Midlife Crisis: Support for Left Behind Spouses
Archives => Archived Topics => Topic started by: Couragedearheart on October 10, 2019, 11:47:37 AM
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“Why did God let this happen to me? Why would I need this lesson?”
The question H posed about his abuse as a child that has led to his MLC.
I’m curious what answers you settled on for your own selves, as I think all of us LBS’s and MLCers alike eventually encounter their own individual version of this question.
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I’ll tell you my answer which is:
“Everyone has free will, they can do what they want and treat people however they choose to treat them, I believe they will have to answer in the end for their actions and choices. But I also think that God doesn’t make bad things happen to us, but I do believe he uses the bad things that happen to us to help us become what he wants us to be, and learn things we need to know.
That’s my own belief on it and you will have to decide what you believe”
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W has asked the same thing...... "Why has God let this happen" and the uglier "How could God let all this happen if he loves me? I'm his child".
To me, God allows this to make us better.... the MLC'er and the LBS. Bad things turned to a good overall outcome..... IF we choose to let it be.
That darn choice problem :P
I know right after BD and I was reading everything I could, it seemed so unfair (and it is) and couldn't grasp how this could be good...... how can testing/destroying a M be a good thing? Well..... that was before I began to understand. The real thing is, we're here to learn, to grow and to become. While we seen so important, we're just a blip in the scheme of things. The MOST important thing isn't us (the LBS) the M, or anything like that. The most important thing is that we (the LBS and MLC'er) are saved and serve. This life is not as important as eternity and we can't see ourselves or our MLC'er like God can. He's playing the long game, and we can only see what's in front of our noses.
Learning to trust and let go of things to him is something we all have to learn, come to terms with, and have faith. It's not about us, it's not about our M's.
If we love them, then we want them to make it, no matter what happens to us..... because we do love them.
Likewise as we are shaken and rebuilt, it's for a purpose if we choose to allow it to be, and allow ourselves to be used. From it comes a greater calling, a greater strength and a greater responsibility. I think as we are reforged in fire, a refined and better version of ourselves emerges..... why? To be used.
-SS
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This is a question I'm really interested in because I continue to try to find somebody to blame and be mad at and God is the only one I've been able to identify. >:(
Of course it comes back to free will, but free will stems from human nature, and I believe God could have done a better job designing human nature. If you believe the Christian Bible it's the nature of all of us to be sinners. Why didn't he start us out with the scales tilted a little more in favor of being and doing good? It's like the deck is stacked against us from the day we're born.
I used to enjoy thinking that God might be a woman but with human nature being so badly screwed up I'm pretty sure now that God must be a man.
I have read Rabbi Harold Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People but it didn't really settle the issue for me.
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Well this is a question larger than MLC.
Why does God let innocent children suffer from cancer and die?
Why did God let millions of people die in the holocaust?
Why does God let people die of famine?
Certainly there is no explanation for those who suffer under these circumstances.
Ultimately I think it is a question which is not answerable.
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Hey Brain and Air....
Not to get too far off topic, but I'm very religious and I do have an answer for that (from my own perspective).
It's the war.... the great war.... the only war that matters, and the one that most aren't even aware exists. THAT is what's going on.
When you have someone who has tried to corrupt, pervert and destroy us since the beginning..... all the things which people say "why" about starts to make a lot more sense. Is isn't that we were made bad, it's that we were made with so much potential..... and we proved easy to deceive (this remains true to this day).
-SS
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I like C.S. Lewis “The problem of pain” for this one.
I also like Ravi Zacharius “Jesus among other God’s” although he is a bit complex and sometimes very slow reading.
I guess my question is.....who’s free will would you ask God to remove to prevent your pain.
For me, I think, my realization that human beings are capable of anything hit me during my custody battle.....if you have ever been in a truly terrible one....you do consider...and dismiss all possibilities. I never believed before that moment I was capable of depraved and horrible acts or thoughts. It was the moment for me that made me realize we are all capable of anything good or bad and we have proved to ourselves over and over and over throughout history and the story of our own lives that we do mean hurtful things and our nature is to be selfish.
The holocaust wasn’t carried out by psychopaths, it was carried out by ordinary people that compromised their beliefs over and over until at long last they found themselves involved in some of the most deprived acts humans can commit. One step at a time, one choice at a time......
