If I am truly detached I should not care what she says and just let it roll of my shoulders - no response required right? Or am I still not getting it. Think I need those examples. lol
I wouldn't say you should be so detached that you don't care what she says or does to you directly. You have children to consider, and how that affects them growing into healthy adults and their relationships in the future.
It is how you respond to her. Standing up to her does mean you tear into her, ready to fight. It means not allowing her to disrespect you. B/c when she disrespects you, everything else just about flies out of the window, relationship wise. Looking her eyeball to eyeball and calmly telling her that you will not tolerate disrespect in your home. If she can't show respect, she needs to leave.
I have seen cases where the woman had bullied the man so badly, that she would tell him that she had no intentions of showing him respect. If that is the case, then they need to separate. He has lost all intended battles for his respect in that household. If a man has no respect in his own home, what does he have? Not very much!!
We had a LBH by the name of Joe, who had a WW. He had gotten down on his luck by losing a job, I think. Anyway, she became one of these people who talked on adult phone numbers. I referred to her as a verbal prostitute. I can't remember is if he had anything else added to his name (been through too many threads over nine years to remember the names), but he was pretty beaten down when he came here. He thought detaching was tuning out everything his W was doing over the phone every night (and she was doing it from their home where the children were). He was scared and wanted to keep his family together for the "sake of the kids". She was a bully. They had separate rooms and she had stopped taking care of the kids, and basically made the adult chatting her life. When he tried to reason with her, it did no good. If he tried to tell her how disrespected he felt, she did not care. She did not care that they had to keep it a secret from their grown kids, and the little ones had no idea what mommy was doing up in the other room every night. He tried to encourage her to get a respectable job, and she told him she enjoyed doing what she was doing! It took him some time before his courage built up enough to tell her she was not going to have sex talk with these men from his house. By then, she was so addicted to it that she was contacting men who didn't pay for it. It was pretty disgusting. Their M ended, but the last several updates we heard from Joe was him saying he was the happiest he had ever been, and he couldn't believe how he allowed himself to be put in that position of disrespect.
Oh, and his WW? She moved across the country several states away from him, and was really struggling...b/c guess what? He had full custody of the kids! Can you just imagine what may have happened if he had never stood against her disrespect for him, the M and their home/family? Maybe you think your situation is not that bad. Joe really didn't at first, I don't think. Either that or he was just making excuses for it. However, one thing leads to another. It is like a snowball rolling in the snow. It gets bigger and bigger.
Stay balanced in your perceptions about detaching and standing up against a show of disrespect.
It is not about what you feel should work in your M. It is about doing the work that gets the right results. Do what works!
