I’m glad that your conclusion was that, whatever is going on with him, safeguarding you and your kids from the effects of it as much as you can is the only sensible path. I remember at one point when my former h was doing a lot of confused wailing about his lot with pleas for me ‘not to give up on him’ (and before he vanished into his new life with ow) a friend of mine said that it reminded her of dealing with an alcoholic. (From her own experience some decades earlier with her own husband - remarkably he and they survived it, he got sober, but it wrecked their lives, business and finances at the time) She said she still remembered the feeling of helplessness and anger and sadness all mixed up together when they had these kinds of conversations even looking back thirty years later.
She was the person who shared The Narcissist’s Prayer with me as a way of helping me understand the mindset I was dealing with….and who lovingly challenged me about the reality of what I could influence and not.
The Narcissist's PrayerThat didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
I suspect you can see much of his bit of that conversation mirrored in this. And, unless you just didn’t mention it, not much of the conversation, if any, was about you or your children’s’ needs, wants or feelings.
I’m not a fan as you probably know of rushing to label people. And I don’t think you have to even hate people who act in these ways, even when they have caused you huge damage, well once your own internal dust settles a bit lol. But I think it is helpful to be as clear-eyed as you can be about the current apparent reality of what one is dealing with. It may not always be so, but if it quacks like a duck today, you deal with it like a duck. If that changes in future, cautiously, you can change your approach accordingly.
For reasons that are beyond my ability to précis, these MLC-type spouses do seem to share some common characteristics once the lid blows off. A lens that is overly fixated on themselves. A desire to be understood and supported that is a bit of a one way street. Olympic level DARVO skills. Feelings as facts. Highly emotionally reactive. Inconsistent follow through from words to actions. Avoidant. Poor self-regulation. Teenage-like immaturity. A weird kind of codependency with their spouse that comes out as sadz or rage usually, or indeed is transferred to their new ‘twu lurve’, but seems unable to know where they end and others begin.
How can that not be a sad thing to witness in someone you care about? How can their refusal to stop causing damage and inconsistent actions not cause you to feel angry and frustrated? How can anyone rescue or protect someone from the pretty predictable effects of their own chosen actions? And how can all of that not create some not so pretty and rather confusing and mixed emotions in us?
Listening to my friend talk about her experience when her h was drinking - and it was a remarkably generous gift that she did bc it was not easy for her to do so, to revisit the worst time of her life - she sounded as if the path forward for her was much the same as most of us experience here. She stood, trying to keep their business, their home and their young children afloat single-handed for a few years while he crashed around and burned pretty much everything to the ground. She kept trying to fix it/him and support him and encourage him…..until she reached her own point of ‘enough’. Which rather surprised both him and her from the sound of it. She was forced into selling the remnants of their once very successful business and their big swanky house to avoid bankruptcy, filed for divorce and sole custody, and stopped talking to him.
It was a very vivid memory for her….visiting him in a rehab place and telling him that this was what she was doing next. I think we all have our own ‘enough’ lines and we know when we hit them. For her, it was getting a call from her girl’s boarding school - bc she had been forced by circumstance to send her girls away to school while she tried to keep the business afloat and believed that would protect them from the crazy chaos - anyway, the call was that her oldest girl, then about 9 I think, had started cutting and tried to kill herself. That was my friend’s line in the sand. The point where she said she really accepted in her bones the limitations of what she could do about her h and the real need to change how she was dealing with it. Awful, right? Just awful. Interestingly - and perhaps unsurprisingly - her h got sober about a year later as I recall. She said that it was as if he didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that she would do what she said she would do and leave him to deal with his own mess. And just as for most of us, it all left a scar….nothing could be entirely the same after it.
We knew them as a couple and a family decades after all of this. We knew them for about 10 years, and only knew him sober. We never knew the history of it until she shared it with me post-BD. He was not a bad person, we liked him and her both. Was their repaired marriage perfect? Probably not, but it seemed pretty good from what I could see. He was given to a kind of introverted depression where he’d disappear a bit for short periods, and then medicate seemingly with a new project….building a house or taking up sailing or renovating a mobile home or a trip somewhere. She continued to be the primary breadwinner and probably over-functioned a bit occasionally as the emotional core of their family. The girls had a few blips as young adults….one struggled with anorexia for a few years and drank a bit too much, but recovered; the other struggled academically and socially as a teenager, probably a bit given to depression, but blossomed in her early 20s once she found a career path that suited her. Today, looking from the outside, they look like a solid successful family and a good marital partnership that mostly works for them. But 30 odd years ago, that wasn’t how it was. And none of today would have been possible if Tim had not stopped drinking and changed a lot of his lens on life. And stuck with it. I rather admire him for that tbh…I admire them both. But it could have easily led to a different path forward for all of them, maybe better, maybe worse, but definitely different.
But the turning point, listening to my dear friend, was her reaching her own ‘enough’ line where she could see in big flashing letters the real limit of what she could do about her h’s alcoholism and all that came from it. Both of them were rather courageous I think….but it started with her courageously deciding to step onto a different path and leave him behind to figure out what to do with his own. They couldn’t meet in the middle until they had both created some kind of middle to meet in if that makes sense.
I was/am very grateful that my friend shared that part of her story with me bc it helped me to be a bit more realistic about my own limitations. And to call a duck a duck, at least in my own head. Imho life - and crises - are in reality a series of small left or right hand turns that unfold a path that we can’t always see at the time. And they are not always directly in our hands alone, are they? Easier to see looking backwards perhaps. The best that any of us can probably do is create a direction of travel that focuses on what matters most to us and is in accord with who we want to be as a human. But we can’t create that for someone else or tidy up their path for them, can we? Much as we sometimes might wish we could lol.
You do you, my friend, the best you are able. And trust your own instincts about your own path forward. Just as you are doing. Let your h - or xh if that is what he becomes - figure out his own path forward for himself. And let time and events tell if those paths intersect again in a way that feels healthy and ok. If the duck stops quacking like the Narcissist’s Prayer, you’ll know
…..if the duck keeps sounding like a duck, it’s ok too to decide that there’s not much you can usefully do with the quacking
Radical Acceptance is the New Black
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