[Treasur]

1. What does Detachment mean for you personally?  (In your own words or a quote that best describes your thoughts)
2. What did you do to gain a measure of it?
3. What positives did Detachment bring you? (Prompted by Thunder.  Thank you!)

1 - Letting be, then letting go (of lots of things not just my h or my m)

2 - stopped asking someone who didn't want to talk (about anything) to me to do so which reduced my contact with whatever was going on in his head or life

3 - a clearer unfogged view of my own wood and trees, the beginning of peace.

For me, limiting contact and now NC was essential to trying to detach at all. I think I was just too enmeshed with my h as part of who I was and my perspective on my own life and his contribution to my own trauma.  Difficult to do though when the divorce process and unravelling the practicalities required some level of exchange and decision making by both of us that affected our individual lives. And the crazy wasn't going to stop unless I did go NC (bc it wasn't my crazy)  and I wasn't able to be emotionally detached enough to simply not care about the crazy.

Did NC/limited contact help others detach or not?

[Keep believing]

I really like and understood what thunder wrote.   take mlc out of it.  look just at the addict.   you do everything you possibly can for the addict then one day you realize you can not help them.   it may take awhile , it may take you doing everything you possibly can for the addict until you realize you can not do one thing.  it may take months or years to reach this point . but when you have had enough there is nothing left to do  but detach. you have to let them go. I did this with my d27. I think the major difference is the addict of a drug is a drug not a human such as ow.   one who can talk and manipulate with actions.   thats the part that is the hardest because we try to beat that other human(ow)  with our reasoning to an mlcer . and it doesn't work.  a drug does not walk and talk in the real sense of a human.  i sometimes think if my h was just a coke addict , i know it would be easier to let him go and hit bottom but when its a ow it makes you feel rejected and not good enough . you feel in competition. you can't compete with coke.


   i hope this makes sense.

[Acorn]

Many of you generously shared your thoughts on Detachment.  Thank you!
I really like the format that Anjae and Tresur used to answer the questions succinctly.
You could either follow that format or share your flow of consciousness with everyone.

Just to reiterate the questions re Detachment:

1. What does Detachment mean for you personally?  (In your own words or a quote that best describes your thoughts)

2. What did you do to gain a measure of it?

3. What positives did Detachment bring you? (Prompted by Thunder.  Thank you!)

What do you think?  Please share!

[OldPilot]

OK - this May will be 10 years since bomb drop. and 7 years since my divorce  was final.

From BD to divorce I was posting on DB and then here.
I thought I was detached as that was the advice I was given.
I had pretty much limited contact with my STBX,
I thought I was detached BUT after my divorce was final I
had major physical issues.
My head was spinning with dizziness and I was not happy.
I could not continue to live with these issues.

I think this was the start of a new level of detachment that was deeper inside the onion layers.

So nothing I DID exactly but as more time went by I accepted my situation and the dizziness started to subside and
the stress was starting to go away.

I think Admiral Stockdales quote is a good one here

In a business book by James C. Collins called Good to Great, Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp.[20]

I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.[21]

When Collins asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:

Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.[21]

Stockdale then added:

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be

So if you replace POW with LBS/MLC you end up with the same advice.

[Thunder]

KB, I understand what you are saying about the addiction being a person, but honestly I see no difference.

What ever the addict is addicted to there is still nothing you can do to help them, so detaching is still the wise thing to do.

Yes a person can influence them with words but I feel coke can influence just as easily.
It's the high the addict is after, doesn't matter who or what it is, you can't compete with it.

They have to deal with their addiction on their own.  Addicts are weak.  Until they reach their rock bottom they will keep being influences.  But they are still 100% responsible for their action.

He will have to be the one to decide to kick his addiction (ow).  You know this has nothing to do with you, right?  It really has nothing to do with her either.

In the case of the alcoholic, they have a disease.  In MLC they do not have a disease, they are just screwed up in the head.  Not a thing you can do to help him or change him, except let go and detach as much as you can.

[Nas]

This isn't about detachment, so sorry to detour, but I am always confused about addiction to a person.  I get the high of infatuation and how at first they feel a sort of euphoria. And as much as we don't want to admit it, those are real feelings.  But then after time passes, does it get to the point where they despise the person but can't stop being with them?  I mean, that's what addicts and alcoholics say, at first they liked getting drunk or high because it made them feel better.  But after a while, they grew to despise the alcohol or the drugs and knew they were really hurting them but they couldn't stop.

