[Father5]

   Maybe you guys should have a message board or a discussion forum set aside for your personal disagreements. You guys have gone back and forth arguing with each other so much that the thread itself and it's purpose has been lost. I am a newbie and would have loved to hear someone else has lost it and said hateful things to their ex after BD. I wouldn't feel so much same and regret if I understood maybe someone else did it to and was able to grow and heal from it. THE FEELING OF HATE IS REAL ! not constructive but it is a definite issue for some Newbies !

Maybe call the disagreement thread the Sandbox

I would love to hear discussion and disagreement but when it consumes the topic by personal attacks and thread police taking over i'd rather watch Springer !

[Ready2Transform]

I am a newbie and would have loved to hear someone else has lost it and said hateful things to their ex after BD. I wouldn't feel so much same and regret if I understood maybe someone else did it to and was able to grow and heal from it.

A ton of us have. Let yourself off the hook, friend! The biggest screaming match happened the day the affair was confirmed. It was over the phone, and he went from full monster to breaking down. I'd been holding back emotions for months while he was out of the house acting like it was all my fault, trying to hide the affair. I let it all rip. Said some things I can't remember. Said a ton I can and will never forget. Sometimes I just took breaks to primal scream, then headed back in for more. I was in a full rager.

He started clinging again within a week. I apologized at one point. I clarified to him that my feelings were still very real, and I wasn't apologizing because I'd hurt him with them - I was apologizing because a rage that deep hurt ME even more. He was shocked at that notion, but acknowledged it.

It was only one day in this crisis and had no bearing going forward on any of his behaviors, choices, or outcomes. Trust me on that. In the time to come, I have no doubt you'll realize yours is the same. Hugs.

[BrenM]

Anjae please just drop it!   The phrase beating a dead horse almost fits the bill.

You once again have severely hi-jacked a thread that could have benefited so many LBS’s desperately seeking support and have turned it into a post with your own motives and agenda. Please start a thread of your own to discuss your issues, and hurt and anything else that you feel you need to share.   

People are reading this thread because of the title - it is appalling what has happened on this thread.

At the end of the day this is RCR’s “created” forum. She can do and say whatever she pleases.  If people don’t agree with her they have a choice to either leave the site or accept what it is.  I note your comment where you stated that she has been absent - yes that may have been true in the past, but it is evident that she has made it her business to be more present over the last 2 months due to many issues. Yes this forum is successful because of the hours that many contributors have selflessly volunteered over many years.   Every member on HS has benefitted from the numerous posts and links.  We have new posters coming on board regularly with updated theories and different ideas.  MLC is not a OSFA situation - there are many variations.  I personally love reading theories of newer posters and love the alternative perspective. 

Anjae please allow this thread to get back on track.  Please show respect to 1T.

[Onward]

I am a newbie and would have loved to hear someone else has lost it and said hateful things to their ex after BD. I wouldn't feel so much same and regret if I understood maybe someone else did it to and was able to grow and heal from it.

A ton of us have. Let yourself off the hook, friend! The biggest screaming match happened the day the affair was confirmed. It was over the phone, and he went from full monster to breaking down. I'd been holding back emotions for months while he was out of the house acting like it was all my fault, trying to hide the affair. I let it all rip. Said some things I can't remember. Said a ton I can and will never forget. Sometimes I just took breaks to primal scream, then headed back in for more. I was in a full rage.

Oh yah.
Full on rage here, too. Once. After he said he was leaving. I let fly with everything I had. Which was rather a lot. He turned the tables, and made it all about poor him.
And held that one bout of rage as evidence of how difficult I am. I am sure the woman he is with now has heard how I "flew off the handle" and how much he needed to get away from the "miserable situation" he was living in.

Never mind that he had BD'd me and been raging for weeks.
Or that an extremely emotional situation might provoke an emotional response.

The thing is, I didn't like how "losing it" made me feel.  Which started a long, hard, continuous journey to detaching my emotions from his actions. I didn't want to give him any more reasons to justify blaming me.
Or give myself any more reasons to think he was right, and it was all my fault.

[Anjae]

I was furious at Mr J, but no hateful things said by me. He was the hateful and violent one.

There were arguments before and after BD.

[Treasur]

Going back to the original intention of 1t's thread - as I understand it - is the wish to say it is ok and normal for some of us to want to vent our feelings about ow/om on HS and to make a space for that. Probably safer here than in RL lol.

