[UKStander]

Ha!  Very true...  And still on topic in this thread about life with the OW!   

[Absolutely Fabulous]

Snow - I too said things like that that I now regret big time!

Oh I don't regret it, not at all.  Just shows who I thought he would be a better match with.  Funny isn't it.  Maybe I already knew that we were growing apart and I wasn't the person he needed, he needed someone who would settle for very little in the standards department.  Maybe he got her after all.

\

Very well said.

[nah]

The trauma therapist I'm seeing thinks my wife was traumatized as a young child by her monster of a father, that his death triggered that buried trauma, and that she's with a narcissistic abuser reenacting that trauma in an attempt to heal the trauma. I've studied the theory and it makes sense and I saw the compulsion last summer and fall. It didn't make sense then but it does now. She's trying to make her dead father love her but she thinks she's drawn to the OM because she loves him. It's like an addiction. It makes me sad and sick at the same time.

Wow, pretty knotted psychology!  I've never seen an OP relationship described as scientifically as that, but it would make sense - it would explain why it's an addiction...  But like trying to roll a stone uphill, it's just never going to work. Agree it's very sad and sickening.  Helps me understand what might be going on in the love nest. Thanks MBIB.

Same thing with my husband.  He started slowly changing when my fil started to age rapidly (loss of memory, losing weight, general bad health), then my fil had a stoke.  Husband started cheating on me just about a month after his fathers stroke. 

My husband and fil always had a strained relationship.  My fil also left his family when my husband was in grade school.  My husband was the oldest and was expected to take care of the family.  He started working when he was 10.  My husband was a high achiever, high grades, excelled at sports, music, very mechanical, you name it he did it.  He still was never good enough.  His father would beat him at the slightest misstep.  My husband said his memories of growing up was watching milk drip off the table, b/c he would spill it everynight.  He would spill it b/c he was nervous that he was going to get hit for spilling his milk, it happened every night, a vicious cycle.

My husbands biggest fear, one he talked about endlessly was not having a good relationship with his kids.  He did not want to be like his father, he wanted his son to be his best friend.  Long story short (might already be to late for that) about a month after BD, I contacted husband b/c our son was having depression issues (he has had them in the past but BD made it really bad), I was afraid to come home to our son hanging himself.  My husband's response was, "maybe you should talk to him"!!?!!  He never called our son about it, never talked to his best friend of 40+ years who talked to our son, it was like he didn't even care.  I was shocked beyond words.  That's when I knew it was more than he "fell out of love".
 

Sorry for the rant, MBIB, I'm grateful for your posts, you seem to have a lot of knowledge on the subject.  Thank you.

[living with Hope]

I was shocked beyond words.  That's when I knew it was more than he "fell out of love".
 

I have had a few "aha" moments like that on this journey.  People think I am crazy because I still try to believe in the essence of who he was/could be.  It is more about those moments that I am stunned and realize this is bigger than he just fell out of love with me.

My friend who had her own crisis said the men she became entangled were not her soul mates, they were a distraction.  A way to keep her busy and distracted from how she ran away and missed her husband and child. She was convinced the one was her soul mate. Convinced.  Now she is embarassed by him and her involvement with him.  She has nothing to do with him at all.  She closed that door and did not return to it.  It took her months to do so. But once she did. she did.

She said she wasn't happy while she was engaging in this life. But she did have some fun moments.  She finally realized that there wasn't enough fun moments to silence the unhappiness.

Maybe hopefully, ours will get to that point sooner than later...

[patience.of.a.saint]

The trauma therapist I'm seeing thinks my wife was traumatized as a young child by her monster of a father, that his death triggered that buried trauma, and that she's with a narcissistic abuser reenacting that trauma in an attempt to heal the trauma. I've studied the theory and it makes sense and I saw the compulsion last summer and fall. It didn't make sense then but it does now. She's trying to make her dead father love her but she thinks she's drawn to the OM because she loves him. It's like an addiction. It makes me sad and sick at the same time.

This is exactly my current MLCer. He had an abusive mother and now he is with an abusive, insane OW. I have often wondered if he maybe has to be with her to reenact his childhood in order to go past it. OW is also very much like his S19's mom, in that they are the same build and have the same hair color...and even the same name.

So mine is living with a cross between his mother and an old girlfriend...both of whom he hates. I'm thinking we're going to see the explosion of that relationship at least 70 miles away. lol

I have also read that to fix this, they need Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

[MyBrainIsBroken]

MBIB, how on earth does anything to do with the EYES help with trauma?  I'm fascinated to know...

I have also read that to fix this, they need Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

UKS, be careful about encouraging me. I love to discuss what I know about this stuff but I'm not an expert, just an enthusiast.

