Thanks for your advice regarding how to handle the thing with my parents. I was planning to do exactly what you suggest and am relieved at it being reinforced.
To you and Bruce, a day does not pass when at least a few times I mentally berate my WAW for what she has done with the family. But, as I see more of her torment and the MLC unsettledness and unhappness in her, I feel like I am better off than her right now. I would not like to be in teh strange netherworld of psyche that she is in now. Reading about MLC helped me understand that. At the least, I now have a way to address my anger and anguish.
Gabriel, I actually liked most of O'Connor's book. I did not know anything about MLC and its psychological basis before I read that book. When I used to lurk on the MLC forum here and on midlifeclub.com I would see all the (mostly) women on there whose husbands had abandoned them in favor of much younger women and red sportscars and I just thought they were hurting from bad behavior of their MLC-WAHs. O'Connor explained why men do those kinds of things in their midlife. He does not condone the behavior however. Ultimately, whatever we may call it, it is irresponsible action and just jettisoning your relationship by walking away from all the problems with it. The Conways' book is more anecdotal and demonstrates that it can happen to anybody. But it lacked a rational framework that my scientific training demands. Brehony's book is somewhere in between. I must warn you that it is very Jungian also. From what I gather, most MLC books go back to Jung because he was the first perhaps to record his own experiences with MLC. I hear Gail Sheehy has a very good book on it, but I read that Brehony's is a more updated, slightly more heavily psychological book. Remarkably, while several thousands on us on this bb and elsewhere are at the receiving end of MLC, the psychology world seems to have little in the form of therapy to deal with this malady. Certainly, the tehrapists that my WAW went to and the MC that we went to made no mention of it. Both O'Connor and Brehony are psychologists and seem to be the very few who have written on it (both of them had MLCs).
Gabe, my WAW does not seem very enthusiastic about my GAL activity and PMA either. It irks her. It probably feels to her like "why is he all positive and happy while I am feeling like crap". It forces them to ask "is there something the matter with me internally that makes me unhappy? (God forbid!)". It is far more convenient to blame external factors, such as the LBS for their internal misery as well as the ongoing drama.
Thanks for your inputs, my friend.
UD
The 3 laws of DBing:
1. PMA is critical to DBing.
2. Since drop in WAW's PMA leads to drop in LBS's PMA and vice-versa detachment is critical.
3. Validate to raise WAW's PMA and GAL to raise LBS's.