So it is with anyone who does terrible things.
So it is with us. IMO this highlights the need for god...not the absence of him. This is the moment when we see God most clearly....where he takes man’s selfish impulses and uses that pain to grow us, to heal things we didn’t even know were broken within us, to make us more fully the version he had in mind when he formed us.
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I really echo what you said Courage and also what SS said. We do have free will and our comfort is not at the top of God’s priority list. I view life’s troubles as a chance for God to refine us(the refiners fire, draw us to Him, and ultimately make us more like Him).
I cannot say I am to the point I am glad this happened, because there is too much destruction(but ultimately I view sin as the culprit). That said, I see how God was finally able to get the funk out of certain areas of my life that He had been trying to get me to change for years. The growth is exponential.
Also, in order to stand, it does take a certain unconditional kind of love(of which we as humans fall short of at times). I have to draw on God’s forgiveness and God’s love in order to chose love for my “prodigal husband”. I am reminded daily of what Christ did for me, and how much I fall short. In turn I am able to have compassion for my MLCer regardless of outcome(for our marriage).
My hearts prayer is that God uses this time(of what has felt like hell on earth) for His glory. My deepest desire is that my marriage would reconcile and we could serve others walking down a similar path.
This is indeed a Spiritual Battle for our Spouse’s soul, for our children’s soul and for our own soul.
I love your C.S. Lewis quotes Courage! Very thought provoking conversation!
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At university one of the most difficult questions we were asked was if Auschwitz proved the existence or the non-existence of God. The question has at least four answers:
- The existence of God. God works in misterious ways.
- The non-existence of God
- Auschwitz is what happens when humanity turns way from God
- God let it happen so that people knew what happens when he turns away from us
There are more possible answers, but these are the main ones.
God is different in the Old and in The Testament. The Old Testament one is angry, vengeful, cruel, punhishing. The New Testment one is kinder, more gentle.
The Holocaust was created by psychopaths (only psychopaths have no remorse), executed by ordinary people that had drunk the cool aid or had no other chance - there is no escaping from being a guard other than death. The prisoners that had to carry things out had no chance.
The other thing with the Holocaust was that Jews, political opponents, gays, etc. were not seen as people, but as vermin. They were not killing people, they were killing vermin.
Ultimately, things are done by humans to humans. Not all humans are good people and good people are easily turned bad as WWII showed - there far more than the Holocaust.
Not everyone comes out of MLC a better person, be it MLCer or LBS. It is a fallacy to think so. It is not uncommon for a MLCer to take their own life or to bepermanently impaired. It is not uncommon for a LBS to have deep, life altering not for the good scars. Some MLCers never come out of MLC, and some who do do not become better people.
If we love them, we let them go. And we worry very much with what happens to us. No one and no marriage is worthy bad things happening to us. <deas like we don't care what happens to us are dangerous. Several female LBS have been physically abused, almost killed. Some LBS may be able to affor whatever happens to them, most are not.
Since not all MLCers nor all LBS believe in God, the spiritual battle, if existing, I think it may be more of a moral/ethic battle, for those who do believe in God does not include God.
Many, if not most MLCers never serve, same for LBS. There is a small faction of people on HS that helps out. Most just come by, post once or twice and that is it - easily checked on HS members list. They do not pay forward. Most people only want o forgot MLC happened, be it LBS or MLCer.
At times I think people go with what a handful of us do on HS and think that is what happens with most. It isn't.
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Ultimately I think it is a question which is not answerable.
Doesn't stop some of us from having an opinion. ;D
Nice answer Finding Joy although I'd rather pass on having the opportunity to become more like God.
BTW, this seems like a good place to mention this. We just returned to school after a short break to learn that we lost a student. An 18 year old male freshman driving back home the day the break began hit a tractor trailer head on and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two days before that the 15 year old son of a friend of mine lost his battle with cancer. He was their only child. I don't know how you survive something like that.
About two weeks ago I missed an EMS call for an infant. I'm glad I missed it. The baby died. I found out yesterday that the baby's father has been arrested and charged with Criminally Negligent Homicide.
Sometimes it bothers me to see so many people being given the opportunity to become more like God. It makes my 6 year old female part cry. She doesn't understand. Neither do I.
