[Thunder]

No I don't think it should necessarily change your boundaries.

[Treasur]

Ah, Morte, just what I meant but you said it better 
That the buried box of what we 'just can't' is underneath all the other WTF stuff...and in time, we each find out what that box is for us.

Actually, you have helped me clarify my buried box. It's cruelty....like those stories of people who hurt babies or puppies...I don't get it but it repulses me. My h was a very kind and sensitive soul; my xh was cruel and seemingly ok with it. His new owife was cruel too so perhaps they are indeed a good match!

Sigh. Just had one of those memory flashes of who my h used to be. I really liked him. Sigh.

[Treasur]

An afterthought...bc it is important to me to be as honest as I can and not inadvertently add to others confusion lol.
About the MLC/WIW lens...or MY version of it and how it links to the cruelty issue.
I accept that cruelty - either bc of indifference, rage or extraordinary self absorption - is a hallmark of what we call MLC. Ergo, it makes sense that it was part of my MLC h's behaviour. It was not part of his persona before, in fact the opposite. I accept that too.

The bit of the MLC lens I have never been sure I believe entirely is that the original person is overlaid temporarily by the MLCness. Or not in my situation. I see it more as MLC creating a fracture that lets the shadow out, I suppose. And my h had something in him that was very dark indeed. That it was part of him previously unseen, probably by either of us. But he could live with it somehow without feeling horrified as I was. Took me a long time to accept the reality of that. Not easy given who he had been before.

I am open minded to events in an unknown future proving me wrong but that is how I see it now.
So I suppose I see - lens on and lens off - that it released something in him and having seen it, I have no idea how I could unsee it. It shocked me to my bones and seemed completely surreal. It broke my heart to swallow down. Or how he could unknow it either tbh. There is nothing in my situation that suggests we will ever see each other again let alone talk about these things as part of reconnecting in some way. I have no idea how one would do that in my situation and I am not seeking it. Remarried vanisher lol...besides, I don't think it's easy to buy 'sorry I wanted you to die but didn't really mean it bc I always loved you' cards!

But unlikely as it seems, I am open minded enough to know that others do find a way to accept the real horrors of behaviour unleashed in crisis and the reality of a post-crisis person trying to honestly repair themselves and their lives without denying what they did. I just can't conceive of it with my xh but that says nothing about anyone else's life. Our personal boundaries and red lines are just that - personal. And the boundaries we need with a spouse in crisis or an exspouse may not be the same ones we need if they have genuinely recovered from crisis. I am not convinced that most do actually...I think the experience changes them fundamentally or they just get stuck in the mess they made, jmo...but I think some do with God's grace and that's a good thing for everyone who got hurt. Just wanted to be clear on that.

[Acorn]

For me the biggest challenge is understanding whether my H is REALLY going through an MLC, or whether is it simply my way to soften the blow for me, or better put, whether it helps me avoid a possible reality which is that, yes, my H no longer loves me and wants to be with me...

I suggest that it’s a painful but necessary challenge LBS needs to face.  No use burying our heads in the MLC ‘excuse’ so that we don’t have to consider some other possibilities for M breakdown.  To do so would be delusional, emotionally immature or both.   I was both for a while.  Yeah... 

I figure we all need to invest in some honest and serious pondering.  Without that, who are we really kidding but ourselves?!

[OffRoad]

How many times do these old timers need to repeat the same stuff over and over without thinking? UM described a comment from Acorn on her thread as being like "Live like they aren't coming back" but Acorn's H never left! So it makes zero sense to describe it that way.

Your example of “live like they’re not coming back” doesn’t work for live-ins. Is there a discussion thread for live-ins like there is for vanishers?  If there isn’t, there should be.

I am only quoting these because I 100% disagree with this. I HAD a live in MLCer. The ONLY thing that saved my sanity was taking care of myself and living like he was going to do what ever he was going to do irrespective of anything I did. And he left anyway, so I eventually got to the same place where what I was already doing served me well when he became a vanisher.

