'd taken the focus OFF my h a lot sooner and put it all on me and MY life, a lot sooner. That would have shortened the life of the painful ordeal, but OTOH, I'm a better woman for it. For whatever that is worth.