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MBIB,
Free will must be entirely free, not limited. Otherwise it means nothing. There’s no half measures. It also means that when a person has made the choice to be selfless, to give, to turn the other cheek, to be kind a gracious and gentle when the easier choice would be a selfish one, we are being shown a small measure of what Gods love for us looks like.
And when we choose him, we come without fear, obligation, we aren’t forced we have every choice on earth available to us and we are choosing God.
Like love this is a choosing every day, over and over to do the sometimes joyous and sometimes painfully difficult thing of trying to show love in our actions and intentions.
To prevent murder god would have to limit free will, and a limited free will in any way is no longer truly free. Where would the line be drawn, should God prevent the free will of murders or thieves, or the lady who steals sugar packets?
God has chosen to love and forgive us, and offer again and again and again....while we are free to not chose him at all.
When I look at the wounds my husband is carrying.....it’s hard to believe anyone could ever heal from such a place...yet even through this MLC....I can see the healing that’s already happening......yet healing for him is traumatic for me.....or perhaps it only feels traumatic because I am being forced to tear down any illusions I am carrying about myself and the obligations of others too me.
Does he deserve to heal, or do I deserve to not be hurt? I am a nurse....and I know that often the healing is as painful, and sometimes more so than the initial injury.
I don’t know that this answers any of your questions...but it is the understanding I have from what I have seen and experienced of God.
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You have an eloquent way with words Courage! Well spoken!
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I was looking at quotes from “The Problem of Pain” and stumbled upon this one.
“Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.
If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.”
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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I am a nurse....and I know that often the healing is as painful, and sometimes more so than the initial injury.
Yes, but, at least here, people are given medicines for the pain. Pain often hinders healing. The idea that pain is good is puzzling. Body and brain do not work well with pain. Pain is not seen as a good thing here, but as what it is, a terrible thing that reduces the quality of life.
Where pain is importan is that it signals a problem, it is the acute "external" signal that something is going on inside. It is not supposed to be there for long, even if at times it does.
You have a rather odd, MLCer, Couragous. You are already seeing healing in him? Many of us have MLCers deep in Replay/for crisis for many years and no healing in sight. Yet, yours is already healing. What is the difference?
Could it be that yours is not having a full blown MCL, rather is having a bumpy midlife transition?
The idea of emotional/psichological pain as a good thing that leads to something greater is a religious/philosophical one that does not take in consideration the many that are forever permanently damaged by it or die because of it. No greater good comes to them.
And, for most, religious or not, nothing comes from pain other than more pain. The great transformation seems reserved to a selected few.
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Anjae,
Healing means different things to different people. A person may recover from polio and never walk again yet consider themselves healed. Why assume the MLCer is so different. I have seen patients recover from the loss of a leg, yet never complete the remaining part of rehabilitation to learn to walk on a prosthetic, they remain in a wheelchair...yet consider themselves healed. So I think it is with MLC. It would make sense that most heal just enough to stop their own pain...and yet do not commit to the hard work of complete recovery. It is a choice.
If my H never heals to the point of trusting people but could live on his own with a pet and learn to love himself....would he still be broken?
My H was raised from birth to be the caregiver for others, and has done it to the point that it can take concerted effort to make him say he is hurt or uncomfortable or needs anything. I didn’t see it at first....but over the years the coincidences added up and I pinned him down and questioned him till I got the truth. Any acknowledgement of his own needs over the needs of other gives him loud pervasive shame messages.
Now my H says he needs to be alone. To not have any obligations, he does things independently, he is standing up for himself, he see himself as a person. That is healing from where he started. Would I have even noticed all this if I wasn’t looking for it....no.
From my own experience, and much of what we know about the affects of severe prolonged child abuse.....the brain shuts off the trauma until it is sufficiently healed/safe enough to deal with it.
Then one day the brain decides, okay, time to process.....and the floodgates open.
Does my MLCer talk to me more than most...maybe? Does his words and actions match hundreds of stories on HS, yes.
Could he be in transition....sure....time will tell....
But I’m curious why we have a delineation that only reconciliation is healing instead of the entire process. Because loving yourself requires trusting yourself and trusting yourself requires demonstrating that you can stand up for yourself and your perceived needs....
It’s a step in the process.
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Yes, healing means different things to different people, but when it comes to a wound (I'm speaking of a physical one) it is medically possible to assert if the wound is, or is not, healed. You're most surely familiar with pressure sores, wounds that hardly ever heal.
