You found me over at Deb's and I was going to come over here eventually.
I have read your updates, seen your comments about your H's narcissicistic (sp?) personality traits, and concur with you on many levels.
Basically, I have gotten where I am today through prayer (both personal and corporate), studying God's word, and then applying it to my life. I have also been in counseling for over a year.
My H is in a bad way, a really bad way, and I refuse to let him get me down or take me with him.
I still pray for him, but realistically I see that there is NO committment from him to either our marriage or the truth.
Kicking him out of the house last April may not have been the best thing db-wise, but it has brought many things to light that otherwise would have remained hidden in darkness.
I never wanted to D him, but see now that it is the only way.
God hates divorce, but does permit it, and God always always always calls us out of the darkness into the light.
Like I said on Deb's thread, in God's economy I am beachfront property!!
It has taken me a really long to to see that, though. I lost sight of that in the midst of my M, I was too busy trying to be who I thought H wanted me to be.
And of course the whole thing with OW really blew me out of the water for a long time. Wrecked havoc on my self esteem for sure.
And part of my H's whole deal was to always blame me for everything.
But I can't cure his childhood pain, I can't be responsible for his poor choices, and I won't sit here any longer trying to db a train wreck.
Liv I so appreciate what you mean by not wanting to be totally inflexible or mean. Isn't this why people like you and I end up with men like these? But yes give them and inch and it would soon end up with you taking your d up to your h. I've been there done that.
Yesterday we had tentatively planned to go swimming in the afternoon, but H rang and said he was getting a lift down and would take D up to his place by bus.
When he turned up, D was showing off on her new bike with our neighbour, so H had a look at it, and then I asked him if he wanted a coffee before pushing off to catch the bus. He had a bit of time to kill and it being a holiday, not much would have been open in town. He accepted. We didn't talk too much, he asked questions, and I answered friendly enough, but didn't ask anything much back of him.
He spent some time ranting on aimlessly about a small airport nearish to where he lives, which was extended recently to take international arrivals - how pointless it was, ridiculous it was, sort of full of disparagement and derision. But he appeared not to be basing his rant on any particular facts, just conjecture, like he knows diddly squat about airports!* I sat there and just listened to him, somewhat tuned out, and thought, this man really has a LOT (all negative, of course) to say about NOTHING!
I just hoped he would not bring up the subject of money while here, and he didn't except to tell me how he had just earned some more himself! I told him how much D loved her new bike, I thought it might make him feel he should cough up his share of the cost to me.
As for replying to his "concerns" about what he pays me, my sister drummed into me that he in fact is doing quite nicely when all is said and done. She knows guys in the other country who have to pay the FULL mortage on their children's and ex-wife's home, plus child support. I already pay half the mortgage here, and we are NOT divorced yet. So I am working on the wording to tell him this. That what he pays right now is the bottom line, as far as I am concerned.
Livnlearn
*Funny story. Years ago some of us were talking and groaning about the effects of jet lag and what a drag it was. H piped up grandly, that HE never suffered from it. When asked what the longest flight he had ever flown was, it turned out to be TWO hours, without even crossing ONE time zone!
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
I just posted something over in Hoping on Michele's thread and thought I would be lazy and copy and paste it here too. It explains a little of what got me to the point where I am at. Someone had asked whether Michele had got a professional diagnosis on her husband being a narcissist.
I wrote -
"About the "professional diagnosis" thing. All I know is that I have known my H for nearly twenty years and was living with him for ten, so I do know him quite well. If an explanation of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) fits the man so well, it doesn't really matter whether the description is official or not. It does help me to understand what the mechanism for his behaviour is, and how to handle it better. It avoids utterly pointless hope and optimism that H can be any different.
When visiting sites for people coping with NPD and reading about other people's experiences with a narcissistic SO, you find yourself just nodding in agreement and laughing out loud at things, because they ring so true and throw so much light on things that were HUGE puzzles before you had an idea of how their minds worked. Because they DON'T work in the same way as yours or mine, believe me. Thinking that they do makes for an awful lot of grief.
I can attest to the tremendous amount of relief and freedom that knowing something about NPD has afforded me. Both my late mother and H were/are Narcissists. Perhaps being brought up by one (or two) either pushes you to become one yourself (seems to have been the case with H, who had two grossly selfish and unloving, narcissistic parents) or turns you into a facilitator/appeaser type in order to cope. I feel I am the latter. My mother, while a narcissist, was a "loving" (dominating) one, rather than an "unloving" (indifferent) one.
If I had stumbled across this info right after the bomb, I don't know how differently I would have coped. But having had two years in which to grieve, to Divorce Bust, to try and work through things in my mind, etc - when I finally did come across it, I seemed to be ready to let go very quickly. It just made too much sense.
I also think if I had come across the NPD info and Divorce Busting well before the bomb, I may have been able to hang on to my marriage, but I would still have been married to a Narcissist, no matter what!
Listen to this. I already knew in my bones, years before the bomb, what the bottom line was - H would not be there for me should anything really bad happen to me.
Did this make me run for the hills? Nope. I took my marriage too "seriously". I loved my H. I just hoped that nothing really bad would happen to me. And I also felt that should something really bad happen to him, I would be there for him. H was the ultimate fair weather spouse.
So can you say that I am well out of this marriage?
YUP!
I still have the rest of my life to live, I will either make it on my own or find someone with the mental and emotional equipment (capacity) to cultivate and maintain a decent relationship or marriage with me.
