[midlifecrisis50]

I have a question for you about how you felt about your family as you came out of your MLC. Me and my eldest child have tried to be there for my W throughout, non judgemental and just letting her do her thing and stepping back. Is that the right approach in your opinion? I'm not sure how you viewed your children through MLC  and as you come out of it but is there any more we could do for her apart from stepping back and giving her space to do her own thing? Would you have appreciated your kids support or viewed their concern as another pressure?

Yeah, I think stepping back and letting her do her thing is absolutely the right approach in my opinion. Any time any of my family expressed concern, it aggravated me. I think that outside pressure can contribute to the inside pressure and maybe make the midlife crisis worse. The MLCer has to at some point come to a place where they feel safe, safe.

There are things that you won't think are pressure but they will. Like WHY telling his spouse that maybe sometime in the future they might be able to reconnect and be friends. That's pressure for someone in a MLC. It doesn't seem like that would be because you're not putting a time frame on it and you're only saying maybe, but that's not how they're hearing it. I think  the best thing to do is just say one time and one time only, “if you need me, you know where to find me”, and that's it.

I think the other thing that you nd the kids can do is go discover yourselves because your lives have changed in a big way. Who you were before is not going to work for you now because of this major life change. There's got to be some changes. I don't mean changing your personality or core values but discover who you are now in this changed life. The MLCer was thrown into their path of self-discovery, but you get to choose yours and what that’s going to look like for you. Find new ways to have fun.

If you're having a difficult time with this, then don't be afraid of counseling. They know all the right questions to ask to get your wheels turning. Maybe there was something that you used to really enjoy but it ended up on the wayside because you were busy building this life that you wanted. Rediscover what that is and bring that back in again.

I don't believe that it's just good for the LBS, but the MLCer too. Maybe it might be good for the MLCer to see you discovering new, safe and non-harmful ways of how to have fun, how to find joy, and how to find peace

[sachertorte]

Our marriage/relationship:
- Known for 24 years, married for 19 at BD
- Both avoidant
- More a WAS than a MLC in some ways: retired briefly between jobs but career stable and successful; was the kind of spouse that made more money AND did chores/logistics/planning (I am a successful career woman with a couple of high-profile jobs, but am intellectual and impractical); replay not very out-of-character or profligate; still good-looking, no excessive aging
- MLC triggers: 3 close relatives’ deaths and dementia; my chronic illness, unemployment and another harsh external stressor


6 years after BD, my XH who divorced me 3.5 years ago and moved back to his home country, asked to attend my mother’s funeral. In his usual avoidant way, he asked our D20 to ask me. Apparently he broke up with his girlfriend of 4 years around the holidays (same time as BD) right before I lost my beloved mom.

We have had minimum contact. I reflexively refused to let him come. I knew he has never been without a relationship all these years; OW1, the exit affair that he never admitted to, started about 1.5 years before BD. Everything I’d learned tells me he has not done the work to make a worthwhile reconnection. He was most likely just looking to plug the hole left by GF.

He has since:

- Gotten into another relationship (this may have happened before he broke up with GF; as we know they would be unfaithful just to ensure emotional safety)

- Made a long trip specifically to see me where he:

* Tried to talk about how it was a mistake to marry me (I shut that conversation down most politely)
* Complained at length about ways in which his ex-GF failed him. She is quintessentially NOT the affair-down; a lot more visible and successful than he is. He dropped me at a time when I was a liability. But dating someone ‘above his league’ in terms of income and job prestige does not satisfy him either, as his objections to her were about how he did not feel valued enough, since he had to accommodate her. He did not show appreciation or pleasure, even though it sounded like she gave him many of the things he wanted: competence, the corporate high life. He was upset that she did not want to buy property together and bind their lives together more concretely.-
* Asked me to upload our family photos for him, saying his copies were deleted from the cloud
* Appeared frustrated when I listened, validated and was generally supportive like an old friend that lost touch for years and is rather incurious.
* The entire conversation is still all about him. Tried to give me advice about dating but did not have the patience to inquire further.


I don’t know if you have any thoughts about where he is at. I have given up standing. It’s just that D20 has been grievously hurt by the divorce, and in my culture family matters above all. If there is anything I am missing here I would like to find out. Thank you so much.


