I very much appreciate your viewpoint. It’s so hard to measure if what I’m doing is working (or any of us really), because the target keeps moving. Some days I can’t tell if I’m having a negative effect, or if her moods are just all over the place for other reasons. Probably both.
Thank you for the kind words on self-improvement. I’m definitely heading in that direction, and being direct and honest and willing to look stupid are all new territory for me. “Be right, do right, act right” is a script that has (not) served me for years.
I’m trying to digest and assimilate much of the good feedback here with a couple of paradigms: my situation is different just like everyone else’s, and some (many) if these rules are hard and fast.
However, my intuition is telling me there’s a mismatch somewhere along the line. One, she’s not a walk away wife. Two, she’s not a wayward wife. There is no OM, and really, there is no Other Life. She’s not driving away from me into the arms of another man, or into the promise of a better life. If anything, she’s driving away from me into the mouth of the abyss.
I really am wondering if I was actually BD’d. (Maybe I was, maybe I’m dumb, both are ok. New day, new me :)). It’s not like she (apparently) has fantasies about disappearing into a better life. It really feels to me like her threat of divorce was akin to saying I’LL BLOW US UP IF YOU MAKE ME FUNCTION.
She has stopped caring about... anything really, except her obsessive focus on a side project that has never made money. We are already $1k in the red every month, and just yesterday I discovered she’s blowing 100’s of $ on phone games. There is no plan B, she’s not building a better life or escaping into fantasy. Or another man’s arms.
That’s why I’m really concerned about the “withdraw emotional support, your old marriage is dead, make her miss you” tactic. I honestly, truly think that will not work. The DR book even has a chapter about the depressed spouse, and it states that (paraphrasing) a depressed WAW is a special situation requiring different tactics, many of which “go beyond the scope of this book.”
Still, I’m DBing, I’m following the rules as closely as possible. I’m GALing. But I feel like I need a specialized plan here. Has anyone on these boards dealt with a. Severely depressed WAW? Is there any further reading I can do on this?