Yes, I think most of us know intellectually that ow/om is not the sole cause of our spouse's behaviour. That if it wasn't them, it would be someone else like them. Most ow/om seem to be tripped over in a sense in easy places...coworkers or old friends. I think most of us also know there is a time when it is easier to be angry with ow/om than to accept the horror of what our spouse we love/d is doing. Or for some a time when we feel as if we are in some lose/win competition.  And that there is a point when focusing too much on ow/on gives them a kind of virtual power that they often like and doesn't serve us.

But as LP says, anger is a valid emotion and can be a useful one. Depends what we do with it.

And not all ow/om are 'equal' in their effect on our lives beyond the reality of them being an ow/om.
Some HS posters experience a lot of disordered aggression or abuse from ow/om. Some are trying to protect kids from ow/om who have drink or drug issues. Some are trying to protect their finances or houses from ow/om who see these things as part of their 'pay off' from the affair. Some are stalked or threatened, directly or indirectly, or dealing with legal cases initiated by ow/om. Some can clearly see a pattern of how their spouses more extreme behaviour or monster is influenced by the agenda of ow/om. Some are trying to deal with practical things when communication with their spouse is controlled by ow/or or even obviously read/written by ow/om. So, on a practical level, for some LBS the ow/om IS a significant player in their life if an uninvited one. It seems normal and reasonable and healthy to me that HS is a place where you get to say that, where you get to not zip your lip, where you get to express your anger or ask for help in protecting yourself from crazy nasty people who want to hurt you or your kids.

My understanding of the 'code of conduct' is that we should not attack or dismiss or name call other posters. Doesn't bother me much if others want to call ow/om any rude name under the sun tbh. They are crappy people on a spectrum of crappiness and they have played a part in creating severe damage to our wellbeing...we get to call them a w***e or an a$$hole here if it makes us feel better or helps us manage our emotional reactions in RL.

At the same time, all of us have seen or done things that simply feed either ow/ow's sense of importance or taken us pain shopping for no LBS benefit. If we see posters cycling round that loop, particularly if they are doing so obsessively fixated on things like the deep meaning of ow's haircut or om's new car, then experience tells us to wave a flag. If only bc it rarely helps the LBS do what they need to do to survive and focus on what will actually help them. And disordered, immature or self-centred people like drama and attention but don't much like being ignored or treated as insignificant. But people have the right to ignore it and certainly have the right to feel whatever they feel about ow/om. (Although it seems to me that most of the really disordered crazy stuff comes from ow rather than om?)

In my case, I was never going to be a fan of someone who slept with my h but the responsibility for the affair was his. I was deeply hurt not just by the affair but also the realisation that my h had invited this stranger into our lives and told her things about me and my life that were private. I was sometimes shocked by snippets that showed the nature of their relationship and that did show me clearly that my h was no longer the same kind of person. But my anger and sometimes fear was bc she stalked me before I even knew she existed, sent me threats and nasty notes claiming to speak on behalf of my then h (who either knew or didn't, but didn't stop her), stole from me and evidently saw me as a threat to be destroyed. Long after I had stopped standing or wanting my h back. My recovery did require me to make some choices about how I handled that and how much it hurt me. I do not wish her well and tbh find her repulsive as well as pathetic, but I count it as a win that I did not let her actions drag me into a vindictive response. And sometimes that took a LOT of emotional self-control when I was exhausted, bewildered and heartbroken. So if I get to manage that by venting a bit about her on HS, that's good enough for me.

And I take silent comfort in the fact that she will ALWAYS be the second wife, that she married a man who can spend twenty years with people who loved him and then throw them all under a bus and that if the price of her love requires medication, psychiatrists, lies, destruction and cruelty to others it is not what I call love or would want in my life. And being a magic fix for a broken man who blew up his life and self respect to win you requires a lot of effort and energy. So, I suspect her karma bus is the unfolding reality of all of this. My xh's is probably a mixture of who she is, losing me (bc I am rather rare and splendid and loved him very much) and having erased twenty years of his own life story. I don't wish them well at all...I hope they have a hideous divorce in a few years that upends their lives as much as mine was upended.(my own L says this is almost inevitable from her experience lol)  But whether that happens or whether they are blissfully happy in their self-created drama makes zero difference to my future life or happiness.

In the end, what I want most from ow is for her to f**k off out of my life. I resent that my h invited her in...i would like her to go back to being the uninteresting stranger that she is. In my case, no contact with both him and her is the easiest route to that.

[Lady Grey]

Newbie here and my first time posting, though I’ve been reading along for over a year now….
I’d like to start my own story thread sometime but have not yet due to h/ow online prying….

I love and second everything Treasur said about the spirit of this thread. I'd been writing a reply, but struggling to find the right words to say the same…that’s one of the things I love most here - finding my thoughts and feelings in this mess articulated so beautifully and perfectly and beyond anything I could come up with….