So mine didn't stay forever, but he stayed for 19 long months. I still had to live like he was never coming back, because whomever this guy I was living with was not my husband. I treated him as I would any acquaintance: Courteous and polite. And took care of myself and S15 (at the time) because at the end of the day (and my life), the only person responsible for me is me.

Having a live in isn't "better". It's just a thing.
Just because they currently live in, it doesn't mean they will stay there.
Whether or not they live in has no bearing on where the focus should be (YOU).

One person's anecdotal evidence that might help someone else make it through with their sanity intact.

[OffRoad]

I am more aware of the MLC lens and its possible ill effects on LBS than ever. I do not mean using it to understand our MLCer’s totally-out-there behaviours which came about almost overnight, and then leaving them alone to their business of figuring themselves out and LBS moving forward and living her life as best as she can. 

Here is my latest thought:

I am musing if it is possible that the excessive use of the MLC lens for a prolonged period eventually fuses it to LBS’s eye.  That is a scary thought, because, then, your life = MLC. 

Do you think your MLC lens is temporary? 

And it funny you should ask this. Right after BD, I reupholstered my couch and had the material cut out to reupholster the loveseat. I never got to the loveseat, other things came up. I recently started reupholstering the love seat. It's the same as the couch, same fabric, same bazillion staples to come out. And I was transported back to a few months after BD. Over four years later, and I was right back there. This caused me to step back and look at how I was feeling and thinking in a different way.

My MLC lens is no longer on XH, but shifts to my own fears of the repercussions his MLC will have on the children. I sometimes feel like a failure as a parent because they (at last say) think that this was a normal way to end a relationship, that people just fall out of love. That they blindly love their father whom, if they were not blood related to him, they would never even consider talking to. That they at one point felt the need to protect me from "what their father does" to the point of lying to me. That these poor kids are now set up for their own MLC because they know no better.

AND THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT. So it shifts to my likelihood of living the rest of my life alone, then to my sometimes anger that I have to do everything myself, since there is no one else to help, then it takes a shift for the better to all the things I have accomplished on my own.

The results of the MLC, whether you reconcile or not, leaves a permanent change in most people for good or for ill, sometimes for both in different areas. I, personally, don't think the MLC lens is temporary, I think it forever colors your world slightly differently than if it had never been in your life. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's again, just a thing, for each of us to decide what to do with it.

[Treasur]

Have you found OR that you can choose to remove the MLC lens for some bits of your life now if not others?

[Thunder]

OffRoad, I agree with you whole last paragraph, I also don't think the MLC lens is temporary.

[OffRoad]

Have you found OR that you can choose to remove the MLC lens for some bits of your life now if not others?

It's an interesting question. If I am aware the MLC lens is affecting  me, I can choose to deal with a situation in a different way, sure. But it still affects me and my actions. Are there facets of my life where the MLC lens may not apply? Sure. MLC does not and never has affected how I launder my clothes because that relies on muscle memory for me. I can do my entire laundry and not remember how I did it, it just happens. I don't specifically think of what temperature or anything because there is just a series of buttons I push and a sequence of things I do(Laundry might affect someone else, I don't know). So to get really, really specific, in my case the MLC lens colors some aspects of my life and not others, but the aspects it colors are always there. How else do you keep the lesson if you don't remember what you learned? It doesn't have to be forefront of your mind, but it's no different than being careful of a hot surface. See flame, know hot, don't touch. How much do I actually consciously think that?

I mean, for those who have found someone else, if they started behaving like your MLCer did, you'd recognize it I would think. But you don't sit there every minute of every day expecting it to happen. It's a background awareness, not a constant thought process. At least, that is how I see it. I see the MLC lens as any other thing that happens in your life: something you look through steadily for a time, then flick off and on to as it's now a part of your internal scenery. Not something to dwell on, something to be aware of.

Maybe the lens is like a bifocal you only use when you need it or accidentally glance that way. 

[Thunder]

The way I see it, we are all still looking through the MLC lens or we would not still be here talking about it after all these years.

For good or for bad.

It had a huge impact on our lives.