[OffRoad]

Hi HF,
The whole "numb" decripton that often goes with mlc makes me think dissociation. When I was in high school, we had to disect a frog. Personally, I think it is inappropriate to require a child to take a class where you are required to cut up what was once a living thing. But perhaps they don't any longer.

In any case, I dissociated from myself to be able to do it. I was aware I had done so (most times people are not aware), but I always say I pushed real me aside, and this other part of me, the one who had no emotions, took over and dissected the frog.  I have no idea how I dissected it as the only memory I had of that was the initial sound of the scalpel cutting the frog and nothing more. My only other recollection was seeing it covered with a cloth, asking the teacher to grade it, watching out of the corner of my eye when he uncovered it to see that "I" had done a good and correct job, getting my grade and asking what to do with it. I have no idea how it was disposed of, if I did it or the teacher did it.

My point is that I always wonder if some dissociated memories are trying to surface and the only way to keep them down is to "go numb". Shutting down everything to not have to deal with it, then being so numb a person would do crazy things to feel something, anything. But not do anything that might surface those thoughts/feelings they are trying to suppress. Instead, maybe doing things they think would DISPROVE those thoughts.

It's just something I wonder.

Tiny journal. Having redone the front yard with the standard boring dry creek bed, D and I have now added colorful resin leaves, turtles and turtle stepping stones, water colored rocks that look like bits of stream, solar sun shape lights hanging off Shepard hooks on the bridge, a small wishing well with a UV light and UV painted fake plants (the radioactive wishing well at night). We still have ahead of us the fake waterfall at the beginning of the creekbed,  blue solar lights in the creekbed, hanging faerie lights in jars for the guava tree, and the dragon for the creek bed (closet thing to a moat I could get). I'm taking some chances because everything of value is chained down, but someone who was bent on distruction might still just break things. We'll see how it goes.

[OffRoad]

Found this, thought I'd post it.

It seems that being ridiculed is not as damaging as being ignored… .The most damaging form of behavior is withholding your attention. — Masaru Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water

[xyzcf]

The most damaging form of behavior is withholding your attention.

This is 100% true. There was no need, he could have had his "freedom" if he had asked for it...eventually I would have understood as I do now that he must be free.....

Understanding his crisis allows me somehow make some sense over his lack of attention and concern for me and our family..in my situation, because he remains in contact with me I also know that I mean something to him and I just let the rest go...or I would never have been able to heal.

[OffRoad]

The witholding, to me, always seems like trying to force the other person into being the "bad guy".  But really, it's just a screwed up way of not dealing with life. It can be to punish, which is just plain cruel, but it can also be out of fear. "If I don't tell, they won't know and I won't be seen as a bad person." Just messed up.

Journaling: I bought a new set of outdoor chaise lounges, a calf stretcher and an upright walker. Somewhere in the mix of unboxing the chaise (Costco delivery, one 30x34x82 inch box with everything but the table and the table box), dragging them to the back yard by myself (the chaises have wheels and I have walker wheels,so we are good to go), setting one up on risers so I can actually get off it, cutting up the box, building the new walker and stretching my calves, something changed in my leg. I can now heel toe strike where I was unable to before. I can put full weight on the leg, where I was unable to before. I can lift the leg where I was unable to before.  I wonder if I'm sweating all the toxins out of my body, I stretched something that needed stretching, am walking better with the upright walker, or its just some fluke. In any case, I am still my own useful engine. That's good to know.

[Father5]

Glad the legs are feeling better OR!  I hope the house oooks great !

[OffRoad]

I don't post on my own thread often, but something happened while on  vacation that was interesting to me.

I'm still broken, but better. Very odd, I've never heard of legs stopping working (was told it was severe arthritis) then reversing but it seems to be happening. I am no longer in constant pain, can stand for long periods and even D noticed I can move faster than before. Not complaining, mind you, just observing. I changed my seat configuration to a forward lean, rearranged my keyboard and mouse to an incline and the shoulder pain is completely gone and I can stand up without pain or feeling like I'm going to fall. You won't find THAT in the standard book of ergonomics, but I'm sold.

Went on vacation with a friend. An off road walker (Veloped Trek, way awesome https://www.trionic.us/en/veloped-trek-c-10/veloped-trek-14er-m-green-black-orange-p-204) at the Biosphere 2 works, but that hill going down and coming back up is a killer on the arms. We also hit several Native American ruins and Heritage sites, Meter Crater and Petrified Forest/Painted Desert. Southern AZ has a shortage of hotel workers and no knowledge of what an actual ADA mobility disabled room should look like. Fortunately, I am creative and managed. The snow drift around my car on the morning we were to leave Flagstaff (northern AZ) was my biggest issue. We relied on the kindness of a stranger to get the snow off the windshield and my friend had to back it out so I could get in. So much for 3 inches of snow...more like 8. But 4wd is my friend once I got in the car and I was smart enough to have left it in 4wd when we parked the night before. But I digress.

We were passing through the desert on a dirt road on the way to a heritage site (no snow at this point) and as I was looking at the scenery, a memory came back to me that made my forehead wrinkle, so I relayed the story to my friend.

Not long before BD, XH asked me if I'd like to visit Joshua Tree. Of course I said yes, I had been to many mines there with my off road group, but never a standard visit. We went and I was having a good time (having no clue BD was on the horizon). We got out at one stopping point and in the distance you could see some hills. XH pointed to the hills and said their might be some petroglyphs over there, why don't we go over. It was moderate temperature (not summer), I estimated the hike across the desert to be about 2 miles, and while I was fairly sure there was nothing over there I said sure because I thought it was nice that he was thinking of the things I liked to do. I grabbed my water pack and off we went. As happens in the desert sometimes, it was not flat, but have downwards hills as it were. Down into a trench, back up over and over which made the hike more like 4 miles. (This was not an issue for me back in the day). We get to the base of the hills and look around at the rocks. At this point, my friend is sucking in her breath next to me, but of course this is hindsight. I said "Yeah, it's not just me, that's kind of creepy isn't it?" and she affirmed it was. I asked her when she first got the creepies, because for a long time it was actually a fond memory for me. She said at the moment he wanted to leave where the crowds were and hike across the desert where there was no one for miles. I said. "Hmm."