(P.S. I don’t like the person my XH has become. I would never date him knowing his marital and dating history. He is handsome, charming, cultured and successful, but a pall of egotism and bitterness ruins all for me. The only reason I would still care is I know how maternal neglect scarred him, and how much I have to be grateful to him for over twenty years. I also made a lot of mistakes myself which mirror work has helped me rectify. However infinitesmal a chance there may be, I cannot rest until I’d looked into it.)

[KayDee]

KayDee
I'm sharing this, not as an MLC theory - far from it - but it was the first thing that struck me when I read your story - the sudden 'hitting of a wall', I really understood it. My personality did not change massively, but my view on the world certainly did. I was convinced that was the only view at the time. For a very long time after, I feared this depression would return and endure. As I read your post I thought maybe you had what is termed as the “quarter-life crisis.” IDK how long those last. I only learned about this while posting my vids. A few people reached out to me who were confused as they were able to relate to much of my story but they were only in their 20s. Just a thought. Personally, I think if you had some intuition that the illness had something to do with it, then there’s a good chance it did.

I didn’t have any illness that I was aware of for at least a year before hitting the wall. But I had been struggling with severe sleep issues for a couple of months prior and until shortly after I got to Florida. Those dang peacocks MADE SURE I woke up every morning! 

I don't really know what caused it. It wasn't a crisis, it was more like a huge mood swing into darkness. I mentioned it only to draw parallels with the suddenness of it. You describe a sudden hitting the wall feeling. Something flipped. This is how it felt for me. Our hormones/brain chemicals can affect our behaviour and thinking, but it can also work the other way around. Our psychological states are so complex, I don't think there's a clear cause and effect, just a cocktail of things creating a perfect [insert favourite drink here].

You talked before about being completely detached. How do you distinguish between being detached and being disassociated?

[Atari25]

Atari, the more I learned about MLC, the more patterns and similarities I saw, the easier it became to get out of the way and accept the way life had turned our for me. I have been very vocal expressing my views that they did not choose to have a crisis. Indeed, it is the worst pain I have ever experienced, his rejection, betrayal and abandonment but, once I found out about MLC (for I had absolutely no idea except for a vague term that mean buying a red sports car), things started to make sense.

Few of my family or friends understood. One verification for me has been in photos..because we do have contact and have always had over the years and his eyes are dead, his body language is like a corpse on steroids...there is such pain in him still, and because I love him, because of the connection that is still there after 15 years, I hope that one day he finds peace within himself..because I am not sure all that are in crisis do.

Your view and experience mirror mine. I see my wife more in a haze, she seems to be just checked out of being able to care or feel anything. Zombie shell of who she was. When I look at video of her 2-3 years ago its all tears, where did that fun person go?

I agree though - I hope they all find peace someday. I hope you do also.

[Atari25]

Atari25[/size]
I wonder now if I will still be there for my wife when she comes out of her MLC (if she does). I am now but in 2-3 year, who knows. The journey continues. Maybe you will be there for her, maybe not. It depends on your own journey and where that takes you. But after reading all the things you posted here, one thing’s for sure to me, you will still have a heart for her. She was a pretty lucky woman.

I know your journey has been kind of short (2-3 years) so far and you might still have quite a ways to go, but I really think based on your posts that you are processing in a pretty healthy way. Learning how to accept is so extremely hard, but that seems to be the path you chose anyway, even as hard as it is. The healing takes quite some time but I think that you really are doing everything that you can for all involved and everything that I believe you should do. Keep showing up for yourself like you have been, you’ll get there.

Thank you for the kind words. You being here and giving us all insights into MLC are invaluable.

I think the dreams/nightmares are the hardest thing right now. I feel ok during the day, waking up every night indicates I'm not.

Did you have sleeping issues or wake up from dreams /nightmares regularly during your MLC?

[Treasur]

I am long past the point when I chew at MLC questions or if/how that was what trashed my old life and ate the husband I knew. Still, for all that, reading some of your responses reminds me that perhaps the person I loved so much and the l shared life I thought was good were real. And that - when I have a moment of old anger or resentment - it is possible that my former h suffered as much as I did if differently and did not choose entirely to unleash a kind of hell on me. It has reminded me to hold some compassion for the person I once knew even if I had to shut down my compassion for the MLC version bc it acheived no purpose for him that I could see and made me much more vulnerable. He is long gone now, sometimes it’s almost as if I imagined him tbh….still a kind and generous eye feels more peaceful than a fearful or angry one.

