[marvin4242]

One thing I’ll add is its not so much about “belief” rather a diagnosis. There is no diagnosis of “MLC.” But all good therapist can see the components that are underneath the behaviour and understand what is going on. Whether it can simply be “treated” until and unless the patient actually thinks something is wrong is another issue.

[xyzcf]

Erik Ericson is well known for his Stages of Psychosocial Development. These were something that I studied quite intensely in my nursing training for they are related to various stages of life (7) and the developmental tasks that are necessary to accomplish in each stage...the implication was that sickness during a specific stage might affect the successful transition to the next stage.

There are certain things that resolve without "therapy". What I have seen in the stories I read here and real life situations, is that MLC ends without psychological intervention.

Other examples of this would be the terrible two's, adolescence and even menopause perhaps. There doesn't need to be any kind of therapy/medication or treatment to resolve these stages of life....so what if MLC is also another "stage" that is more intense for some than others (as are the examples I gave above) that resolve internally when the time is right for that stage to pass?

I actually believe this to be true for many who have a MLT or MLC. Not saying that they return home or to their previous lives, but they do figure things out and lose some of the "characteristics" that were present throughout their crisis.

[Thunder]

Idk Marvin, I kept telling my therapist all the bizarre things my H was doing and saying and she kept saying, more than once, was...'Welllll people change."

I seriously looked at her like she had two heads!  You know how a dog cocks his head when he is trying to understand what you are saying?

Exasperated I said.."Yes I understand people change, but overnight and into a completely different person you knew for the last 30 years??  No."

Needless to say I never went back. 

[marvin4242]

Idk Marvin, I kept telling my therapist all the bizarre things my H was doing and saying and she kept saying, more than once, was...'Welllll people change."

I seriously looked at her like she had two heads!  You know how a dog cocks his head when he is trying to understand what you are saying?

Exasperated I said.."Yes I understand people change, but overnight and into a completely different person you knew for the last 30 years??  No."

Needless to say I never went back.

I absolutely believe you, it seems there is a whole group of therapist who have dismissed this out of hand and don’t realize how drastic a change it is. And they can be so damaging to an LBS because they try to see where we are “distorting” what happens. I had one therapist like that, but she was a good one and after a little while started to realize what I was describing was accurate and not normal. She started to understand it was disassociation, a fracture, and other behavioural traits.

My current one only listened to around 3 minutes and then started guessing at my W’s behaviour, triggers, etc. I just smiled, stopped and nodded. She completely understood what was happening because she was aware of it. She also observed that therapy would not help my W, not where she was (which I also agreed with).

So your point is a great one Thunder, if an LBS starts with a therapist to work on the damage from their MLCer be sure they “understand’ or it may be at best unhelpful.

Good for you for walking out!

[Nas]

She also observed that therapy would not help my W, not where she was (which I also agreed with).

I agree that therapy would not help until they are at a place to be receptive, which can be a long time and sometimes never. My ex went at my behest early on and it made things worse. I'm saying that they do eventually need to seek help if they're going to deal with their underlying issues. (That's got nothing to do with them returning to the LBS either. They need to face their issues whether they return or not.)
Again, just my opinion. People can disagree.

ETA: if they all just wake up with no intervention, then the title of this thread would be a moot point, no? Would it need to be recognized as a diagnosable condition if it just goes away on its own with no treatment?  The diagnosis would be for the person going through it, not the LBS - LBS could explain to their IC what's happening and, recognition of MLC or not, the therapy should be the same: you can't fix them, let's work on you. No therapist should discount the LBS experience of seeing a sudden change in their spouse, whether that therapist believes in "MLC" or not.

[MadLuv]

I start therapy soon. First thing I asked was if she recognized  MLC. She said not as the actual term, but She does believe that people can go through crisis due to under lying issues or traumatic events. She doesn't use MLC terminology, but She does recognize the crisis that is referred to by many as MLC. So, I hopeful for some helpful therapy

[Songanddance]

I start therapy soon. First thing I asked was if she recognized  MLC. She said not as the actual term, but She does believe that people can go through crisis due to under lying issues or traumatic events. She doesn't use MLC terminology, but She does recognize the crisis that is referred to by many as MLC. So, I hopeful for some helpful therapy

Torn up - what I would urge you to remember (having had a lot of really helpful therapy in the last 8+yrs) is that the therapist is there to help you and your fears/anxieties/concerns and worries.  She will not know your H and any good therapist will not try to solve your H or give you strategies/words to try and control your H.
Good therapists take the whole of what you tell them and effectively work on helping you to help yourself.
For example my therapist wasn't interested in what my H was saying when he monstered but she was interested in helping me deal with my reactions to what H was saying. She gave me a really simple technique of saying "uhuh" every time H monstered so that I could begin to mentally step back and see what he was saying as projection. 
It took time but it worked.  So she helped me learn to detach rather than try to come up with clever words on how to deal with H.

