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Our Community / Links/Blogs/Articles for us all to share 10
« Latest by Nas on June 05, 2026, 05:59:53 PM »
One more from me - this one I found while trying to help a writer create a character, but it resonated with me in several different directions.
I suppose the opposite of cycle breaking would be exactly what many of our spouses decided to do instead…

https://share.google/TCmFBTWfPuZOcK7yL

“Cycle-breaking involves ‘learning to feel emotions’ that were never safe to experience…guilt, shame and anxiety are known as ‘inhibitory emotions’. These emotions typically ensure that people behave in ways that help them fit in with their families and society. But they can also block access to other emotions, such as anger, fear, sadness and excitement. Those important, ‘core’ emotions often help human beings take actions that serve them well, such as standing up to others when angry, running from danger when afraid, or crying when sad…”

🎵 https://youtu.be/0asSzzf6HPw?si=uTi5clZSUqEJuLy0
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Our Community / My journey post D
« Latest by MadLuv on June 04, 2026, 09:29:42 PM »
I just think some love deeper and are more acceptable to faults in others. Have better communication skills and most of don’t need that high of a new car, new person, big trip…..that’s mature love and relationships. To be grateful with where you are. Who you are with. I don’t think anyone in a marriage doesn’t at times look at their spouse and think “ who are they?” There are pikes and valleys. Comfortability with time and I think MLCers get bored. Harbor resentments. Chase those high school
Romance feelings. They aren’t ever happy or satisfied. When I asked my XH a year after he left if he was happy he stated “ I hate when you ask me that” I think that says it all. They are never truly happy.  I also think it reverses. They first find the exit as relief when we are in shambles, but then we grow and learn and survive and that’s when all their pushed aside emotions and escapes stop working. We pay at the beginning. Theirs is delayed. That’s how I feel now.
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Our Community / Links/Blogs/Articles for us all to share 10
« Latest by Nas on June 04, 2026, 06:25:02 PM »
Another interesting one:

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire?utm_source=Aeon%2BNewsletter&utm_campaign=9ef158376b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_04_27_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-4ef8a26106-72670444

If your basic needs are stabilized, self-inquiry is easier. Without stability it seems frivolous. But desire has always fascinated me as a luxury, and so often authentic desire isn’t examined. Mimetic desire is safe. Real desire often has a consequence of disruption. (If you can’t tell, disruption is a theme in my life lately and partly because I’ve had to recently take on some pretty difficult situations).
I never really knew how to want. I knew how to need. My wants were around survival. I want the freedom of authentic desire. One thing this made me think is that when you’ve (often subconsciously) built your life around mimetic desire, confronting your authentic desires could be very disruptive. Unsettling. Stability threatening. It requires one to tolerate uncertainty. “What do I really want?” Is a big scary question even though it seems pretty innocuous.
Anyway, food for thought that I think fits the LBS experience. What kind of life do you really want?

🎵 https://youtu.be/y25t6YqxDOw?si=hC7LFkIIO8PZKPMH
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Our Community / My journey post D
« Latest by Nas on June 03, 2026, 06:19:19 PM »

Though, i have to say the whole womanizing and the lying thing was already there even before he met me. In hindsight, I don't know which part of that marriage was true and which part was a lie. I don't know what else he was lying about, especially when he was assigned abroad. But, that doesn't matter now. I cannot change what happened and it doesn't affect my future anymore.


It’s funny, I recently had one of the most interesting conversations with a priest. I’m an atheist, so he wasn’t going to change my mind and I wasn’t going to change his mind, but the conversation was stimulating. At one point we ended up talking about perception, self-delusion, self-awareness, and radical acceptance. We humans will do a lot to avoid discomfort or disruption. And there’s this thing called preconscious knowledge. Things that we know, the knowing exists within us but it’s not in our active awareness. It’s not that we’re turning a blind eye so much as we’re just choosing to not yet know what we know.