Both of those things were/are quite important to me. I loved my then h too much and for too long to be comfortable letting myself slide into hating or despising him, even if a bit of me at times felt that way and tbh for good reason. And my own sense of sanity needed me to believe that I had not based 20+ years of my life on some kind of fake .folie a deux’ or just been duped by him for years. I can’t KNOW that of course, or so it seems to me, but it’s easier to find peace on the other side of this experience if I choose to not hate him and choose to not think that decades of my life were not as I experienced them at the time. Or pretty much lol. That’s my choice; I genuinely have no idea what my former h thinks about any of it and I don’t exoect to ever find that out. But it helped me to choose thoughts that did not damage me further with a side order of ‘I don’t know for sure’ 

What I was wondering was where you have landed on the issue of holding yourself accountable. Bc we LBS tend to struggle with that balancing line between ‘my spouse did not choose an MLC type breakdown of their own free will’ vs ‘but who else is there to hold responsible and accountable for their actions’. It can be a bit of an existential mindf**k tbh.

Some MLC spouses here have done/are doing things that are incomprehensibly cruel or profoundly damaging to the spouses and families they once seemed to value. Verging on abusive tbh….more than just passively tuning out or disappearing into the ether. And keep doing it for years, almost relentlessly really. Hard not to take that personally to some extent. And most LBS, and their kids, continue to find that bewildering.

Did you hurt people who cared about you or were invested with you, midlifecrisis50?

I understand from what you posted that you were probably unaware or indifferent to that if you did during your crisis years - but what about your pov on that now?
Does it matter to you?
Do you hold yourself accountable for that or do you feel that it was beyond your control?
And how do you expect others who were hurt by your words or behaviour during that time, if there were any, to view it or indeed view you now?
Did reaching some conclusion about that, or even acknowledging it to others, form any part of your own recovery and rebuilding?
Do you feel you have repaired any relationships you ‘broke’ or did others repair them for/with you? Or did they just become no longer relevant in your post MLC life?

PS and it’s ok if that feels too personal or too uncomfortable to speak about here. Bc I can imagine circumstances in which it might.

[WHY]

There are things that you won't think are pressure but they will. Like WHY telling his spouse that maybe sometime in the future they might be able to reconnect and be friends. That's pressure for someone in a MLC.

I think that’s my whole point.  How do I apply this pressure in a graceful way so that it will actually get her to do something about her D and move on?   I’m trying to get her started on her new journey but she can’t seem make any progress in the tunnel…

[OffRoad]

There are things that you won't think are pressure but they will. Like WHY telling his spouse that maybe sometime in the future they might be able to reconnect and be friends. That's pressure for someone in a MLC.

I think that’s my whole point.  How do I apply this pressure in a graceful way so that it will actually get her to do something about her D and move on?   I’m trying to get her started on her new journey but she can’t seem make any progress in the tunnel…

I know you aren't asking me, but that isn't your job. You don't get to start her on her journey or help her move in the tunnel. She has to do that on her own when she is ready and depending on how she is thinking,  anything you want her to do she might do the opposite just because she's gonna do it her OWN  way.

Pressure is pressure. When I encourage my son with his studies (even " nicely done") for him that is pressure to continue to do well. When I encouraged my D, she was proud of her work. Two people, two reactions to the same thing. I can't change how my S feels, just know that normal encouragement is pressure to him.

You can't control the situation, WHY, just yourself and how you deal with it. If you have any expectations that something you do can make someone else do what you want when they don't want to do it, it usually doesn't work that way. (Much as we'd like it to). Sometimes you just have to completely let go and let it unfold in its own time.

My 2 cents.

[midlifecrisis50]

KayDee
You talked before about being completely detached. How do you distinguish between being detached and being disassociated? Disassociation is where we purposely remove ourselves from a person or situation. We can detach on purpose as well or it can be intrusive. If it is on purpose, it takes work. My detachment was pretty instant and not on purpose, so it was intrusive.

That detachment in me came from a place of more than just an inability to be able to feel my feelings. My feelings about a lot of things changed.

I detached from “stuff” and had a need to get rid of all my stuff. The stuff that wasn’t my idea of functional made no sense to me. This wasn't just an inability to feel about the stuff but that those feelings actually changed.

