[Acorn]

Thank you for following along, UM. Curiosity, HF, Nas and Pacman!   I’m glad you appreciated the Perlman story.  I find it very inspiring and encouraging. 

…..

I just noticed the following tagline, Pacman, I would like to comment on that, if I may, please.

Quote form a MLCer "From my experience if my H had let me go a long time ago, and stop pressuring me, begging and pleading and just let go I possibly would have experienced my awakening sooner than I did." Hope this is true!

My hope is that this person eventually came to realize her statement was about blaming another person for her tardy ‘awakening.’ 

She may have woken up (if she says so), however, I suggest that she is still lying in bed and not doing much if she did not attain enough emotional maturity to take 100% accountability for what happens in her own mind-scape and still passing the buck to her H.   Accountability 101. 

I am wondering aloud if crisis and the accompanying craziness end for most MLCers but emotional growth does not necessarily happen.  (Just a little musing on a lazy Saturday.) 

[marvin4242]

Acorn thanks for the update and sharing your experience as always. I was reading your insightful comment about the quote and something struck me. That applies more to us, the LBS, than the NLCer. The sooner we  let go of understanding, controlling or “fixing” and “helping” our MLCer the sooner WE may experience OUR awakening.

I think that fits your comment about taking full responsibility.

[Pacman]

Thank you for following along, UM. Curiosity, HF, Nas and Pacman!   I’m glad you appreciated the Perlman story.  I find it very inspiring and encouraging. 

…..

I just noticed the following tagline, Pacman, I would like to comment on that, if I may, please.

Quote form a MLCer "From my experience if my H had let me go a long time ago, and stop pressuring me, begging and pleading and just let go I possibly would have experienced my awakening sooner than I did." Hope this is true!

My hope is that this person eventually came to realize her statement was about blaming another person for her tardy ‘awakening.’ 

She may have woken up (if she says so), however, I suggest that she is still lying in bed and not doing much if she did not attain enough emotional maturity to take 100% accountability for what happens in her own mind-scape and still passing the buck to her H.   Accountability 101. 

I am wondering aloud if crisis and the accompanying craziness end for most MLCers but emotional growth does not necessarily happen.  (Just a little musing on a lazy Saturday.)

That is a very insightful way of looking at it. Thank you. We tend to see only what we want to see I guess.
This whole situation has been about blame so far. So I see where you are coming from.
Not to hijack your story.

[Acorn]

Marvin, by Jove, you are right!  Thank you for placing the mirror where it belongs — in front of LBS.  What LBS’s ‘awakening’ entails would make an interesting discussion. 

Pacman, ‘hijack’ away!  Any thread can be a place of discussion, I believe.  As long as we are learning and growing, who cares what thread we use, eh!

We tend to see only what we want to see I guess.

If I may ask you a question, Pacman, what did you want to see in the quote?   I’m really curious!

[Pacman]

If I may ask you a question, Pacman, what did you want to see in the quote?   I’m really curious!

I guess hope is what I saw out of it. Hope that one day we could reconnect.
That one day she might see out of her current affair idiot and realise that we had 23 years together. Some great time and some crap times.
But that is what life and marriage are about. Enjoying the best of times and working through the bad.
But I feel that society in general has become throw away and that when things get too tough it's easier to walk away.
The whole narrative that everything was horrible and so bad that she had to choose to have an affair and leave our family with 2 new grandchildren (5 months and 6 weeks old) has me absolutely dumb founded.

At the moment the "grass is greener".

[JohnnyBravo]

I find that same hope there.

(Thunder has that quote in her .sig, so I hope people aren't just noticing that statement now because Pac is a newbie. As am I.)

[MadLuv]

Quote form a MLCer "From my experience if my H had let me go a long time ago, and stop pressuring me, begging and pleading and just let go I possibly would have experienced my awakening sooner than I did." Hope this is true!

It’s kind of interesting if you read it more than once, because it almost has the introspective view of the LBS or MLC’er that has made it through the worst, right?? All you great minds saying focus on you, turn your head to their shenanigans. They have to work it out and you have to work it out, but that work is done separate and you both have to do it separate or you BOTH impede what the future will be. Move forward or stay stagnant. IMHO

[Nas]

What LBS’s ‘awakening’ entails would make an interesting discussion. 

I'd really welcome this IMO very important discussion.

As to the tagline/hope - I remember that quote. I believe it's from Denjef, who shared her story of her own *MLC while also standing for her marriage as her H had an *MLC. (*everyone MLCer is different and MLC is not a "diagnosis).