So it would make sense that the MLCer would grow to truly despise the OP but for some reason not be able to leave them.  I have a hard time believing that for some reason though.

[Granite]

1.
My goal of detachment:  To lift myself up and find a calm place where my wife’s spinning life could be observed, but not felt.

2.
No contact for 5 weeks followed a couple of months later with a journey of mourning the person she was thru travel to places of importance in our life together.  At each spot I spent enough time to lock in those wonderful memories and feelings.  Before leaving each place I took whatever time was needed to mourn her as if she had died.

3.
I am calm when I see her/them.  I am able to listen to her with little to no jealousy, pain or anger and speak freely, kindly, but freely with her about what she is doing and going thru. Detachment is allowing me to get back to the person I was and at times I even notice a better me shining thru the clouds.

[PJ Ames]

This may look a little different for those of us with live-in wallowers. It's kind of hard to get to "not my circus - not my monkeys" when you're living in the big tent. But I think OP is right - it's a matter of layers.

1. What does Detachment mean for you personally? 
It's a method for preserving my own mental health and staying out of the way so my W can (eventually) resolve her own crisis.

2. What did you do to gain a measure of it?
a. Realize that this is not a problem I can fix
b. Learning to trust in God (I'm a slow learner)
c. Worked on my own hobbies and physical health.

3. What positives did Detachment bring you?
a. Better mental, physical and emotional health.
b. More control - I'm not as tossed around by every wave of W's crisis.

[Nerissa]

This isn't about detachment, so sorry to detour, but I am always confused about addiction to a person.  I get the high of infatuation and how at first they feel a sort of euphoria. And as much as we don't want to admit it, those are real feelings.  But then after time passes, does it get to the point where they despise the person but can't stop being with them?  I mean, that's what addicts and alcoholics say, at first they liked getting drunk or high because it made them feel better.  But after a while, they grew to despise the alcohol or the drugs and knew they were really hurting them but they couldn't stop.

So it would make sense that the MLCer would grow to truly despise the OP but for some reason not be able to leave them.  I have a hard time believing that for some reason though.

I’m  not sure how it feels.  I don’t have addictions to substances , except maybe Cadbury’s chocolate - and I don’t despise it; if I eat a whole Family bar I’m more likely to despise myself. 

Process addictions were explained to me as triggers.  So I decide to shop on Saturday.  The purchase is the least of the addiction.  The pleasure starts with deciding where I will go.  What I want; what shops I will Visit.  I look through brochures or websites.  These all are addictive actions and bring anticipatory pleasure.  .  The final purchase is not the point of it all. 

I think addictions to people are probably a bit different again.  I imagine it feels a bit like being with friends and finding myself drawn into conversations and activities that I’m not proud of: gossiping maybe, or vandalism or whatever.  .  It isn’t the persons fault because I joined in willingly, but I know it is t good for me and I don’t like myself much  afterwards and I vow not to do that again.  But somehow I do.

I must agree though Nas, chocolate aside, I simply don’t get the kind of pleasure from any of these things which would make me go back again and again and destroy my life for their sake.  I remember that well after his affair stopped being physical, I found an email from my H to his ow who had found another older man.  The email was infantile.  Utterly unbelievable.  He was mortified as I tried to understand what it was he got from an email exchange which seemed to be written by twelve year olds.  It wasn’t even explicit although it tried to be sexy.  He hung his head and said “ you wouldn’t understand.  You wouldn’t do it”.  I think things really work differently in their minds.

[Acorn]

I continue to learn from everyone’s post.  Thank you...  I hope others, especially newbies, find the discussion helpful. 

May I encourage you to continue to share you thoughts on those 3 questions re Detachment? 

I found this observation helpful.  Detachment: not to be attached to an outcome. 

Perhaps we could discuss what ‘outcome’ menas for LBS and how attached we are to them.  Well, that’s after we’ve put some effort into answering the 3!

OP, I find your quote thought provoking - Have faith that you will prevail, but with reality in mind.