In my situation, I found this thread and the opening post to be of interest and felt frustrated by the turn things took.

To me, reading along, it is feeling rather like “don’t focus on the ow/m” has actually come to mean for some posters “don’t mention the ow/m”

Also, from what I’ve noticed, many posters  (not all, and based only on the stories I am familiar with so far) who say that they “barely give ow/m a second thought” or that ow/m is just not part of their life, and “don’t focus on ow/m, don’t give them your energy/time/brain space etc” are in a situation where this approach is possible.

They may be many many years post BD, have no contact with their MLCer, have no children, be dealing with an ow/m who keeps to themselves, or have a personality/emotional resources etc that support this.  Many LBSs who are seen as “focusing too much on ow/m” are not in these situations, and can benefit from somewhere to discuss their experiences and challenges with the ow/m.

In my own situation, I have kids who may at some point in the future, have to be around ow. This is a horrifying thought to me, and I feel it is part of my duty of care to my kids to know what they are dealing with. She also has kids in their early 20’s. My kids are lower primary aged and I would want to know more about ow kids as they have been raised by a mother who is proven to be severely lacking morally. So I value the experience of other LBSs who are/have been in this position...

I do wonder if in this case, on this thread, it was actually necessary for anyone to intervene at all? No one had even called an ow/m a nasty name...

Seems like maybe, if the concern is for someone who is stuck in hating and blaming the ow/m for the MLCer’s actions, posters here could help them by pointing this out when it is actually happening. Seems like what happened here was a bit of a preemptive strike, in case anyone might call ow/m a nasty name. As Treasure just said, I don’t really care what names ow/m gets called!

I don’t know, but a bit of me also wonders if we really need to protect the rights of ow/m to exist in a world where they are not called the occasional name on an internet forum, esp. an internet forum supporting LBSes? To me, 1trouble’s opening post referred to name calling of the ow/m, NOT of each other here on the forum. And as I understood it, was more about the occasional name, not a constant obsession.

Thank you 1trouble for starting this thread…I’ll be reading along

[Shockandawe]

Wow, this turned pretty explosive pretty quickly!

Anyway, the original topic is what I want to comment on.
My h lives with ow, I very rarely think about her and I have never had any contact with her.
I learned quite a lot from my younger years as my Father (God rest his soul), left my Mother for the world champion of evil ow!

My Mother never once called her anything and didn’t interact in any way with her. She just carried on with the dignity I know her for and left my Father to get on with it.

As a teenager I was taken to meet her along with my siblings and what a disaster area she was. I’m sure the term affair down was coined just for her. She tried endlessly to cause as much trouble for my Mother as possible and eventually caused my Father to have a nervous breakdown. I hated her with every fibre of my being and would openly either totally ignore her or be openly hostile.

My Father tried many times to return to my Mother but because of the way he had treated her prior to BD and later when my Mother moved on and met her now husband my Father was devastated.

The ow continued on her path of manipulation and control, even her own children have nothing to do with her. She was the epitome of evil, hated my Mother and is, tried to cause all kinds of trouble for my Mother by being evil to us, his children all in an effort to get my Mother to bite. She never once did.

I learned from my Mother that, in her opinion, to lower yourself to resorting in mud slinging with a class of person such as the ow is adding fuel to the fire of the “soulmates stick together “ scenario.

I think when my h dropped the bomb I was so shocked and devastated, as were we all, I was speechless.

I can well understand what it is to be that angry and I can empathise with the need to vent. I personally don’t see any harm in venting on here as it’s done to alleviate some of that anger at a time when it could be done in RL with consequences.

Just my opinion

[Lady Grey]

I find it interesting Shock, hearing your experience as a child with your father's ow, and especially with the way your mother handled things.

I've only once called ow a wh*r^, in a message to my dear friend shortly after BD, and I do feel a bit yuck about having done that now. Just for myself, I've nothing against anyone else using any name they want. But for me I was surprised that it felt yuck (as ow surely deserves it and no harm done) it just somehow does feel like what your mother said about lowering myself to ow's level, so I refer to her in RL as dismissively as possible just as h's affair woman, and here liked what Anon said on this thread about reserving capital letters for worthwhile people, so lower case ow/m.

[Shockandawe]

Exactly Ever,

The ow/om of this world are best left to it. I know from my earlier experience just what a total disaster these people are and I always remember my Mothers words.

I’m never going to lower my standards to be in a slanging match with a person not worthy of my time or thoughts so I just put all that energy into me.

Let the ow/om drag our mlcers into the hell they create and leave the LBS to find their peace.
God bless you all