[Treasur]

I suspect MLC is a non-technical term, a bit like 'nervous breakdown' that we get in RL when we see it (or experience it  ) but that doesn't fit the DSM that many IC use.

I have always framed it in my head that MLC is depression+insecure identity issues....and exists on a spectrum of course...but I also suspect that many MLCers could probably be diagnosed as essentially having c-PTSD from unaddressed early life FOO trauma. Not all perhaps, but a goodly number.

[marvin4242]

My only addition to the great points above is that if a therapist dismissed the idea out of hand they may have the wrong context for our experience. Case and point: if I tell a therapist that my wife says “I love you” on Sunday, and Tuesday morning says “I never loved you” this can be because:

1) I have an incorrect/partial recollection of events,

2) My wife has been lying to me and I didn’t know it, or

3) Something dramatically altered in my wife in 2 days.

Generally speaking, barring brain trauma or something major, 3) is not likely. So even in trying to help me they may go down blind alleys and not be able to provide help with the shock/trauma of the experience. Because we are off balance, and what we are saying matters in giving a context. If 3) is true then our demeanor is perfectly normal, we are turned around, in a daze and crushed. Otherwise something else is going on.

I have known therapists that ranged from being dismissive of the concept, to ones that start completing your sentences because they have had experience with it. There is no DSM entry, because this event LEADS to a group of disorders and behaviors that are understood and labeled, but the cause is not. So you can say disassociated, PTSD, emotionally detached, pain induced narcissistic traits, etc etc.

[xyzcf]

I knew that I was stuck, for many years. I functioned but I didn't know who I was..I didn't recognize who I was.

After BD, my doctor immediately wanted to write me a prescription for an anti depressant. A drug to decrease the emotions I was experiencing from a situational depression. I declined. I went to therapy. It was "nice" but there was no relief from the pain.

People get divorced..what was causing me to continue to have such deep pain?

The symptoms after BD that so many here have experienced, extreme weight loss, inability to sleep, hands shaking, crying for hours, inability to focus, being on high alert, inability to experience joy..those symptoms were real and very serious.

But you paste a smile on your face and nod and say you are fine.

I was stuck and by sheer chance, I ended up in a therapist's office who treats trauma. Had I been raped, I could have accepted PTSD being the reason I was in such pain...and yet, in some ways this is similar to rape....someone you trusted and loved and built your life with for 35 years in my case, against your will, took everything that you knew as your life away in a very quick and unexpected way. Betrayal, abandonment, rejection = trauma.

The things that happened in my therapist's office were unconventional, not at all expected and so intense...entering into another world, one that I was not consciously aware of...a world made up of many things...my genetic code, my values, my childhood, previous betrayal, who I was as a woman..who the child within me was and everything in between.

This therapy focused on me at a cellular level, a biochemical, physical  and spiritual level taking me places that I would never have got to any other way.

She was my guide, the work I had to do was my work, she guided me and helped me to face it all and in the end, I found myself again.

I am still broken... I doubt that I can ever remove this wound that is so deep.

I felt that I was a "failure" at divorce....as I listen to other women gleefully talk about their ex's, seemingly totally accepting of their first, second, third divorce..their remarriages, their dating.....all I could yearn for was a man who had discarded me...what was my problem?

Trauma, feeling it, spitting it out, stamping on it..being aware of where I was feeling this in my body, my mind, my soul.

Slowly, there is no rushing through this...slowly calm, peace, acceptance and letting go...slowly I got up from the ground, shaky, fearful .....slowly standing upon the ground, connected and stronger than I ever was before.

The tears remind me..I am allowed the tears, they are mine...they belong to me and they remind me that what happened was traumatic....

If you need this, to find who you are again...a trauma therapist is perhaps a better choice than other types of therapy..it certainly was for me.

[LBS_Les]

My therapist won't use the term MLC, but she does believe that we all inevitably hit a point in our lives where we question things.

She has a name for it (which totally escapes me in this moment), but she won't call it full on MLC.   She basically acknowledges that we have a morbid complex at a certain period in our lives, and its not uncommon.

But she won't nod in agreement that my STBXW is in MLC - she does acknowledge however, that my STBXW is going through some kind of "transition"

[Lady Grey]

I love that this thread is up and running again! Such a great discussion.

