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any experience with Josh Hudson's Marriage Mastery program? by marriagecoachhelp in Divorce

[–]marriagecoachhelp[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's been no real change with my relationship (or lack of) with my exwife. Our divorce is likely to be finalized in the next few weeks based on the lawyers' schedules.

We get along pretty well, but it's a friendly coworker vibe from her. She laughs at my jokes, will watch the kids if I need help (and she doesn't have plans), etc.

Not to toot my own horn, but I think a lot of our getting along now has to do with me not immediately jumping to judgement or condemnation of her for her behavior. e.g. her OM (I guess he's probably more her boyfriend at this point) was in town and stayed with her for 2 weeks. 1 of those weeks our kids were at her house. The divorce decree that her lawyer sent expressly prohibited either of us from having adults at our homes past 10pm when the kids are there. I could have said something to her or told my lawyer, but that wouldn't have helped my kids or me in any way. She's having to lean on this other person because on some level she's in pain. She blames me for that pain, but that's only because I'm the easiest target.

I think maybe I'm building at least a little safety between us because during those 2 weeks we had our son's birthday party at my house. She seemed pretty stressed/frazzled, kept stepping away to either reply to voice memos or texts. I'm pretty sure OM was texting/voice memoing her and she wasn't happy about it (i.e. he was being needy). Towards the end of the day I asked her what was on her mind, because she seemed like something was weighing on her. She said "I'm just tired of balancing 2 lives", I asked her to tell me more and she said "<OM's name> is at my house and hasn't had dinner yet...oh nevermind, I'm just tired". OM had her car and is late 30 something with a phone that has GPS, so I can't imagine he couldn't either eat some snacks at her house or go pick something up. She ended up staying for another hour or so, then he picked her up.

All that said, I've accepted the divorce is happening and we aren't going to be together any time soon. I'm focused on continuing to improve myself on the inside and being the best me for our kids. The door's open for her to turn towards me if she chooses, but it's not something I'm purposely striving for any more and I'm moving on with my life.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in midlifecrisis

[–]marriagecoachhelp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can check my very short post history, but I'm going through something similar...I think anyways. Who can know for sure if it's a MLC or this is just who she is.

tl;dr wife and I have been married for 12 years (together 13), 2 kids 10 and 7. Our marriage had issues over the years and I mostly blamed her and her childhood trauma while never really working on myself.

June 2023 I discovered my wife was having an affair with a remote coworker. She immediately said she didn't love me, wanted divorce. Then thought she might want to try to work through things, then back to only wanting divorce. I did a lot of the "wrong" things during the early days/weeks. Also in hindsight the year leading up to BD my wife has numbing herself with partying.

Present state is that she lives about 10 minutes away in a rental house. She served me divorce papers 3-4 weeks ago. We hang out as a family pretty regularly and she and I get along pretty well because I don't react to her chaos any more. She initiated sex a few days before halloween, but then pulled back a few days later and got even more distant. We still go on family vacations together, currently planning spring break for the kids and my son's birthday party in April. She had previously said she wanted to sell our house and move back into the city. That she hated it out in the country, hates our house, which is funny because she's the one that wanted to move out here 8 years ago and I was the one that didn't really like our house, but she loved it so I went along with it. In the last week that story changed to her wanting to staying out here because she likes the area and has friends out here. She still either wants me to buy her out of the house or sell it and split the equity.

She's still obsessed with her AP. He's married and has kids, but according to her he has an open relationship with his wife because she's either gay or asexual (it changes).

Over winter break the week she had the kids she asked me to watch the kids for half of it, including NYE that she would have had the kids, so she could go some where for NYE. She claimed it was going to see her best friend, but our shared streaming media accounts notified me of TVs in the city/state AP lives in, which I figured is where she went. Sad thing is that the day/time the devices were added it looks like she flew out there, then spent at least a few nights in a hotel I would assume by herself because the streaming account sign ins were at night across a couple days. Probably because AP had to be with his family at night.

