Divorce Is ‘More Than I Can Deal With’

If my X had not ghosted me, I believe I would have tried to kill him. I am better now.

This demonstrates two terrible, traumatic truths:

1) Living with a cheater is a *5 alarm medical emergency* and
2) Living with a cheater can ruin your live in a nano second.

What if you (us) had a murder charge to contend with as well?

We can all play it cool while reading this post and eating breakfast, but remember those first moments of discovery that the person you love….does not love you at all. Mouth goes dry. Heart in your ears, pounding. Immediate diarrhea. Panic. Frantic research. Other people sound like they are shouting at you while you are in a drum. Miserable need for the cheater to care. They don’t. Calling someone 50, 60, 70 times in one hour. Repeat. Research reveals fresh steaming betrayals.

It is insanity. We don’t know if in that moment, we might pick up a gun, a knife, a brick if the Cheater does one more act of cruelty.

When people hurt you, run for your life. It is not dramatic. It is life saving advice.

As always, these extreme postings point to sad realities. Probably most chumps are currently stuck and may remain stuck. Even with the high rate of divorce, serial infidelity traps chumps. The pilot’s wife may have her own mental health issues and didn’t reference the ongoing impact to her adult children. There may be a poorly crafted pre-nup agreement in place.

For chumps who are now living lives largely separate from their cheating spouse, start with a lawyer who can advise on the implications of marital status and they will refer to a financial professional to untangle assets.

PilotsWife is obviously not okay with the situation, or she would not be here. She really needs to ask herself if living the rest of her life as she is acceptable to her. There is no way that she can live an authentic, honest and safe life where she is now. Divorce is a long and exhausting process especially in long term marriages with a lot of assets, but it can still be done.
She needs to feel safe from disease, bad decisions for the future and much more. Is it hard to make the life altering decision to leave a cheater? HELL YES!!! The benefits are great though once it is over and you can feel free of the stress of living with a cheater, being lied to and risking your health. There will be rebuilding, and life will change but it will be as safe and tranquil as you make it. For the sake of her mental and physical wellbeing she needs to make the choice to leaving the cheater before she can gain a life and get to meh.

I hope to hear that this person specifically selected complex trauma therapy — EMDR or Brainspotting. I’m no mental health providing professional, but everything about that letter screams extreme complex trauma into my untrained ears.

And spot on, CL, on all counts, as always.

Seems to me that this person is in the sort of situation where the extreme chaos has slowly become their life’s “normal”, like that old analogy of how the frog in the pot doesn’t realize they’re being boiled because the heat is rising slowly.

Divorce is really, really, really, really, really hard to go through. It’s also important to go through when it’s needed. It can be tough to find that line in some cases, but this letter is pretty over the top.

A couple thoughts. When I was going thru my most mental sanity disruption time period, when I was fighting the inevitable end, my kid asked me why I didn’t tell because he thought he could intervene and stop his father from leaving. And I said, but what would I have really been left with, if he stayed, reluctantly. I’d always be second, on defense, and do endless pick me shit to keep him home. And son, I just couldn’t. Nothing could fix this broken, even the much favored son. And my son said, yes. That’s true. This was just the reality I had to suffer through until I got through the other side. And every self esteem hot button got pushed. I’ll never be that same innocent bumpkin just minding my business in my supposedly safe world that never saw my spouse’s perfidy for what it was. I’ll never be the same. In many ways I’ve lost my spark. I really can be a genuine miserable bitch. Some days I really just don’t feel like I want to go on. But I do. And I do it freely, without the 500 lb gorilla on my back. I actually know a pilot’s wife. She lives quite well and has everything one could want. She had a great career of her own too. And happy children. But he cheated. And she kept him. And he owed her. So she wouldn’t give up her sweet surroundings because she earned it all. She’s a different generation of stoic wife and todays letter tells me she’s younger but still straddles that pilots wife mind set. Women get quick to a point once D day happens when a cost/benefit analysis gets calculated. Do I keep everything going in my now unsafe area of the world or do I go? The pilot wife I know stayed. Her FOO prob influenced her decision (left orphaned at 6 and lost both siblings by 15) But she really was pretty miserable with moments of great. She made it through the daily by doing her own thing with friends. She’s going blind now and has to wait for her spouse to drive her for everything. It’s all pretty sad. So OP, you’re prob going to stay like my friend, for whatever reasons you compromised on long ago. But can I just say that half of all that property and assets doesn’t sound so bad. You’ll have to nurse that sows ear soon enough – unless you escape.