On HS when we talk about a healed MLCer we mean someone who is either fully out of MLC (MLC, not Replay) and had went back to be whole, or is close to the end of MLC.
We don't tend to consider a half baked MLCer healed. If the MLCer is half baked, the MLCer is not fully healed.
A MLCer that needs to be alone and have no responsabilities, tends to be what we call Replay. Replay is the most broken part of MLC, we do not see it as healed.
Maybe you are seeing different things, or maybe you are calling different things to what we call Replay, healed, etc.
We don't tend to have LBS saying that their MLCer in Replay is healing/healed, since Replay tends to be big destruction and most MLCers do not work on issues during Replay. Issues are usually dealt with after Replay.
But I’m curious why we have a delineation that only reconciliation is healing instead of the entire process.
We don't and I surely do not have it. What we have is that Replay does not equal healed, or even healing, since that tends to come afterwards.
However, HS is aimed at reconnection/reconciliation/save the marriage, a thing that will not happen for most of us. People like those stories, even if they are rare.
I am all for healed MLCers, but I don't like the fact that someone's healing is done at the expense of hurting others, at times almost literally since the MLCer tries to kill the LBS. I can think of far better ways of dealing with issues and I think MLC can be solved. To me, it is unecessary suffering to all involved. I am including myself and my MLC in the lot.
Perceived needs is different than real needs. MLCers tend to say they need the affair, and so on. They don't. It just causes more damage to all involved. As for stand up for themselves, pre-MLC J was good at it, so was I. It did not prevent MLC for both of us.
And his perceived need of OW1, etc. did not help him one bit. Nothing he has tried worked. It has been 13 years since he left,
There is nothing in his life similar to your husband's life. He just become addicted to MLC lifestyle and incapable of dealing with the growing mess his crisis kept creating.
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I agree that it is unanswerable in the sense of being able to go 'aha, 43'....but as a person of faith, I chewed on it....and tbh faith is inherently about belief in unseen and unknown things isn't it? So any wise person of faith asks themselves these questions sometimes.
Free will, yes. I think God allows rather than enforces. My best sense is that even when we turn left, God is always there quietly whispering that we can still turn right, that it is never too late to do so, that we are worth more, that we matter just bc we are here. That good fruit comes from good seed. That we can choose better. But he won't force us to listen and he won't step in to save us from our own messy consequences until we decide to try to save ourselves. Then I think he shows up with an encouraging grin and a hand!
I don't know what happened to my xh or where God's hand was in it. Was it a necessary time of destruction for my xh to see and heal his own wounds and live a more healthy authentic life? Or a time of running away from his pain and the opportunity to heal and so creating more damage to eventually deal with? Or with time, both? Or how God balanced my needs against my then h's in our intersected story. Idk. Above my pay grade. I suppose my instinct is that when God is in the room, even in the most awful circumstances, there is more healing than destruction, more grace than confusion, more kindness than resentment. Fruits. So I could be wrong and my xh may be happy as a lamb and more healed than not....but if the damage and hurt caused on ones own path to others is never even acknowledged, something important is missing. Imho.
To be fair though, I am a bit too busy tidying up my own side of the street and focusing on my own seeds and fruit to do anything other than let God do his thing as he sees fit in my xh's life.
And I can't explain any of the awful things that Brain shared. But I do think God shows up in the broken pieces. I think even in these awful times we can see God moving in how people care for each other...in hospitals, and hospices and when the EMT show up. Hard to describe but you feel it when it's there, a kind of deep love that seems to bring out the best in some people at the worst of times.
Hmm, I wonder when God thinks we are 'healed'? Idk. Sounds like healing isn't an either-or but a process....maybe we decide when we are healed 'enough' for the time being? And of course we use metaphor but most of the healing we talk about here - for both LBS and for their ex/spouses or families - is mostly internal isn't it? Less easy to see or measure perhaps than a broken leg or a physical wound. Maybe we judge healed by its fruits....and the direction more than the end point like turning a big ship? Maybe healed is a feeling thing more than a factual absolute thing? But your discussion has made me muse on it for myself....when will I feel healed enough from this experience? Or is it more about no longer feeling broken by it? Idk.
Idk isn't always a comfortable spot but sometimes perhaps it is the most honest one.
Jmo with all its imperfections and human unknowns lol.