I need to update my thread, as the recent appointment I had with a trauma therapist was SO different to my previous bad experiences with IC. I think I have now joined those of you who would suggest that a fellow LBS looking for an IC consider seeing someone who specialises in trauma. Thinking about my experiences I've found the way that marvin sets it out to be very helpful:

My only addition to the great points above is that if a therapist dismissed the idea out of hand they may have the wrong context for our experience. Case and point: if I tell a therapist that my wife says “I love you” on Sunday, and Tuesday morning says “I never loved you” this can be because:

1) I have an incorrect/partial recollection of events,

2) My wife has been lying to me and I didn’t know it, or

3) Something dramatically altered in my wife in 2 days.

Generally speaking, barring brain trauma or something major, 3) is not likely. So even in trying to help me they may go down blind alleys and not be able to provide help with the shock/trauma of the experience. Because we are off balance, and what we are saying matters in giving a context. If 3) is true then our demeanor is perfectly normal, we are turned around, in a daze and crushed. Otherwise something else is going on.

With the last three bad/unhelpful ICs I saw before finding the trauma specialist, 3) was completely off the table as far as they were concerned. Which meant that when I described my experience and what was happening with my h (which presented pretty clearly as a 3) situation), that wasn't an option for them so they viewed it as some combination of 1) and 2).

With an added emphasis perhaps on me being in denial and looking to see "something wrong with h" as a way to explain what was happening, and to avoid facing my bad marriage and the ways that I had contributed 

I didn't feel so much that they were invalidating or dismissing how I felt, but my perception of reality. And as many of us here know only too well, right after BD when you've just had the "waking up to see zombies on the lawn" experience and are frantically trying to work out WTF is going on. And with blame-shifting and gaslighting from the mlcer, and most people in RL unable to even see the WTF, our ability to trust our own perception of reality may not be high.

The difference with a trauma therapist perhaps is that in the framework they have to understand what's going on, 3) is most definitely an option. So when an LBS comes to them and describes a situation that sounds like 3), they have less reason to assume, straight out of the gate, that the LBS is crazy/delusional/lying/in denial. And THAT means that they can actually hear the LBS experience. Which is something I've been looking for in an IC and haven't experienced until my appointment with the trauma therapist.

It seems to me that this may be part of the benefit of seeing a therapist who understands trauma, and the other part I guess is that they can actually see that what we as LBSs have experienced is trauma, and specialising in treating trauma, they also have the tools to help us heal.

[Marchingforward]

Thought I would add my two cents since I am a therapist. In a nutshell, it's not in the DSM so it's not considered a disorder. It would be most closely linked to a "Problems of adjustment to life-cycle transitions." Which is sort of a secondary diagnosis that isn't actually used very often. That's not to say that it won't be added at some point in the future. Many of our current diagnoses were once not considered a diagnosis. So...we, as therapists, are not trained to see it as anything. We aren't trained to look for it. We don't have a list of symptoms as black and white as say, anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, etc.  Also, I personally think because society (at least in the US) makes fun of a MLC, we don't actually take it seriously. I know I didn't until it happened in my life and I started seeing the similarities in MLCers. 

I wholeheartedly agree that a trauma professional may be more willing to believe that something is "off" in our MLCers and will work to help LBS heal from the trauma. Because it is incredibly traumatic. As all of us have experienced, our spouses do a complete 180 in what seems to be overnight. My own therapist really poo-pooed my idea that it was an MLC when I first mentioned it. This was before I knew much about MLC, but my H had done some of the things you see in media (losing weight, dressing younger, working out incessantly, and randomly buying a motorcycle when I was at work). She said something the effect of "Maybe it seems a little MLCish if you want to label it, but the bottom line is the relationship has ended because he is clearly not a fully integrated individual. Because he's not fully integrated, he's always been that way."  So the trauma I experienced of this sudden switch of my H was dismissed. I was suppose to just move on because he was being an selfish jerk. He wasn't always like that. And she really didn't understand that, no matter how hard I tried to explain it. I was told I was simply blinded to those parts of him because of my love for him. No...not it at all. He literally changed overnight.

