[Seahorse]

Courage Dear Heart -
Your post made me realize that my H, also, had been left alone for 3 months as S15 and I moved to new state early, leaving H at home alone.
He did eat with friends a lot during that time and made new close friends.
Perhaps it was during this time that he realized that he "needed" his freedom and realized his unhappiness with our marriage.

It was shortly after he joined us in new state that BD occurred (less than 6 months).
Makes sense.

Back to you - you're right -- healing an occur but only if both are willing to work on it.

Sea

[barbiedoll]

Is my fractured marriage a fallout of MLC, or, was it a catalyst that helped launch MLC in my spouse?

.

As you say Acorn...this is excruciatingly painful. It is a triggering statement for me actually and I have done battle on more than one occasion with this very question. And I will need to face it head on and ask myself this again. I do not know the raw answer to this . My husband says , that he believes it had VERY little to do with our marriage . He has said that the marriage was overall solid, we always had a very active sexual relationship, he was happy with his daughters and "family". He feely admits he failed to "stand up for himself" when he should have , failed to make his needs know or speak when he was unhappy ...and that resentment was of his own making. He can link that all back to FOO.

Regardless, shamefully I will admit that if it is the result of marriage issues ...then the cost was too high. The punishment for too severe for the "hidden and unspoken crimes". The risk is too great . If my marriage was the catalyst that helped launch a MLC ...and yet the marriage issues were manufactured by an avoidant that insisted all was "fine", what is that saying?.  I have, with extreme emotion, tears and rage told him and our therapist that I NEVER want "marriage" again...if there is this possible looming outcome. The therapist just stares at me ….baffled. But I mean every word. I am sorry Acorn, I know this is likely not helpful or what you are looking for. It is my own massive reaction to feeling "blame". It has been there from the start ...if I hear blame , then I am done. Apparrently I am "hearing thru a wound". I am also aware that I need to look harder at this ….but I cannot. This is the number 1 issue and stumbling block in our "re-connection". Now bawling my face off ...honestly, it is just so raw for me . I am NOT to blame for something he never told me, spoke up about, did nothing to "fix", decided to hide etc etc . Stopping now... I am sorry I am not adding anything mature and brilliant .

[Father5]

   Yes our marriage wasn't perfect. My wife had really strong vunerability issues. She always seemed to have a foot in and a foot out. She had a lot to drink one night and in front of her first husband and his brother and their wives she said she couldn't really love me.

  The next day I told her what she said and she sent a text to all the people at the dinner to explain how she loved me and was the best thing to happen to her. That her issues keep her from opening up and becoming vunerable.

 That is the one and only time I have ever seen her vunerable and open up to me. I always assumed teh she had really been let down by every man in her life. Her dad was never around, her first husband cheated and her mom had men in and out of the house through out her childhood. I always told myself that as long as I am there for her when she needs me that she will someday see.Maybe this MLC is the test ??  All of this is fixable nothing in our relatioship was a deal breaker but it does take two ! 

 

[Velika]

Marriage does not cause MLC. MLC causes MLC.

What people are describing as depression here is anhedonia. This means that a person cannot feel happiness. Someone with this condition instead must turn to chemical highs to feel “up.” Chemical highs are not the same as happiness. They can become addictive.

I believe many MLCers are in a state of anhedonia on and off for a year or two leading up to bomb drop. Because they don’t know what is going on, they attribute this “unhappiness” to the marriage.

Once you have seen this play out for some years it is very easy to see that it is not the marriage. In fact, I feel some of the mixed messaging on this forum follows the same approach as subtle forms of emotional abuse, telling people to look at their marriage but it’s not the marriage.

If you want to look at your relationship as a way to see what you want and don’t want in the future or to learn about yourself, that is fine, but you won’t discover what caused the MLC. A marriage does not cause bipolar or schizophrenia or dementia. It does not cause MLC.

To the person whose therapist is telling them PlayStation was infidelity: please, please reconsider this type of therapy. Therapists are required to be licensed, but beyond this are almost completely unchecked and unregulated. They can say whatever they want! You are in a very vulnerable position right now, seeking answers. If a therapist imposed a divorce narrative on you, it’s going to be challenging to recover from what truly happened.

If you look around on narcissistic and psychopathic abuse forums you find nearly identical stories as to what we write about here. This abnormal, sudden loss of empathy and self awareness is not a psychological reaction to another person, an ethos, or any other personality driven issue. It has to do with malfunction of the brain and is highly consistent with damage to particular regions.