I think the MLCer needs a complex of treatments and any one by itself may make it worse. CBT is used for treatment of trauma but I read that it's not effective up to 50% of the time. I know it didn't work for me. But I think it would be useful for the MLCer to treat other issues they usually have that are also related to childhood stress or trauma, things like passive aggressive behavior, conflict avoidance, low self esteem and accommodation / self-image issues.

EMDR and the EYES. They say the eyes are a window to the soul. I don't know if that's true but what I did learn in the neurobiology course I'm taking that I thought was very interesting is that looking into the eyes allows a doctor to directly view the brain because the retina is formed from neural tissue and is considered an extension of the brain. I don't know what that has to do with EMDR but it might be useful to keep in mind.

EMDR involves moving the eyes back and forth while trying to remember traumatic events. It was accidentally discovered that doing this allows these traumatic memories that often are not accessible using other methods to be retrieved and properly processed. They don't really know how or why it works but they believe it may simulate REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the time during which the brain is active and dreaming occurs.

I've been treated twice using EMDR. The first time was in the mid 90s for PTSD related to a car accident when we thought we were going to lose our youngest daughter. For 7 years I experienced anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and at times would wake up screaming. It was a pretty bad time. I was treated using AD meds, anti-anxiety meds, therapy including CBT, and nothing really helped. Finally, I was being treated by a Psychologist who taught at a nearby university and he said he was going to try something new that he didn't know a lot about but that they had been having a lot of success with. At that time it involved a bank of lights that would turn on and off and you would follow the lights with your eyes. It was amazing. After being treated with EMDR my problems almost completely disappeared. I would occasionally experience a little depression during October but otherwise I did well until BD 9 months ago. This time, after months of therapy didn't seem to be helping I requested a referral to a trauma specialist trained in EMDR.

So far we've only used EMDR once because so much seems to come up between sessions that it seems we spend most of each session trying to process recent activity. The one time we used EMDR was very interesting. We focused on an incident from my childhood when I almost drowned in a pond. It was only mildly bothersome but I couldn't remember much about it. I couldn't swim at the time and was in the shallow portion of the pond. I stepped in a hole and went under water. I was able to kick off, bob to the surface, yell for help, then I'd go back under. That's all I could remember.

Instead of the lights my therapist held up two fingers and moved them back and forth in front of my face. I followed them with my eyes while trying to remember the pond incident. Details slowly returned. By the time we finished I could see that the sky was blue, the sun was shining brightly, I could see the people laying on the beach, I could see my father running around the edge of the pond to get to me, and I could see my oldest brother swimming towards me and he was practically flying across the water. He was first to get to me. I could also remember them laying me on the beach and clearing the water from my lungs. The weird thing is that the bottom of the hole must have been soft because I could feel the mud squishing between my toes when I would push off. We did this at the end of the session and then I left. Another weird thing that happened was that for about the next hour memories from my past kept popping up like rapid fire, stuff totally unrelated to the pond incident. It was kind of neat at first but after a while I wished I could turn it off. It eventually faded away.

Later I talked with another of my brothers. We had never discussed this incident yet he remembered it and described it almost exactly as I had remembered it. In particular, he described our oldest brother as having practically flown across the pond. I mentioned the rapid fire memories to my therapist at the next session and she said that was normal and she suggested I get a notebook and journal those memories that pop up. I'm not sure if I could do that, though, because they were really coming fast.

And this concludes another episode of too weird not to be true. I hope I didn't take this too far off topic. If so, blame UKS, she encouraged it. 

[patience.of.a.saint]

That is fascinating stuff! I just wish there was a way an LBS could get a MLCer to try any of it. I know mine won't come up with it on his own.

[MyBrainIsBroken]

I think if there's one thing that might have an effect by itself, it's EMDR. Sometime's there's a window at the beginning where they're willing to try something. I would send them straight to a good trauma therapist. It might not ba appropriate for all of them but I suspect it would be for most.

[patience.of.a.saint]

My guy was always willing to try things I suggested, maybe not right away, but after he had time to think about it. I had to wait for the right moment though, usually after he monstered and then felt bad about it, then I could quietly suggest we try this or that.

We really had a good thing going that way, it just got so that I was overwhelmed and couldn't think straight anymore before BD. Had I known about this back then, I could've suggested it the last monster time instead of telling him I didn't know what we should do anymore. I think he gave up hope when I said that..not that we can do all their hard work for them. I guess I don't see what would be wrong with pointing them in the right direction.

[MyBrainIsBroken]

My trauma therapist must think she could do something. She's told me several times that she wishes she had my wife in her office and once she said that she was seeing the wrong person. You might find this interesting. She called their relationship an emotional kidnapping.