We can also “know” things but do nothing about it because the status quo is comfortable enough and changing it would be very disruptive. And when we are the focus of someone’s attention, it’s very easy to believe that the way they behave in other situations and with other people doesn’t apply to us. One of the hardest things I’ve learned throughout my life is that if a person will treat other people a certain way, there’s no reason to believe they won’t treat me that way at some point. Example: My former husband was highly annoyed by people. He was nicer to people depending on context. Even through the perpetual cycles of cutting me down and then building me back up and then cutting me down, I still lived in the delusion that I had a hierarchical advantage, that my status was safe. I think it’s human nature, we just want to believe we matter. In reality, that’s why it’s so important to observe whether behavior is consistent -  the way a person treats others shows you what they’re capable of.

That said, for many years you made the choice to love your husband and that was real. Any happiness you felt during those years was real. Those moments were real. They were just as real as the moments of happiness you felt recently in France with your sister. That’s my belief anyway. You can’t get inside your ex-husband‘s head and know what he felt or didn’t feel, but you know what you felt and it was genuine and it absolutely matters.
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Our Community / My journey post D
« Latest by Dragonfly33 on June 02, 2026, 02:17:44 PM »
Hello Ready, thank you for the greetings. I celebrated my birthday back in April but I told my sister to come during my holiday so we can spend a lot of time together. The trip to France was so much fun with my sister. We travelled in the Normandie, Bretagne and Bourgogne region. It was easy because I brought my car. It was such a memorable trip. We also travelled here in Switzerland, there was no time to rest. But it's all worth it.

As for being a people pleaser, yes, I am the world champion of pleasing people. And part of it is good but sometimes you can lose yourself while people pleasing. I don't know how my ex was before the marriage, if he had depression. But during the marriage he did have a burnout. Whether I was around or not, I guess it was inevitable. He would have a burnout due to work stress and also sleeping problems. I used to blame myself because he blamed me, but in hindsight, none of it was my fault. Even now, he still has problems with all sorts of body pain, sleeping, etc despite me being gone for almost a decade now. And I agree with you, the MLC intensified everything. Though, i have to say the whole womanizing and the lying thing was already there even before he met me. In hindsight, I don't know which part of that marriage was true and which part was a lie. I don't know what else he was lying about, especially when he was assigned abroad. But, that doesn't matter now. I cannot change what happened and it doesn't affect my future anymore.

Recently, while I was travelling in France, my ex and I were communicating. I sent him pictures of the places we once visited when we were still married. I also told him stories of me meeting some people on the trip who in complimented me and my sister. Some of these people were men. So for me as a 50 year old, I felt flattered and some encouters are really funny. I recounted him some of the stories and whenever it involved a male person, he would tell me he was not interested. Basically, he was pissed off and told me he didn't understand why I was telling those stories to him. I told him, I told him the stories because I find them funny and it was not only him I told the stories. I told it to my other friends. He told me he was not just "a friend" to me. I don't understand what it meant but I told him, I won't be telling stories anymore. Perhaps it was inappropriate that I told him those stories but I didn't have any intention to make him jealous or whatever as I have no intention anymore of getting back together. I gave up standing a long time ago. I just find the reaction a bit weird.
Anyway, he's now in my home country, I guess joining a triathlon competition. Haven't hear from him anymore. Maybe it's a good thing. haha

As for me, I realized when my sister was here, that nothing more that makes me happy than being with my family. I am happiest when I am with them. I forget about the hard things in life. We had a lot of fun moment where we got to laugh a lot. My sister kept telling me I should try dating again but honestly, nowadays it's just hard to meet good and sincere people. But who knows, one day. If it comes, and when I'm ready, I might give it a try once again.
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Our Community / Full Moon Alert VII
« Latest by UrsaMajor on June 01, 2026, 02:41:21 AM »
Blue moon, you saw me standing alone. Without a dream in my heart. Without a love of my own. Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for.......