I recently received an apology from my ex and I could see with crystal clarity the true problem and challenge that I and I believe many LBS face, which is a deep energetic trauma coupled by any belief at all that this attack was merited of that there was any truth in the words of an abusive and disordered person.

My ex did not remember anything he said. He also told me that he didn’t think any of the things he said said were true. The person who remembered and believed was ME.

Overcoming an enemy within is much harder than battling a MLCer. This is someone you have been living with a lot longer than your former spouse. Please, use what your unwell former spouse has told you not as a way to “improve” yourself but as a way to get to the heart of your traumas and vulnerabilities.

Big hugs! Please please be gentle on yourselves.

[readytofixmyselffirst]

Hello,

My IC once said, as we were exploring my W's infidelity, "You cheated too.  You used the Playstation as a mistress."

I am going to be very open because Disillusioned was just as open. In my situation, both my MLCer and I were both conflict avoiders. The point I am making is that echos what Law Professor and NYM have stated. The MLCer can't be just vilified as pure evil and the LBSer blessed as the absolute saint. No marriage is perfect and both partners bring flaws to the relationship. In my case, instead of dealing with things, we just put the issues in the attic. Soon the attic was too full. You can only kick the can down the road so long.

I used to be proud of my marriage on the fact that we didn't fight. I thought we had a great relationship because we didn't fight. Instead, I now realize we had a bad situation because we didn't fight.

I don't want to confuse the state of my marriage with her MLC. Her MLC was a crisis that was hers. Our inability to communicate due to the avoidance issues only made things worse and BD caught me completely offguard and lacking the tools to deal with it. My own Peal Harbor and I was left defenseless.

The forum was my sanctuary. It gave me tools to deal with my wife and most importantly the tools to work on myself. The past ten years have been more about my growth and change then what my MLCer has done.

My goal this year is to really look at conflict avoidance and how it plays in marriages with or without MLC.

I do wish everyone a Happy New Year and Great Topic!

Ready

[Penelope2018]

I'm pretty sure mine was fallout from his MLC. We had a few tumultuous years in the beginning of our marriage but as we matured, we calmed a lot and were generally happy. I know I have issues with control, being judgemental and emotional expression. He made comments about that several times after BD but I know I became much better as I got older. He claimed that if I had cried it POSSIBLY would have changed something. 

I was very self-centered when we met when I was 17 up until about 25-26. That's about the point my mindset became similar to how it is now. At the time of BD, I was much more understanding and would speak my mind when we had issues. I had only blown up once in 2015 on a vacation in France because he was trying to spend it entirely in the hotel and refused to take time off work so he stayed on his comp in the hotel bed all day. Now I know that year was the start of his depression.

From the beginning, he always wanted to be his own boss but the businesses just never survived. He hated dealing with coworkers, going into work and was an extremely jealous person. He was one of those people who would go into work meetings late on purpose to show others he was exempt from the rules. Lucky he was/is intelligent or he'd be homeless I'm sure. His brother moved back to their home country and opened his own clinic which took off and I think started xh's depression in 2015.

I remember the shift in his behavior very clearly. His mother would call and constantly talk about how well his brother was doing while talking badly of xh's accomplishments which was always strange to me considering they were much greater than his older bro, money/assetwise anyway. I know now and kinda knew then that his mother was and is a very toxic, nasty individual. If I would have known exactly how bad she was I never would have pushed for him to have a better relationship with her as they hadn't been on good terms since he came to the US in 1995. We had bought a new house in 2014 and had been doing DIY projects galore.

We traveled to California and bought mango, lychee and some other exotic fruit trees. Planted a huge garden in the yard and had tons of lemon and orange bushes blossoming on the back patio along with an assortment of rose bushes which he took care of very well. We were definitely happy. But for most of 2015 he languished on the couch, beside the vacation which I had planned thinking he needed to get out of the house. I remember he never wanted to go anywhere, would watch TV for hours and hours and then finally got the bright idea to open another store but in his home country.

That happened at the beginning of 2016 and ended up being a complete disaster and where OW came from. She replaced a stealing employee in the summer of 2016. The business continued to fail (no profit, machines constantly breaking). He decided to buy MORE machines to place in an apartment we were building (which was another big money drain) thinking he'd acquire business from hospitals, which never happened. My grandmother went on hospice and died in December and he just completely lost it. That one month between me leaving his home country to try and see my granny before she died and his returning at the end of January in 2017 changed him drastically.

