After reading more posts and thinking more about my H, I find myself trying to understand what I now see as my H's NGS and how that maybe intersects with MLC. Is what's happening with him a somewhat inevitable result of a lifetime of NGS or a combo of MLC/NGS? If anyone has any experience or insight with this in a partner or themselves, I would love to hear your thoughts.
I suspect this would have happened to him eventually no matter who he was married to. I can definitely see how confronting NGS in oneself could lead to MLC (though I don't think H knows about NGS or thinks of his own behavior in these terms, I think his crisis in part involves recognizing his behaviors have not actually made him happy, as he always believed himself to be the happiest person in the world).
I've found myself nodding along with aspects of various other posts: my H tended to avoid conflict because he said he didn't want to upset me and interfere with my work; he prided himself on being different than stereotypical guys and often discussed their behavior in a negative light; he was raised by a single mother who he's always focused on pleasing; most of his close friends have been women, etc.
I can see how he didn't have the skills to process feelings of sadness or anger or resentment, that he only knew to cope by hiding these feelings and by not acknowledging them, and how that probably contributed to the increase in outbursts of anger. To me, the anger seemed disproportionate to whatever was going on, and I think this attitude of mine made him feel like I was dismissing his anger. I thought he was making progress when, at one point a few years ago, he told me he realized he only grew more angry at himself when he expressed anger--that he felt he shouldn't ever be angry at me, or angry/sad in general, as he had a happy life. Of course, I now recognize how I started working to avoid conflict as well, because I didn't want to make him angry, since I couldn't understand the anger and didn't know how to resolve it.
In the past, he'd also expressed doubts that I really loved him, or that I was really happy, even when I assured him I did and was. I can see now how our SSM would make him doubt that, despite my other displays of affection, despite the other positives in our R, so I don't want to discount his feeling, but I also see now it might be part of a larger issue of low self esteem for him, as he would often worry about seeming like a "bad" guy, or a "typical" guy.
What else? I noticed his mom was quick to go from warm to cold with him if he disappointed her in some way, so I can see how maybe he's tied his self-worth to keeping the women in his life happy. A few years ago, she had a mental health crisis in her life that I think stemmed from her own people-pleasing issues, and I wonder if H is going through his own version of this now.
I recognized some of these nice guy tendencies in H when we married, but I never thought of them as having a potential downside. At that time, I admired how his mother was so important to him, how kind and loving he was, etc. I guess I'm thinking about all of this because, well, hindsight, but also because if I try to understand H, it helps me have more compassion for what he is going through. Otherwise, I find myself stuck wishing there was some way H could recognize and change these tendencies in himself without ending our M, and without running hard in the other direction, since he seems to have flipped from MNG to "I only think about me now!" mirror/alien H.
Maybe he has to go to this other extreme in order to find a middle ground for himself? That's the journey I hope he can make. That's the journey I can't help him with.
Then there's the fixer part of me wishing I could have known about NGS years ago, because if I'd understood the root of some of his behavior, I would have been able to respond to it myself in a more healthy way, and maybe we could have avoided everything escalating into MLC mode...