Pilot’s wife, I think you could feel better about the complexities of property division if you talk to a divorce attorney. They can help you assess what the assets are and how they can be split. At least you HAVE assets to split and are not being held as a financial hostage. Start making changes to protect yourself. Make sure that you are a JOINT owners of all financial accounts so your access cannot be cut off. That your name is on the deed to all real estate, vehicles, etc. Make sure that you are the sole beneficiary to retirement, life insurance and investment accounts. I found out that I was not – my ex just gave me his user name and password. It was too easy for him to just change the password and block me out. I was an authorized user on credit cards and he simply removed me. Run his credit report and see what is there. If he agrees/helps with this process, splitting assets will be relatively easy. If he does not, that is a HUGE red flag. It means that his exit strategy is already in place to make it easy for him to walk away with everything. Be making contributions to 2 retirement accounts equally. Don’t put your eggs in his basket. I think you could learn a lot about him in the process, and maybe find that you can readily stand on your own 2 feet. I should have seen the sign when he refused to put my name on car titles. They were financed through his credit Union, so he simply got the title in his name when it was paid off. I asked for years that he add me and he said yes but never did. I should have taken that more seriously. You sound like you have a good career and can access help to start making these changes. I wish you the best. I sure wish I had been given this advice during the “suspecting” years.

Hopefully, she’s in a better place now, but yes, both are really messed up. Maybe this is made up, but I do some local domestic advocacy volunteer work, and I’ve heard similar, colorful stories that make my head spin. Shots fired, the affair partner moves in, the affair partner moves out, porn videos, people go to jail (or not), and the rest. I still tell them to get to a safe place and focus on your junk, period. Crazy does what crazy does, but you don’t have to participate.

In my case, sure, I thought about all kinds of revenge, but it stopped there. When I finally sat at the conference table with my attorney, I had some mixed feelings but told him, “I just need out, whatever it takes.” And he did that for me, despite a divorce that he told his associate was one of the most memorable of his career. I got out and worked on my junk and am living a new chapter.

I feel helpless and nauseous reading this. I thought I was immune but situations like this are where angels fear to tread. The merest reference to a gun immediately evokes the specter of death. Over half of domestic homicides involve firearms and access to them in situations involving domestic abuse increases the risk of not only spousal homicide but also collateral (bystander) victims.

The teeniest little hint of what might have been going on was her throwaway mention that FWs are “scary to leave.” From working with DV survivors, I’ve seen situations where victims show up injured and hysterical and describing horrific assaults, then a week later denying everything except their own reactions. In effect, they end up telling the same expurgated stories their abusers would tell. I likened it to someone showing a video of a bear attack but with the bear edited out by CGI, leaving only the footage of someone flailing and rolling around in the woods, rending their clothes and screaming hysterically for no discernible reason.

For any chump who’s ever been falsely accused of violence by a blame-shifting FW, in my experience, fakers and prevaricators never cop to any threatening gestures on their own parts so I highly doubt that the throwaway hint of “scary to leave” was an attempt to frame. I think it was more like the small print in a contract so the issuer can pretend it provided all the information.

On average it takes DV victims about seven attempts to leave before finally making a full break so the advocacy organization I worked with just wanted them to have a place to go when they were ready for subsequent attempts. We would ever-so-casually rattle off safety measures “Just in case.” It’s usually only when the danger of staying exceeds the considerable danger of leaving that victims make the final escape. Eventually I stopped getting upset when we couldn’t save them all because we managed to help so many. We never spoke contemptuously of those who did 180s because there was always the sense that we didn’t have the full story and certainly weren’t directly in the situation picking up all the unspoken cues and intuiting all the risks and dangers. When stories came out in the news of victims being killed, bystanders would often say things like, “If she’d left ten years ago, she’d still be alive.” But there was always the possibility that if she’d left ten years ago, she would have been dead ten years ago (possibly along with her kids) because of the 70-fold increased risk that a victim will be killed within two weeks of leaving.