He came back cold and angry. Was a completely different person fueled by rage. And now I know he had started something inappropriate with OW during that time. Their RT hadn't taken off yet as I don't think he was chatting with her while in the US (no password on his phone) but he had to go back to his HC in April and a week or two into that trip he bought her a $200 phone. I even found love songs he had sung and recorded to his phone during the same month that I guess were for her.

He admitted the last time I left that there wasn't anything wrong with us and he didn't know why he did what he did. I won't take the blame for what happened nor try to rewrite history as MLCers tend to do. I think we had some issues like any non-perfect marriage but they definitely weren't anywhere near enough to warrant how it ended.

Edited for paragraph breaks.

[AlvinTheMaker]

I agree to very large extend with Velika's views, especially three parts below:

A marriage does not cause bipolar or schizophrenia or dementia. It does not cause MLC.

IMHO even at worst the marrital conditions were one catalyst among others. But they did not cause inability to deal with life and personal situations.

If you look around on narcissistic and psychopathic abuse forums you find nearly identical stories as to what we write about here.

Not to mention similar stories being found on support groups of partners with (long term) depression or anxiety.

Overcoming an enemy within is much harder than battling a MLCer.

Agree 110%...we are our worst enemy,, and it takes a lot of self work and courage to acknowledge this and flip the game.

Alvin

[Not Applicable]

“Is my fractured marriage a fallout of MLC, or, was it a catalyst that helped launch MLC in my spouse?

I think the question itself still allows people to escape responsibility. In both cases, you are assuming that what happened is MLC. Is it actually MLC if the marriage was the catalyst? Wouldn't you agree in such cases, the wayward spouse may not be suffering from MLC at all, and the LBS is actually in denial not only about their role in the demise of the marriage, but that their spouses aren't actually having an MLC at all?

I don't think there is enough of what doctors would call differential diagnosis being encouraged here in the forum. Is it MLC, or isn't it? Some people do come asking that question but they expect the answer to be "yes" and you are damned if you suggest that it might not be at all.

[Velika]

“Is my fractured marriage a fallout of MLC, or, was it a catalyst that helped launch MLC in my spouse?

I think the question itself still allows people to escape responsibility. In both cases, you are assuming that what happened is MLC. Is it actually MLC if the marriage was the catalyst? Wouldn't you agree in such cases, the wayward spouse may not be suffering from MLC at all, and the LBS is actually in denial not only about their role in the demise of the marriage, but that their spouses aren't actually having an MLC at all?

I don't think there is enough of what doctors would call differential diagnosis being encouraged here in the forum. Is it MLC, or isn't it? Some people do come asking that question but they expect the answer to be "yes" and you are damned if you suggest that it might not be at all.

I sort of agree, but am not sure how to do this in a meaningful way, or what the implication would be for an LBS who is either attempting to recover from bomb drop or hoping their spouse will recover and return home.

I asked this question early on (I think everyone does) and was told the difference is that in MLC the personality change is dramatic. I.e. it is not just your same spouse, however flawed, suddenly wanting a divorce.

I think even if the personality change is shocking and dramatic, however, there can be a lot of lead up to bomb drop that we aren’t aware of. Or, we notice our spouse seems distant or tense but attribute it to other causes.

I know there are physical symtoms like shark eyes, flat expression, stiff gait, that many report. I saw them myself. But I’m not sure what other telltale symptoms  are that this is conclusively a MLC over just a divorce.

If someone’s spouse treated them badly enough to fit the description of MLC, but does not have MLC, then I think under no circumstance should they attempt to wait this out. Having said that, I also beleive that if someone truly has MLC, I would be very cautious to advise them to wait it out either.

[Father5]

   This is a  great thread ! Ready I was/am very conflict avoidant my wife as well. I am working on this and I do believe I have improved greatly and will continue to work on this going forward as I see what problems can arise from the lack of confidence. Ready  I would love to help with your study if you need feedback from a confessed conflict avoider.

    When I first came here as the title of my post States is it MLC or exit affair. I was looking for answers. I do believe I have found those answers and I am completely confident that she is having a MLC.  The death of her father , the then erratic behavior and total and complete lack of any empathy only confirm my thoughts on this.

NYM I know you challenged me and my sitch on wether it is MLC related. I would only applaud you on that as I am always looking for discerning opinions just to make sure my hypothesis is correct or not. It did trigger me but that is my problem and nothing you did.