I've come to view it as a serious mental illness. One in which rationality is fleeting. In the case of my H, there are several months of rational behaviors and thoughts, then something (mostly his fear about his kids, interestingly always around the holidays) triggers a ton of fear and away he runs. I also see him as being depressed. There are so many examples of things he loved to do which, when the depression takes over, he does not do. He also has significant trauma from childhood that has not been worked on. I believe this trauma is the basis for his fear about losing his connection with his kids. We were in marriage counseling for a time and the therapist asked him about memories from childhood. His first memory is that of his father's funeral (my H was 7 at the time).  He was very upset about the questions and asked me on our way home why the therapist would want to know that, and why the therapist looked at him funny when he could not remember anything before 7. I said "because it's not normal to not remember things before you were 7. Maybe that's something you want to explore with the therapist." (Side note: the next session was our final session as H said he just wanted out).

I'm hopeful that the mental health field will really put more research into this. I'm hopeful the stigma around MLC will reduce and these individuals will be able to get the help they actually need. The help to deal with the covert depression, anxiety, and trauma so they can become healthy whole individuals. I think it will take time and a lot of work to make this happen though. Getting a new diagnosis into the DSM is hard and can take years.

[xyzcf]

Surviving, thank you for your post and also thanks to everyone else discussing this.

I can never get enough information to allow me to understand and accept what happened to him. When I read posts like yours and others, I still (11 1/2 years) later nod my head....and somehow it soothes me.

I care so much about this man that to see him like this still breaks me.

There are so many examples of things he loved to do which, when the depression takes over, he does not do.

He has created a completely different life and has totally rejected everything from our past and from what I can see even from his life before he met me. The thing that were important to both of us, that we were both on board with he rejects now. That hurts me still..because those things still matter to me.

The beauty  of HS is that we are able to explore this "condition" which is not understood by many except those who have themselves experienced it.

Thanks to everyone who continues to share and help others to find the healing that can come to us.

[marvin4242]

Thank you @Surviving2019 for the clarity.

I care so much about this man that to see him like this still breaks me.

I believe that being connected to the reality as is, rather than as we want it to be, is an important component of mental well being. Part of the MLC phenomena from what I have seen is how not being connected to the reality of past trauma, the causes of pain, and the general state unhappiness leads our MLCers to distort more and more what is happening internally and finally externally.

Our challenge as an LBS has similar components. I loved my wife, the person she used to be. I cared for her deeply, the person she used to be. But now I have to fully accept and integrate that that person no longer exists. It has taken me a few years to get there, because they are so important to us and we have so internalized a version of them for so long. I even started referring to my ex as "old-name" instead of her current name. It was and is a reminder of what reality is for me.

I care for this new person like I would for any other person in pain. I will help this person when and if I can in a healthy way like I would help any other person I could. But she is NOT the person I loved. She is NOT the person I cared for. And if I still saw her the way she was I would be creating my own version of discordant reality. This, from experience, can only lead to pain and unhappiness.

Maybe one day a version of my wife will reassemble. Maybe this new version will be something like the old one, or be someone with whom I can have some kind of relationship with (let's start as basic normal human daily friendship). But that day is not today, and I am pretty sure its not tomorrow. That day may never come.

[xyzcf]

Well said Marvin. It took me a very long time to understand this and it is so important.

He is not my husband. He is nothing like the man I loved for so long.

[Pendragon]

I have a psychiatrist friend I made years ago when I was going through poor mental health -- specifically panic and generalized anxiety and depression. He went from an email buddy to an in-person coffee buddy to a dinner buddy and has been there for me over the years.

He is, no joke, one of the top clinical AND research psychiatrists in the world. He's been on many news programs and in print being interviewed when these sort of topics come up. 

I asked him this question, and I'll paste his reply below:

“Midlife crisis” describes a real phenomenon that some people experience. It is not an official diagnosis but, rather, a description of an event in a person’s life. We would use the term in a way that is similar to how we use “suicide.” It is an event in a person’s life that is most often related to underlying depression. I have a patient who has a “mid-life crisis” every time he gets depressed – he wants to leave his wife, go into another field of work, move away, etc. When the depression subsides, the crisis goes away. BTW, he is 67 years old and I have seen this happen with him several times now. I am able to “talk him out of it” by reminding him of the prior experiences. This kind of event often affects a person globally – that is, affecting multiple areas of life. So, in your wife’s instance, it is not just leaving you, it is moving to Denver, getting a new job, etc. That global unhappiness (rather than unhappiness about one thing in particular) is usually a product of depression in my experience --R"