[Treasur]

Getting off the train is vital.
And then getting on a different train of your own is essential.

How you see their train or your ex/spouse is up to you.
I have never seen my xh as garbage even when he has done garbage things or treated me like less than garbage. I don't believe he was before and I don't believe he is now.
But I hate the train and he chose to stay on it. And I completely accept that he became someone who could only bring bad stuff with him in my life.
Keeping a sliver of a Something lens even now - whatever I call it - lets me despise his behaviour without despising him as a human being. It lets me trust my own life experience that - whatever it was - something went badly awry in my h and he became a lesser man in many ways than he used to be, the kind of person he would have been horrified to become. But he isn't garbage.

I don't have to see him as garbage to cut him out of my life as someone who will hurt me without concern if I don't even if I will perhaps never entirely understand how he became someone who could, would and did. Maybe there is a 'just enough' of a Something Lens that we need to accept the inconceivable, let go of the unacceptable and remember the better side of someone we once loved enough to wish them recovery from whatever it was that brought their train along.

I have no idea how much is too much , too little or just enough - ha ha I sound like Goldilocks -  but I susoect each of us individually knows when we get there.

[Watcher]

Yes I agree Treasur about getting off the train and sometimes it's not so easy. I like to believe my W kept pushing me off and I finally let go of the hand rail and fell off. 

Oh that devilish MLC lens. Being a compassionate person can be a handicap during this experience. Yes I felt sorry for her for the longest time and kept getting abused along the way.

Good point. She has chosen to stay on that train. I can look at it subjectively now and say, well, you are on your own my dear. Good luck when it derails.

I also harbor no ill will towards her as I know it will derail at some point and she will have to face the consequences. I can separate the person from the behavior. Right now she is an out of control person.

She will drag me to rock bottom and destroy me financially and jeopardize my career at the same time. She simply dosen't care. When I received the court summons for school tuition I realized she would never stop.

So maybe viewing it through the MLC lens kept me stuck a bit. IDK.. I was really devastated so maybe it protected me in a strange way. Maybe I needed to be stuck a bit as I was just not ready to accept that she became such an evil person.

There are times when I still cannot believe what she became and I just don't dwell on it. Yes, of course, I hope for herself that she will not always be this way. 

[Limboland2018]

Viewing my exes behaviour as a mlc kept me stuck as I made excuses for bad behaviour.  I suppose I kept looking for an explanation for why he did what he did. I was a great, loyal wife...albeit tired as I was up half the night taking care of a baby/toddler. We just had our longed for baby. He must be crazy to abandon us. But he did. And that’s the reality. He is just a bad bloke. Simple. There is no need for psychoanalysis.  I’ve just got to accept he worked with a woman - his subordinate , fell in lust/love with her and decided that she was worth giving up his family. Sure .....she wanted him and made it clear about her intentions but he went for it.

I’ve got to the point in my grief that I don’t care if he was depressed or was going through a mlc. He had the ability to stop what he was doing but he manipulated and lied every step of the way. He spoke to mutual friends telling them he had depression and  there was no third party involved. He kept up the charade for a long time.

He was smart enough to know that what he was doing and  feeling was wrong. But he thought he would get away with it.  I actually don’t like me ex anymore. However, I miss our relationship- I loved him deeply and we would laugh about the most stupid things. But he has no substance and is of weak character. My daughter and I deserve better.

[Penelope2018]

Treasur - They're not garbage, well, I don't think most of them are. Just my anger talking. It's just a summation of all the callousness, cruelty and eventual indifference they display. The aptest word I could think of at the moment. I know something happened, it's just hard to accept sometimes.