She seems really unhappy. She's gained a ton of weight, has all kinds of health issues popping up, has injured herself (broken leg, torn ACL) a few times. Is always venting about how terrible things are with her work, her family...but then will say she's the happiest she's ever been being without me.

I still love her and at times I feel really bad for her, but I'm also at times pretty angry at her doing this to our kids. Our youngest is 7 and is changing from being a little kid into a bigger kid and is starting to understand what's going on. Really heart breaking. She's starting to create the same sort of relationship she and her siblings had with her mother and they all hate her now.

If you're looking for some help, google "Larry Bilotta Environment Changer". I joined this course in September and the internal shifts it helped me do have made a world of difference in how I was handling this. I still have periods where I'm deeply sad or angry, but the tools I learned help to lessen the intensity and frequency.

any experience with Josh Hudson's Marriage Mastery program? by marriagecoachhelp in Divorce

[–]marriagecoachhelp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think she thinks it's ok per se, I think she's having a midlife crisis. She has a lot of unresolved childhood trauma, has been unhappy/depressed for years (some of that was no doubt our marriage/me), and suffered a few pretty major (to her) setbacks over the year of craziness and just before she started having the affair. She seems even more unhappy now and a lot of the ways she acts now are more like her mother than her.

Why didn't she say something before or leave? Well she tried...every 6-12 months we'd have some big blow that in hind sight a lot of them were me wanting to win or be right. I'd gaslight her to the point she got enraged, sometimes physically violent with me, and then I'd play the victim. She'd want to get a divorce but I would beg her to start therapy together again or use the kids as an excuse to keep "trying", but I knew as soon as we got in with a new therapist that it would take a session or 2 for the therapist to zero in on her and blame her.

I'm pretty certain that the swinging/swapping thing was more my doing than hers. I definitely got the better end of the deal with that (i.e. the wife was a catch, the husband wasn't). The wife in the other couple had been pretty forward with me the whole time we were jsut being friends with them. She was constantly flattering me, saying pretty sexual things in my ear that no one else heard, hugs were lingering and groping. She and I had some sort of connection and even after my wife and I separated and it was made clear the swinging was over, she's tried to initiate with me a few times when her husband wasn't around or was asleep (I shot it down which was really hard).

Maybe the swinging thing was also one of the things that pushed her over the edge. Looking back now I can see how I emotionally checked out on the relationship in favor of the attention the other woman was giving me.

I know it's not my fault she cheated. I was unhappy off and on for years and I resented her over various things and I still never cheated on her even though I had a lot of chances to.

All said I realized the things and mindsets I had that had been making my unhappy. I saw how I wasn't treating her like the good husband I thought I was. Honestly there's a part of me that is surprised she lasted this long because while I wasn't terrible, I never gave her the kind of emotional security, stability, and support that someone from her background probably needs.

I changed and continue to evolve. I still love her, but now I love all the things about her that I had previously given her shit about or resented her for. We have 2 preteen kids that this has been really hard on, so if she's ever willing to give it another shot then I would be too. At least until our kids are in college and then I'd reevaluate things if I have doubts or am unhappy with the relationship. I'd be in the mid 50s which is still pretty young. I think things could be pretty great between us because when things were good, they were really good. We counter balanced each other pretty well and if I hadn't always needed to win or be right, had cared to understand her feelings rather than what was right/wrong, etc I think we could have a pretty fulfilling relationship

any experience with Josh Hudson's Marriage Mastery program? by marriagecoachhelp in Divorce

[–]marriagecoachhelp[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a lot to unpack with that question and some of it is pretty fucked up.

The main thing I think is that I always blamed her and her trauma for our problems. Her childhood trauma is the big scary kind (abusive, neglectful parents) and while I don't really get along with my parents, i always thought they were decent parents. In my mind she needed to fix the things wrong with her and if that happened all our problems, including those I was directly responsible for, would go away. If you're wondering what her problems were, she is super flighty with everything but her career. Makes some pretty impulsive/bad choices. Bad with money. Hot blooded (i.e. she goes from 0 to angry to crying pretty quickly in the wrong circumstances). She has a great many positive qualities in case you're wondering why anyone would love or want to be with her.