=============================================

Tonight (Last night at 04:45 UTC (Sunday morning) was the full moon) is a Full Blue Moon. The Blue Moon occurs when there are 2 Full Moons within the same month, this is the second Full Moon of May. The name Blue Moon comes from an ancient word which is 'Belewe' which means to betray, so the Blue Moon literally means Betrayer Moon. Monthly Moon phases were each given names, this helped farmers to prepare for various types of weather and crop rotations such a  Full Harvest Moon for example, so the extra Full Moon in a month would often confuse people and messing up the farming calendar giving it the name Betrayer Moon.
There is so much happening around this Moon in terms of once-in-a-lifetime type chances. It’s as if we are all on the edge of something so big and we have to make the decision to take the path we’ve always taken, or to jump into the territory of new possibilities. The Blue Moon has a super charged energy we can use to help us heal in every emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives, soak up the Moons glow and invite it to enter our bodies as waves of healing energy.
This Full Moon is in the sign of Sagittarius, it is about celebrating our individuality, our little quirks that make us different from everybody else. Let your creativity come out. Do something a little different, dress a little differently, wear your hair a little differently, rebel against the norm. Take a walk on the weird side of life.
Our minds will be clear and uncluttered around now, we will be able to see things as they really are, we can take off our rose tinted glasses and take a good look at ourselves and the world around us as it is and not how we want it to be. This will also have us asking ourselves if we are happy with where we are and what what we're doing.
As amazing as this Moon will be, and necessary, it’s going to be one that challenges us on every single level. In the build up to this lunar event we may have been feeling restless, or have had an excess of nervous energy. Our pulses may have been racing and it may have been harder for us to relax or fall asleep at night. Our spirits can sense that we are on the verge of something big, but it’s up to us to initiate change. We are on the threshold of having massive pieces of the puzzle collide or fall into place.
There may be big changes or upsets in the status quo during the next several weeks. We may find ourselves acting in ways that only a few weeks ago we never thought possible, but Sagittarius is lighting a fire inside of our hearts and daring us to break the boundaries that have held us back for far too long. While we may feel anxious at all of the possible changes being presented to ourselves, know that the universe won’t bring us anything we aren’t ready for. The truth of it is there is no such thing as the perfect time, so now is as good a time as any.
Everything that we have been going through the past year has been leading up to this Moon. It’s the time of infinite possibilities, of desires bubbling over and manifesting themselves in our lives in ways we never thought possible. No matter what has come in or out of our lives in the past few years, once in a while we are given the chance to have everything we’ve always wanted, we just have to make the choice now to not let it go.
Because certain chances only come around once in a Blue Moon.

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Our Community / Links/Blogs/Articles for us all to share 10
« Latest by Nas on May 28, 2026, 12:23:58 PM »
https://deconstructingstigma.org/latest/language?utm_medium=email&utm_content=421122525&utm_source=hs_email
Came across this while researching something for a project and it may not resonate but I found the topic interesting -  in terms of "what's the whole story, really?"/labels don't account for individual circumstances - and it got me thinking about the ways people sometimes use terminology about themselves or others. Sometimes, unintentionally, we stop actually seeing ourselves or others clearly precisely because we think we see them clearly - I know that sounds daft. But I think our certainty about who a person is can become a blindness, and we've probably all done it - particularly in long marriages, we may get complacent and just create an emotional file: my spouse is this or that kind of person - as if people are 2D rather than humans with psychological depth that contain sides we just haven't yet seen...or haven't looked at, or haven't wanted to really see, which is a subtle difference. Reality is both objective and subjective, and sometimes to avoid discomfort, subjective (our interpretation) can take over in a way that blurs, like an emotional astigmatism.
I think there's a risk sometimes that labels can unintentionally freeze a moment in time, if that makes sense.  What we say about ourselves too - what might have been true at one time is not the whole story: "I am this thing" is different from "I'm experiencing this (present tense)" is different from "This is a pattern I'm actively working on (not passively waiting out)" is different from "I experienced something (past tense)"...


https://youtu.be/X2iHXlCShmY?si=8G3wfBY2tVkK92cj
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Our Community / Links/Blogs/Articles for us all to share 10
« Latest by xyzcf on May 27, 2026, 07:06:01 PM »
This book is getting a lot of press:

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
Book by Belle Burden

It's as though the idea that a spouse leaves a good marriage and it is a complete surprise to the LBSer is something new...We all could have written this book, and it is uncanny, the "similarities"

Although I have not read it and I am not sure I will..I think from the little I know, it reaffirms that this happens and it truly has nothing to do with us.