As I continued my story, I told her how he tried to get me to come over to a certain place to see if there were any glyphs. I could see from where I was there were none, and the the rocks were not of the type where you would normally find any and I said that we were just out of luck. For a reason that I didn't recognize, I would not go anywhere near him and thought it odd of me at the time. I started back, then he started back. As we walked back, he got further and further away from me to my right until we could hardly see each other. Sadly for him, orienteering was not his forte and he was heading for the wrong rock outcropping. When I lost sight of him, I called out and told him he was off course and he popped out from behind a Joshua Tree. Now, I thought maybe he was relieving himself, you know? But my friend once again sucked in her breath. And I said maybe he was just relieving himself and she said "What, like he couldn't have done that three feet from you?" which of course was true. Not like I hadn't seen it before or anything. He just stood there for a few  minutes, and I continued walking towards the rock outcropping we came from and he started walking again, slowly closing the gap between us. We ended up back at the car and while I had a strange feeling about the whole escapade, I could not put my finger on exactly what was wrong because stupid me, I trusted him.

After I finished my story, my friend said "You might have been very lucky." and I said maybe he planned to do something, then couldn't. Or maybe it was just a harmless hike. She just looked at me and said she didn't think it was a harmless hike and had the circumstances presented itself, could have had a different outcome. BTW, this person sees the good in everything, which is why I told her the story because if it seemed weird to her, then my hinky meter wasn't off, I
just didn't realize it was going off.
Moral of this story. BD wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. I'll take that win.

[Standing Strong]

Wow, that IS a creepy story.

Ehhhhh..... yeah, not cool at all. 

Do you think MLC'ers actually think about offing us?
After my W broke, a month or two afterward, my FIL and his W came by for a family gathering (W was not home, she was off somewhere, I think out of the country), and once everyone had left except them I told them what was going on. FIL said "do you have a gun?".... I was like "yes.... ?".... FIL added "and she has access to it?"...... I said "yes....?". FIL said "you need to be really careful, maybe remove it from the house"..... I said "She may be distraught but she isn't suicidal, no way she would kill herself"...... he looked me dead-center and said "We're not worried about her killing herself...." and he lifted his eyebrows with a slight nod.  What? "You think she would kill..... me? Nooooo, there's no way.... is there?". He told me not to be blind, and not to trust, that she could do anything.
Needless to say, she didn't kill me either. 

Wow, your story just brought that back for me. It's not enjoyable to think about is it? Yours's actually did something though, that's a whole different level.

-SS

[MomOfSteel]

OffRoad and standingstrong, I’m officially creeped out and now wondering what H might do if he loses what he wants in court.  I think it is likely things won’t go his way.  To think they are capable of that is horrifying.  I’m glad both of you are still kicking. 

[Treasur]

Great news about your health improvements  that must feel like a big win. One of the problems I think with medical support with auto-immune disorders/inflammation is that they don’t always fit a standard textbook, isn’t it? But that process of trial and error can also lead to trial and success.

I often think now of life post BD like being Alice falling down the rabbit hole. A whole bunch of previously just inconceivable things, not just about how spouses but our sense of our own ‘normal’, started to feel conceivable. Lots of stories here about MLC spouses suddenly refusing to eat dinners in case their LBS has poisoned it....who would even think that? Well, projection and transference would think that.  I am a big fan of a book called ‘The Gift of Fear’ in which the author makes the point that we can be too quick to out vote our instincts by rationalising them into silence or a kind of social people pleasing. I don’t know how real the risk was....but I trust that your lovely little animal instincts at the time felt at risk and you let them guide your actions. As you might recall from my story, I had death threats ‘anonymously’....my instinct at the time was that it was OW but I also felt in my bones that my then h would have walked over my dying body and been able to justify it. This was a man who previously didn’t even like killing flies! A bit of a wimpy guy actually, not a physically aggressive person at all. I lived with a sense of deep instinctive fear for well over a couple of years but it was so inconceivable to me that I told very few people I knew bc it sounded so nuts that it made me feel nuts. But some bit of me trusted my instinct and I took advice from a local DV charity and the police and my lawyer and acted accordingly. Do I think it might really have happened? Idk. But I do know that the feeling was an absolutely abnormal one for me in my life up to then and persistent, so I trusted it at some level. I know that, strangely, I started listening to a lot of those Dateline type podcasts bc I think I found them validating somehow, which sounds weird I know. But these things do happen and people involved find them equally unimaginable even after the event. I have become a big fan of not dismissing loud messages from the lizard bit of my brain  after all, if I am wrong, I am still alive to tell the tale, right?

[Reinventing]

I know a woman who had a creepy situation like you had Offroad, except it was on a rented boat off the coastline. Her H was having an affair. The way he was looking at her and commented on how far away they were from other people raised the hair on the back of her neck. She moved  next to the communication device of the boat, pretending to look at the boat controls. She didn't know about the affair yet so it was very bizarre to her.

He drove extremely erratically home from that boat experience such that he was stopped by a  cop for such bad driving.

I have no doubts he intended to do away with her.

He is on W number 4. The OW at the time of the boat incident, after marrying and then divorcing him, said she would never marry again. She was married when she was an OW and so it was marriage #2 for her. She has not married again.