MyBrainisBroken - He had his good points and was my first love. He's always been a liar and manipulator though just not to the current extent. Now he'll lie about what he ate for breakfast. He's always, always had family issues. He could go months without speaking to his parents then all of sudden answer their call and there would be screaming/shouting matches. This usually led to him putting a hole in the wall or smashing something, cursing his mother out, saying he would never go back home again, etc etc. Then when he'd get there the calm didn't last long before they started screaming at each other again. His mother was always going at him for religious issues (not praying, doing this or that) and money. Why can't he buy her this or that? Why doesn't he have money? His brother did this or his brother paid for that or his brother's vacationing here or there. CONSTANTLY. I wanted to strangle her sometimes. To make matters worse I think she's hard of hearing and speaks loudly plus (though never diagnosed) I think she might be mentally delayed. Extremely hard to deal with.

[MyBrainIsBroken]

Penelope, it sounds like he had FOO issues well before his MLC. Overtly damaged people can have MLCs too. I'm sorry that he had these issues but he should have gotten help before the crisis hit and he didn't. If he would have worked on his issues he may have been able to avoid this crisis. Regardless, I think you deserve better but that's a decision only you can make.

[Treasur]

I'm a coach by trade so I like good questions.
Sometimes the most powerful questions seem simple at first bite but stick with us somehow and keep prodding us.
I think this thread question is one of those for me bc it won't go away entirely. It is sitting gurgling at the back of my brain lol. When the gurgling stops, I'll post on my own thread rather than sucking up space here.

But a thought occurred to me earlier today....if MLC is the answer, what is the question?
Or questions?

(By MLC I mean something mentally/emotionally that happened that turned my h into someone unrecognisable, not very rational and pretty unpleasant to deal with....it's a shorthand label bc I honestly don't know what it was  )

I have a sense that we get stuck in it when it is about trying to guess answers about the other person perhaps, as we all do initially. But maybe there is a later stage when our questions are more about our own lives, about us not them, and maybe the MLC lens is the only sane way to answer some of those individual questions?
Probably depends on what your question is.....
I do know that my questions have changed significantly with time, events and my own recovery.

[beyondblessed]

Treasur, absolutely getting stuck probably happens most of the time due to the LBS putting thoughts to the MLC'er.  The base truth though is that the only person who knows what a MLC'er is truly thinking or feeling is the MLC'er.  Anyone can make a guess, but that doesn't make it factual or true.  It just keeps the LBS hanging on to false hope.....like a mirage in a desert.  You want it to so badly be true, your mind bends and twists to accommodate.  Good people do bad things.  Doesn't necessarily make them bad, but the trust in them is now broken.  With the trust gone, the respect is also lost.  No trust, no respect....no relationship,  in my opinion.   It never mattered to me why my xh did the things he did.  He chose them just like he chose to do any other things in his life.  His actions, his responsibility.

[Not Applicable]

I wanted to add something to the discussion. I don't want to get off on the tangent of the issue of the odds of reconciliation, and that is not what this post is about. But I think we can reasonably say that most people who join, post about their spouses' MLC, are not coming back in the end with reconciliation stories. They may be reconciling but not returning to the forum. But I think we can safely say that reconciliation is the end result for a minority who continue to post. Then really should we be trusting all the MLC advice we are being given if that is what we want in the end? Does the MLC advice actually HELP produce reconciliation, or is it harmful if we keep following it indefinitely? May it actually be useful only in the beginning but later on  we need different strategies and those later periods simply aren't covered? Do some people reconcile and not return because in the end they found that what they learned in the forum did not actually help in that reconciliation? Sometimes i wonder if the advice is any better than a placebo would be as a drug.

[Counting on Time]

I haven't had a chance to read this entire thread.  I agree that it can be very time consuming staying up on the forum.  I love this topic because it challenged me to think about my situation which has recently changed (please take a look if you have a minute at my thread).  Right now, I don't see it as keeping me stuck because it is my choice to work on GAL and myself and not initiating a divorce that I don't want.  I found it useful to cut materials that help me understand the situation in a way that I couldn't do otherwise and help me to support why I am standing and to have hope it can work out.

[nah]

Dukie...

When you say “help me to support why I’m standing”, what exactly do you feel standing is about and what “support” beliefs do you need to help you decide to continue to “stand”?

To keep on topic of this thread. Do you believe “standing”, “stuck”, and/or “initiating divorce” are at all the same?