We never discussed MLC in detail because she was more interested in helping me recover from my own trauma of what H had done, but she did believe that people's actions are driven by their thoughts and feelings and that thoughts and feelings for some people in mid life will change and often become the antithesis of what they used to be and that is often very unhealthy.

I was lucky to have found her and now we talk sporadically throughout the year on a need to basis. 

[Treasur]

I would agree with Song ; any decent therapist will only treat the person in the room!

Having said that, I had a couple of IC who weren’t much use....partly bc of where my head was at, partly bc they tried to steer me towards solutions that didn’t fit the WTF stuff that I was actually dealing with at the time early on. And, rightly or wrongly, that made me feel judged at a time when I really needed to feel validated that what I was experiencing was really happening and that I was not nuts.

That didn’t happen until I saw a trauma specialist who could see, at a glance, that I was deeply traumatised by something that was a million miles from normal for me. Just feeling seen and heard was like a weight off my shoulders. But we spent very little time trying to figure out what was going on with my then h, just enough probably to let me feel that my reality was being accepted.

[MadLuv]

Songanddance-

  is that the therapist is there to help you and your fears/anxieties/concerns and worries

yes, that is what I am hoping for. Help with my dealing with moving on, my recovery, detachment and pain. It is all about ME!!! I needed someone to understand the crisis to be able to possibly understand my struggles

[MarianTheLibrarian]

I would agree with Song ; any decent therapist will only treat the person in the room!

This is more true than you realize when you're in this kind of situation.  I had a therapist who would say she couldn't diagnose other people in my life, and then diagnose them anyway (non-MLC issues) and sometimes the diagnosis would change based on how she felt that day.  The problem with this is that no one goes into therapy and discusses all the wonderful things about their families.  We go in and talk about all the garbage happening, so it's easy for a therapist to see dysfunction and disease when really it might be subclinical, or perhaps even quirks or foibles.  Someone's worst day becomes their everyday to your therapist.  Diagnosing someone not present is really not a good thing, trust me.  Be thankful if your therapist doesn't engage with this.

That said, a big part of my personal battle (which many of you have read) is that the world at large doesn't accept MLC as an explanation for this kind of behavior.  Namely, in our culture we have a strong belief that everyone knows exactly how to make themselves happy, and that our actions are all basically sequentially leading up to self-actualization and "happiness."  The idea that we sometimes do things that make us miserable -- knowingly or not -- or that we engage in acts of self-sabotage, self-medicating, etc. is lost in the discussion.

The notion that H was self-medicating his depression **absolutely** rings true for me.  He had very definite peaks and troughs in his satisfaction with life, and always needed a big "next thing" to pull him out of that trough.  I think he landed himself into a pretty big trough and OW was the only thing that made him feel anything in that moment, and that felt like love.  If you've ever battled depression (and I have) you might be able to relate to that feeling of anhedonia, and then the random thing that gets through it feeling like total magic.   I'd like to say that H had a choice in doing what he did, because we always have a choice.  But brain chemistry is very powerful, and I think it would have taken a supreme act of will braced with strong family support to make any other choice than what he did.  Neither of those things were available.

Personally, I wouldn't stick around with a therapist who didn't acknowledge multiple possible causes for someone creating a path of destruction through life.  I don't buy into this idea that we all intrinsically know what makes us happy and are able to pinpoint it and pursue it.  Humans are a lot messier than that.

ETA:  The individuation issue rings true as well.  Some people go through the first part of life completely unquestioning, aligning their actions with other people's expectations.  They never stop to really consider whether they want to get married, have kids, etc. -- they do it because that's just what you do.  In H's case, I think his parents disapproved somewhat of OW when he dated her as a teenager.  Meeting her again later in life was an opportunity for him to commit the ultimate act of rebellion against his upbringing and do something entirely self-serving.  Most people do that as teenagers and complete that phase of their personal development, but for others, they find themselves years later living a life they've never actually **thought** about because they just followed the crowd.