Here is Oprah's interview with the author:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctXbYb8OdEk
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Our Community / My journey post D
« Latest by readytofixmyselffirst on May 26, 2026, 09:12:18 AM »
Hello!

I have been really busy with work and everything else and I just have not found the time to post and rationale thoughts. I don't know if you have already celebrated, but happy 50! I hope you had or will have a great time with your sister in Paris. We were going to go to Paris in 2027, but I need to replace my roof and that pushes the trip further back. Oh well!

Now onto your post:

Quote
but he wanted to find the tools to find his happiness. I guess he found it finally.

One of the signs of MLC is the proverbial search for complete "happiness". Just like the lost city of El Dorado, it's a myth. Happiness like other emotions come and go. MLCers think that if they make some changes and do things differently, they will unlock the chest and achieve that magical moment that will last forever. I don't see your ex as happy; I see some who is driven to prove he is happy.

Like your ex,  I am happy that I still can workout, but I do need to watch my diet. My happiness is eating food, so maybe I am too happy.

I don't know your ex and I have never met you either. However, I feel that you are like me in that we both are people pleasers. We want to make those around us happy. I think the hardest aspect you have in regards to letting go is that you, tiny little you, made your ex unhappy and that is why he left. I felt that if I had been a better man, husband, and father that my ex would not have cheated on me either.  Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to make the people around you happy. Just yesterday, I grilled steaks for my wife and her son and his boyfriend. It was delicious and we had a great meal. That is all good, but when we obsess with making everyone happy and if things are not perfect, we self absorb it as our failure and all our fault. Have you ever considered that your ex was depressed prior to your marriage, was depressed during your marriage, and is still depressed today and there is nothing you or anyone else can do to help him with his internal issues?

I'm not saying that there isn't MLC. I just feel that MLC intensifies the situation. However, the triggers for the MLC were present way before you were on the scene.

Quote
I am happy with a lot of things in life. I’m happy with myself and  my dog but sometimes I do feel lonely and overwhelmed being alone. That’s when I wish I had someone with me.

That puts you ahead of a lot of folks. I do understand the need for that special someone and trust me, I totally get that feeling. I also want you to know that there are many people who feel just as lonely and they are with someone. My hope is that you find the right person that "gets" you and appreciates you for the person that you are; not the person that they hope you will become.

Keep growing and always be kind to yourself!

(((Ready)))

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Our Community / Divorced and moving forward!
« Latest by readytofixmyselffirst on May 26, 2026, 07:49:20 AM »
Hello,

So good to hear from you and congratulations! I am so glad that everything is going well with you and that you have a true partner.

Quote
I found a good guy, that is there whenever I need him.

That is the best. The comfort of actual presence. I have an odd situation where I am up early and on the road to work Monday through Friday. By the time I return on home on the evenings, it is eat dinner, pack, and get to bed. However, every weekend is our time and we spend the entire time together. Just going to the store is an adventure and I enjoy being with her. I think that is why I am looking forward to retiring in a few years is so that we have the opportunity to be together every day.

I am so glad that you found a good guy as well. A person that is mature and understands that the world doesn't revolve around him and his needs. A guy that appreciates and respects you. Above all, he loves his family. Trust me, they grow up fast and in the blink of an eye- they are adults. Enjoy this time- I'm not saying things get bad, they change and you truly want to be present for all the changes as your children evolve into adults. Sometimes, I become so focused on the end that I forget that you need to appreciate the route that takes you to your destination.

Keep posting and let us know how the family is doing!

(((Ready)))

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