Abuse can de-calibrate survival instincts so that victims sometimes make short-sighted choices or fatally hesitate but you have to trust that living creatures tend to be geared towards survival. Escaping violence is like defusing a complicated bomb. When the worst happens and a bomb goes off, we don’t tend to cluck over the incompetence of the bomb squad because they cut the wrong wire. We assume they were doing their best in a nearly impossible situation. Having that attitude was the only way most of us could keep functioning as advocates.

Another hint that there may have been a long history of threats and/or violence in this situation is the intensity of FW’s reported lovebombing. Batterers create situations of “mutually assured destruction” so that, even as they campaign to entrap victims, they’re also making it harder for themselves to leave because of the likelihood that their histories of demented, illegal behavior will come out once the relationship ends. Batterers are thrilled when their victims begin to react violently in turn because this gives them “dirt” to reverse victim-offender. It’s easy to see how this struggle can end up going off a cliff with everyone dead. I knew an anger management therapist who worked with convicted abusers who kept a sign on his office wall that said, “There are dead men in my Rolodex.” I didn’t know anyone still used Rolodexes but I suppose that sounded quippier than “dead men in my iphone contacts.”

Usually when abused women kill, it’s in direct self defense and I believe it’s statistically rare for victims to turn full stalker and do a Betty Broderick. I never personally encountered a situation where the victim had internalized abuse to the point of becoming dangerous in their own right without immediate provocation. According to policy, we wouldn’t have worked with someone like this and would be compelled to contact police. I’m grateful it never came to that because it would have been indirectly traumatizing and could have pushed advocates over the edge of burnout.

I’m not sure what’s happening in this story but that one little thrown-in clue (“scary to leave”) and the description of total psychic numbness/brown-out have a familiar ring. I have a suspicion that the gun wasn’t hers, that she might have been menaced with it at certain junctures, that she edited out the history of threats when she’d previously tried to leave and skipped to the lovebombing/abuser-groveling stage, that she didn’t mention a burgeoning issue with drugs and alcohol that began as an attempt to self-medicate and that if she’d gotten to the point of nearly shooting her husband that she was also a hair away from suicide. If that’s the situation, I think the best case scenario is that the new numb psychic trance allows her to wander out sideways and financially solvent after the next round of fuckery, delaying her collapse until she’s safely out. Second best is if this FW dumps her for a Schmoopie, she survives and eventually trips upon a better life without him. Worst is that someone ends up dead or in prison or that her health fails and this guy ends up with the power to pull the plug. Another possibility is that this guy is soon crippled with typical FW health problems and she ends up with a bed-ridden, de-fanged, babbling bear fading away in a dark corner while she keeps up the married charade with a bit more freedom and waits for him to croak.

No matter how this ends, it still makes you throw your hands up to the sky and ask “Why?” It could make a stone weep. I need to go hug my kids.

As your husband, this is the man who will get to make life-or-death decisions for you, if you’re incapacitated. Trust him with that? As your husband, this is a man who can rack up obscene debt and leave you with 1/2 the bill. Trust him not to do that? As your husband, this is a man who can take ALL of your money (not just the half he’d get if you actually got divorced) and never return. You trust him to leave it be?

If you decide to stay in this sham of a marriage, then AT LEAST consult an attorney on how to legally protect yourself against the above actions, and whatever other chaos he brings your way. And, move out. Do not live with this guy. You can’t trust him and apparently you can’t trust yourself around him.

You know..I was raised near the ocean in Brooklyn NY.We went to the beach every weekend. Seagulls are at the beach. When they fly over they drop bird poops. I ask myself, should I move out of their flight path to avoid all this bird crap or should I just sit here, call it rain drops and write about how awful living like this is. Some folks give up on THEMSELVES and maybe should seek another support group like
User’s who Use users. I guess that is reciprocity?

I love “not coexisting for real estate” part. I did, for that & finances for 4 years to long!!!! OP when you wake up & don’t care, that’s your sign to leave.