If you were referring to dissociation, while that too is intrusive, the person still has an awareness of reality, that doesn’t change. That which was important to them still is even though they can’t FEEL it, they KNOW it. With detachment, that which was important is not anymore.

dissociation is “I can’t FEEL my feelings, but they didn’t change”.

A key element is that my feelings didn’t just flatten (or numb if you prefer), many of them also changed. My sense of right and wrong was very skewed. This doesn’t seem to be an element of dissociation.

Treasur
Did you hurt people who cared about you or were invested with you? I didn’t hurt anyone intentionally. And I only know that some of my behavior hurt them because they told me. I didn’t understand while in my MLC. That understanding only came to me after coming out of it, when I was able to feel, use retrospection, and empathize.

I understand from what you posted that you were probably unaware or indifferent to that if you did during your crisis years - but what about your pov on that now? So different from while I was in my MLC!

Does it matter to you? ABSOLUTELY!

Do you hold yourself accountable for that or do you feel that it was beyond your control? This isn’t so cut and dry. It’s both. I know that I had no control then, but at the same time, I recognize the hurt and damage that was caused due to my MLC. So while it “wasn’t my fault” necessarily, “I was the cause”. I accept their anger, I fully understand.

And how do you expect others who were hurt by your words or behaviour during that time to view it or indeed view you now? I have no expectations as to how they view it or me. Coming out of it, I accepted their anger, I fully understood. And I know some of them see it like me, it’s not my fault but it is my fault. If that makes sense.

Did reaching some conclusion about that, or even acknowledging it to others, form any part of your own recovery and rebuilding? I would have to say that it was due to my rebuilding first that I was able to see and acknowledge what had transpired.

Do you feel you have repaired any relationships you ‘broke’ or did others repair them for/with you? Or did they just become no longer relevant in your post MLC life? A few (friends) are no longer relevant, but those are the ones that were unhealthy. Everyone in my family is relevant today. The preMLC me is not who I am now but rather I am a combination of her and someone else (but not the MLCer). Most of my family now trusts me. I don’t know if I would word it as “repair” so much as building anew as the person I am is different. There are still a few family members that do not trust me. I get it. But I have to allow them to heal at their own pace.

sachertorte
I don’t know if you have any thoughts about where he is at. It sounds like he spiraled into self-loathing. Not being a psychologist, it seems to me that he may have some other, perhaps major, issues going on. If MLC is involved here, it seems to be combined with something else too. If it’s MLC, then he seems to still be in the thick of it. I wonder if MLC or the triggers complicated an already existent, low-profile problem.

Atari25
Did you have sleeping issues or wake up from dreams /nightmares regularly during your MLC? I didn’t have dreams (that I recall) but my sleep went haywire about 6-8 weeks prior to hitting the wall. That persisted every night until a couple of weeks after I got to Floria. Not being to go to sleep, not sleeping long enough (2-3 hours in a night), sleeping too long, and not feeling rested when I woke up. I attributed that to winter blues but clearly, something else was a brew.

Have you seen a doctor about your sleep disturbances? You really have to get a good night’s sleep, even if just a few times a week.

[xyzcf]

Did you hurt people who cared about you or were invested with you?
I didn’t hurt anyone intentionally. And I only know that some of my behavior hurt them because they told me.
I didn’t understand while in my MLC.
That understanding only came to me after coming out of it, when I was able to feel, use retrospection, and empathize.

If by learning about MLC, the LBSer is able to understand the "pathology" it may make it easier to let go and heal.

Many MLCers have also said they do not remember things that happened while they were in crisis. A "fog" so to speak.

I am of the opinion that  many do not purposely do things to hurt us. It seems counterintuitive, because the things they do hurt us immensely. And there are some perhaps who are really nasty and abusive.

My perception is they want to go, they need to go or they will die..and we are in their way, because we cannot go along for the ride. They don't feel much of anything, they have no empathy for our plight and we take that personally...how can we not?

But, placing "blame" on someone in a crisis puts us at risk of never fully accepting that what happened really was not their fault, nor ours. It would have happened regardless who they had married...that was key to me......and of course, not all MLC occurs in married people.

Thanks again for sharing your insight. I know it will be helpful to everyone who has gone this way...looking back, it was so confusing...how could this be? How could this happen? So many questions and no answers. Your insight gives us some answers.