In the end, no one is forcing anyone to accept a diagnosis, but we are free to draw our own conclusions and make our own decisions. My H already decided, without consulting me, that our marriage was over. I have now decided, after two years, that I am happy to let go and agree with him!"
Livnlearn
PS: Once again, for Pamila and others, here are a couple of links -
Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited is a thick book by self confessed and professionally diagnosed narcissist Sam Vaknin. I have had my copy of the book on order for many weeks. But a large chunk of the contents are available online on this site. Very interesting reading.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
LNL--Your observations about your H are pretty interesting and amusing. I'm glad you are detached enough to see them for what they are and not how they must be due to you or anything you do or say.
That being said, I really had myself a hearty chuckle at your postscript note about jet lag. It really made me laugh. After making several trips to visit family Down Under, I can sympathize with jet lag. It's always easier for me to go, but coming back is the absolute pits. I seem to walk around in a coma for a few days.
A doctor told me a long time ago that it takes the body 1 day for every one hour time zone crossed to fully recover (at the cell level). I finally learned that the secret to many of my lag ills is hydration. It does seem to mitigate some of it, but frankly, there is no substitute for good sleep in the supine position (vs. sitting stiffly in some coach chair that doesn't fully recline).
Anyway, just checking in and glad to hear you're in good spirits.
Take care,
Betsey
"There are only 2 ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
D came back yesterday afternoon and H called in the evening to speak to her and "wish her goodnight".
So when the phone rang this evening, I was wondering how come H was ringing again to speak to D - he usually rings once every two days. I picked up as D was still eating.
H asks me the international dialing code for other country (his own country of citizenship - shows how much he keeps in touch with folk there! ) I tell him. He tells me he tried it and it doesn't work. There is a silence. I cannot take responsibility for him not getting through to a number.
He then tells me he has only the number, he has lost the email contact because his computer is "broken", which I find a curious use of words. I said, broken? What do you mean? He says, DEAD. Oh dear.
He says he is coming to town tomorrow to buy a new laptop, as he needs it for work. He is tired of money going down the drain. I would be too. I ask him if it isn't still under guanratee, and he says it is past a year old. (Remember he left his last one in a cheap hostel totally unattended for a day last year in January, and it got stolen, along with his expensive Barbour jacket etc?)
He says, it is out of guarantee. He seems certain it is unrepairable, broken. I have a feeling there is more to it than what he is saying, but that is not my concern.
Throughout the convo I could feel myself slipping back into "secretarial" mode with him, being his PA basically, and having to resist it. There are plenty of other folk he could have called to find out the dialing code from!
I felt sorry for him, but I also remembered that when my computer was as dead as a door nail just after the bomb, and I was in a terrible state and ran up a huge telephone bill in order to stay in touch with my sister (weep on her shoulder) in the other country, H was nowhere to be seen, except cavorting with OW1.
I don't like this at all, but I am having to learn to harden my heart. No doubt this will also get linked to how he can't pay me etc. I don't wish him ill, but I do want to stay out of his drama nowadays, but he appears to want to suck me in at times. He sounded very down this evening.
I got my copy of "Why does he do that?" in the post today, and have started reading it.
What do people think?
Livnlearn
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
Sometimes I think we were married to the same man. My XH told me I needed to help him set up a retirement account for him after I had already filed for divorce. In the past, I would have done it. The new and improved me told him to kiss my a@@.
Stand your ground. Any little thing you give him will just make him ask for more.
I agree - odd choice of words. Perhaps he stomped on it in a fit of writer's-block rage? Perhaps he got a virus and doesn't know how to reboot? Perhaps he dropped it while working from the bathtub? Who knows. If he does get a new one, you should ask him for the old one - "for D to play around with". I'm betting you could get it fixed for cheap . Maybe you could just run Scandisk and defrag it?
There are many reasons why I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, Ellie!
H is computer savvy, at least he used to be a programmer way back in the 80s. But he is also very lazy and doesn't bother to tinker and repair. The stories I could tell you about that! I'll keep that for another day, when you are out here visiting me!!
Here's an example - he's the one who knows about computers, yet he will be on to his fourth one in four years tomorrow. During the same time, I am still using his old one that is more than four years old and has been repaired, and I am the one who "doesn't know anything about computers" except how to hang on to one!
I had a bad experience when H gave D one of his "old" cellphones 18 months ago to play with, because it "didn't work". It was the smartest cutest phone you ever saw, and so I asked D to give it to me to try out my SIM card with, and it worked! It was much smaller and neater and lighter than mine at the time, which was by comparison from the ark. I used it successfully for a few months, including when I went abroad last summer. Then when H was in a rant last year, he demanded it back, saying that he hadn't given it to me , and he needed a "spare" phone! So I returned it, and eventually bought my own cute one, that HE DIDN'T BUY or GIVE ME!!!
And although only a guess, I am 100% certain he give the phone to OW2.
I don't want our things or lives entwined any more than they are, I want to untwine our lives. There is still a way to go, as we have not divided the household stuff yet. Or the house.
Got to see the laywer this week to clarify some stuff.
Livnlearn
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
PS I just had a disturbing thought - I hope he didn't put his fist through it in a rage... he has a tendancy to smash his fist into things (luckily not people) when in a rage.
Livnlearn
"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates
and I was going to come over here eventually.
