[Lovebystanding]

Just want to aks u  Lanzo if u think this is MLC bc i hv often wondered if my H has finally
found his soulmate....situation similar  in that I also feel his parents ...especially his father, did'nt approve of his choices wrt everything ...very controlling.

My H always wanted to please his father and since his father married a woman from my country of origin ,H did the same. So like u ,i may not be his normal type ......more wife material than  true love.

His mother passed away 17 yrs ago and his father  has alzeihmers.He is in a home since last year when this started.

So  this relationship maybe what he always wanted.The only sign that it is MLC is that OW is 21 yrs younger and at 55 says he feels young and wants to hv fun.

LBS

[Lanzo]

Hi Lovebystanding,

Yeah W is in MLC, If I’m honest I think she has gone back to a time to rebel against her parents,  W always tried to please her dad and I know he was really made up and happy for her when we got together.

When I found out about this OM I did think she had found her soul mate as he tick all the boxes she looked for in a man before she met me, however as we have looked into his background we can see he is a bit of a player, a pervy old man with a string of conquest behind him. He was sleeping with his partner and W and the same time and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were others.

I speculate now when I say he was the one that ditched W, so as I said earlier W may either chase after him or go looking for someone similar.  A funny thing was W used to try to get me to dress in a certain way, dapper looking, smart formal clothes & chunky jewellery , when I look at it now she was trying to get me to dress how OM dresses now and if you add to that I now have a shaven head I could pass for a younger version of OM.

So yes this is MLC and I think if OM was less of a dog she would be with her soul mate.


Lanzo

[Albatross]

Nigredo

An alchemical term, corresponding psychologically to the mental disorientation that typically arises in the process of assimilating unconscious contents, particularly aspects of the shadow.

Self-knowledge is an adventure that carries us unexpectedly far and deep. Even a moderately comprehensive knowledge of the shadow can cause a good deal of confusion and mental darkness, since it gives rise to personality problems which one had never remotely imagined before. For this reason alone we can understand why the alchemists called their nigredo melancholia, “a black blacker than black,” night, an affliction of the soul, confusion, etc., or, more pointedly, the “black raven.” For us the raven seems only a funny allegory, but for the medieval adept it was . . . a well-known allegory of the devil.

In the second sense, 'the nigredo of the process of individuation on the other hand is a subjectively experienced process brought about by the subject's painful, growing awareness of his shadow aspects'.[7] It could be described as a moment of maximum despair, that is a prerequisite to personal development.[8] As individuation unfolds, so 'confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible...nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia'.[9] Here is 'the darkest time, the time of despair, disillusionment, envious attacks; the time when Eros and Superego are at daggers drawn, and there seems no way forward...nigredo, the blackening'.[10]

Only subsequently would come 'an enantiodromia: the nigredo gives way to the albedo...the ever deepening descent into the unconscious suddenly becomes illumination from above'[11]

Carl Jung equated the albedo with unconscious contrasexual soul images; the anima in men and animus in women. It is a phase where insight into shadow projections are realized, and inflated ego and unneeded conceptualizations are removed from the psyche.

[Albatross]

"Often midlife is a profoundly transformational period in personal identity for both women and men. Sometimes this takes the form of the famous "crisis," but often it is not something quite so dramatic. I have come to think of it instead as a potential second birth of adult identity, the first having taken place between late adolescence and the thirtieth year. And birth is sometimes traumatic, and so one speaks of it as a "crisis" with justification. But even if not a fullblown crisis, it may signal a subtle transition in a person's sense of self and identity.
About the timing of this transformation process, one cannot be quite so precisely mathematical. Some people seem to experience this on the early end of the midlife period, and many others on the other end and in their late forties. The timing is quite variable and depends on a number of factors coalescing that bring it to a point. What happened earlier in the person's line of development out of childhood through adolescence and into adulthood is of importance in this.

[PatienceGalore]

So you mean if someone has a family history of separation then there is a likelihood if separation for the MLCer too?

[Albatross]

So you mean if someone has a family history of separation then there is a likelihood if separation for the MLCer too?

I don't quite get Your question, can You please paraphrase ?

[PatienceGalore]

What I mean is that the experiences that happens to a person when he or she is a young adolescent is something that can happen again in adulthood. For example, a person who experiences the divorce of his parents is more likely to repeat that experience if it affected them deeply and it was not taken care of at the time?

[Snowdrop]

PG  I asked the psychologist this, but it was at the end of a session, and I must remember for next week when I go.

I asked him what I need to do to help my children not follow in their father's footsteps.  H's dad left him, and I asked the psychol, why, knowing the pain it causes, would a father do it to his kids, when he must have grown up vowing to never to it to a child of his, knowing how much it hurt.

I think the psychologist guy said something like it was learned behaviour, and something he would have learned as being a coping method.  H learned to do it by knowing his dad did it.  Mind you, if you saw Hs mother, you might understand

I don't think our kids will do it as they are growing up in a nurturing environment, and have a solid mom to support them.  I hope that is how it is anyway.  Need to find out more about it.

Don't think it is a conscious thing at all.  Why would a parent who grew up with the pain of a parent leaving, do it to their own child.

[PatienceGalore]

Snowdrop the same happened here. Both my parents n H parents separated. We had vowed to NEVER do this to our children because of pain etc... But it happened n now I want to protect my children for the future. How do you ensure that?

[Albatross]

"Jung's model of typology distinguishes four psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.

    Sensation establishes what is actually present, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to possibilities as to whence it came and whither it is going in a given situation.

Though all the functions exist in every psyche, one function is invariably more consciously developed than the others, giving rise to a one-sidedness that often leads to neurosis.

    The more [a man] identifies with one function, the more he invests it with libido, and the more he withdraws libido from the other functions. They can tolerate being deprived of libido for even quite long periods, but in the end they will react. Being drained of libido, they gradually sink below the threshold of consciousness, lose their associative connection with it, and finally lapse into the unconscious. This is a regressive development, a reversion to the infantile and finally to the archaic level. . . . [which] brings about a dissociation of the personality"