Here's what I'll say about hope. Hope is great. Hope is necessary. But finding hope within yourself is very different than finding hope by looking at others. It's very, very natural to look at others for "hope," but what it really gives you is a baseline for comparison and a general idea that something is possible.  It's very important to come to a point where you hold hope in yourself (yes, hope that you might reconcile, but mostly hope that you yourself will be okay) because what happens in someone else's life will never dictate what will happen in our own lives. It does give us a bit of hope to hold onto, but that needs to be balanced with the actual reality of our own lives. Otherwise, we end up trying to jam the basic square pegs of our own situations into holes shaped like...I don't know, what's the most complex shape in the world?

Sometimes a square peg is just exactly what it looks like, a square peg. Sometimes viewing things wholly through an MLC lens distorts them unnecessarily and makes them more complicated than they really are.  I say this with empathy because we all do it and it only really ends up wasting precious minutes of our lives, and we don't know how many of those we have.

I seek out and read stories all the time of people who have lived for decades with triple negative breast cancer. They give me hope because they show what's possible. But they're not me and I'm not them. I can read their stories, but I have to walk my own road, because what they did might not work for me and it could be really catastrophic if I just did exactly what someone else did because it worked for them. For example, when I was first diagnosed, I was given a choice between two treatments. One was standard of care, proven to work in a majority of cases. The other was a clinical trial. I ended up on the standard of care and read many stories of survivors who went through this treatment and were thriving, and I thought since I was doing the same thing they did, I'd be fine in no time. But the treatment didn't work for me. But it worked for so many, and it was supposed to work for me, and for that reason, I didn't protest when the doctors kept me on it even when I said I felt the tumor was growing. And my cancer progressed, and then we changed course, but by then, damage was done. That's an extreme analogy, but just to say that every single situation is different and you can look to others for hope, but be careful not to compare at your own expense.

Sorry Acorn, talk about a hijack!

[MadLuv]

Gosh, I feel for me I thought I was there so many times, but then a trigger would happen and nope!! For me it was pure exhaustion in the situation, time and stop loving him more than me. That was the biggest turn for me. I had put H before me for so long it was hard to change that focus.

Also, when I lost my D14 I learned to look at people who had it worse. Suffered more before passing or living with never a moment of clarity or peace. I am not an overly religious person, but I do believe that what is going to happen is going to happen. That our lives are predetermined in a way, so it helps to give up trying to control what is uncontrollable.

[Acorn]

Thank you, Marvin,  PacMan, JB, Torn and Nas, for following along and taking your time to respond on this thread! 

….

Thank you for graciously indulging my curiosity, Pacman. 

I can tell you I also saw ‘hope’ initially, and I stopped begging, etc., erroneously assuming that I had some influence on H’s crisis trajectory and that a rosy future of our relationship was somehow baked into that trajectory.  That’s hope gone rogue and crossed over to quasi-fantasyland.  From my personal experience, I believe that it may help LBS move forward with more vigour if they unhitched the crisis outcome from the relationship outcome. I suggest that proactive and purposeful unhitching does help with seeing the reality, detachment, and, therefore, healing, as it helped me.

Back to ‘hope’ — As Nas kindly explained, using her exquisitely vulnerable personal experience as an example, I believe hope can be positive and therapeutic, as long as one does not cross into the realm of delusional thinking via contorted extrapolation.  Delusional thinking is  explained as ‘a false belief that is resistant to confrontation with actual facts.’  Yes, cherish hope, by all means, but with both feet firmly planted in reality.  (By the way, Nas managed to cram so many important and insightful observations into her post.  I’d say It’s worth reading carefully and read it again.)

There was one silver lining in changing my behaviour, which was based my faulty assumption that I had the power to influence H’s crisis, is that I eventually realized how degrading and pathetic it was to beg, plead and cling.  I asked myself, ‘lady, where is your dignity, eh?’  Eventually, I got with the real programme — H could not hide his contempt for me, his eyes were firing hatred at me, and then I became nothing to him, just a piece of furniture.  Why would I beg anything from someone that does not want me?

About accountability:

When I settled down a bit, the importance of taking full personal accountability for yourself and not putting the blame on your condition/diagnosis/personal or psychological history, the actions of others, group pressure, the societal trends, etc came into focus.  Once your eyes are open to this, you can not unlearn this vital lesson.   You immediately recognize when you are passing the buck to something or someone else.  You recognize with more alacrity when someone else is passing the buck — funny that.

Meandering post as H and I celebrate our wedding anniversary.  We talked about how precious each day is, how important it is to not forget the lessons we each have learned, and to live in gratitude.