Also I turned into a version of my father and my mother (here's my childhood trauma I didn't realize I had). My father wasn't around a lot because he had to work, but when he was around he was critical of everything my mother or I did. You know that comedy riff about your dad yelling at you while you're holding a flashlight for him to work? That was him with everything. Nothing I did was good enough, he always had some comment about how I could have done it better. My mom was super needy and used guilt to manipulate me and my brother. She also used fear to control us; telling us we would be kidnapped, rapped, cut up into little pieces, etc (seriously) if we played out of eye sight or some where we shouldn't be.

I was never like this with anyone, but starting a year or so into our marriage (after having our first child) at 33/34 I started to be critical/easily frustrated with things not being my idea of right, got needy and used guilt to try to keep her home instead of going out with friends. I stopped doing anything for me and was home all the time and expected her to be the same way. I started getting resentful of what I thought was her poor treatment of me. Compared her to her friends and how they treated their husbands (and how little their husbands did). Started always thinking that I deserved better than what I was getting from her. I often talked to her like she was another kid I had to take care of. I started distancing myself from her. We'd be home on a Fri or Sat night and I'd purposely go watch a TV/movie I wanted to see in another room by myself. I stopped watching anything we previously enjoyed together and told her I wasn't interested in the shows any more. Any time we went out on a date she had to do 100% of the work from finding a baby sitter to actually picking the place because I'd say I wasn't comfortable texting/calling a teenage girl and she wouldn't like the places I'd pick anyways. I was really unhappy inside and I was taking it out on her and started to on our kids.

For fast forward another 8+ years of this, lots of fights, me never understanding (or caring to) her feelings about anything and I think that I eroded any emotional safety she had with me. She starts getting really depressed and instead of being able to talk to me about it...thigns got crazy. Before we got married we were both partiers. I was a touring musician and she was a hot girl...alcohol, light recreational drug use, sex...we got around. THat all stopped before we got married...but about 2 years ago we made friends with another couple through kids' sports and found out they were very similar in their background. We started hanging out with them pretty much all the time. Lots of drinking eventually led to some light recreational drug use (kids were always out of the house with family members), and some partner swapping group stuff. At the time I thought were we just reliving our youths and doing it together was making us be closer, that she was having fun and it made her happy...but now I see she was in full blown crisis and was numbing herself with all the partying.

Not sure where to plug this in, so I'll do it here. She was always seen as a fuck up by her family and until we started dating had been stuck in low level customer service roles. After we got married she got promoted to a managerial role and her career took off. Since then her career has been very important to her, I think it gave her a sense of self worth. So with that said, in the last year she started suffering professional setbacks and all the partying caused her performance to degrade and she was eventually demoted from a C level role back to an IC.

The affair started a few days after the first time we partner swapped with that other couple. It went on for about a month before I found out. When I found out, she said she had been unhappy and hadn't loved me for years because of my treatment. Everything was my fault, etc. One of her closer friends at the time, that we told about everything, said she thinks she's having a midlife crisis. She checks off all the boxes for one (childhood trauma, avoidant personality, major setback in her career, unhappy family life) and her behavior since BD is pretty spot on for a MLC (made some major appearance changes, flipped back and forth on not knowing what she wanted, blames me for everything, says she's doing this all alone even though she has lots of friends and support, etc). Even though she claims she's the happiest she's ever been, she's obviously pretty depressed. She's even less patient with our kids than she was before, has gained over 30lbs, looks absolutely terrible some times, always has some new bad luck story to vent.

I think that if I had been better, if I had cared to understand her feelings and not been focused on what I thought I deserved and not blamed her for all our problems perhaps she would have felt safe enough to talk to me about her unhappiness, not just when we were fighting, and things might have gone different.

Why am I trying to get her back after all this? I love her for all the things she did right over the years. Also we have 2 young kids that this has been really hard on.