Coconut, we appreciate your updates. I can't remember if we ever posted much to each other but I've always followed your sitch. If I didn't post it was only because it looked like everything I could think to offer was already in your wheelhouse.

In terms of tone while communicating, we all have to find our own way. For me I went the approach of no emotion at all. I mean absolute zero. I only communicate by text or email, and it's only on a true as needed basis. My responses are short, and then I strip them and strip them and strip them so they provide only the absolutely critical information needed to be passed on. I am respectful so if she texts me that someone passed away as part of her message to me I'll add in a line about being sorry to hear, but it is totally sterile. And I absolutely positively make sure there is no emotional undertone. When she attacks I don't defend. If she accuses me of something I don't reply. If she asks a questions accusingly I find a way to reply to the question to answer it without either defending or retaliating. That kind of thing. In my mind she tried pushing my buttons in various ways and for the last 3 years I completely and totally removed the batteries from whatever game she was trying to play.

I rarely see her in person, when I do we rarely speak, and if I need to it is one sentence uttered as if I was in a trance or something. As far as I'm concerned she's dead and is just a ghost that other people still see and interact with that I cannot.

I, too, have reduced the anger to where I can't even notice it anymore other than a vague sense of nausea on rare occasions when I am triggered. Mostly it is replaced by humor when she does something over the top, or a moment of silence for our humanity and the destruction we cause to each other. But while I am not harboring hostility, I darn sure don't see any reason to expose myself emotionally in any way to her ever again. My wife been dead in my heart for three years now, murdered by the XW who took her place. The husband I was died with her as that is not who I am anymore. I truly am beyond it, but I don't have any interest in being face book friends or acting like pals or even swapping cute kid pictures. That emotional back and forth died with the marriage.

I'm not saying this is ideal or anything. Maybe it's the only way I could manage the situation based on the way she behaved since BD. Maybe I'm just a super sensitive person that has a hard time opening up and can only protecting myself by shutting down to this level. I don't know. But this is the only path I could find. And for better or worse it's allowed me to put a tremendous amount of distance between me and the wreckage and rebuild a life that I have found peace and content in. It's not what I set out for, but it's what God has given me. My job is just to savor it and say thank you.

Take care and looking forward to hearing what you do with yourself in 2018.


Me:38 XW:38
T:11 years M:8 years
Kids: S14, D11, D7
BD/Move out day: 6/17/14, D final Dec 15