June 25, 2024 • 49 mins
Hello Fellow Travelers, this week a man who ended his marriage to be with the love of his life wonders if that makes him a bad person. We talk to Mike about coming to terms with his decisions by seeing things from the perspective of others.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist advice column for The Atlantic. And I'm Guy Wench.
I wrote Emotional First Aid, and I write the Dear
Guy column for Ted. And this is Dear Therapists. This week,
a man who left his wife for the love of
his life wonders if that makes him a bad person.
(00:27):
I mean, I did leave my wife for another woman,
but the rumors that were about were as nasty it
can be and set the timeline very differently than what
reality was. Listen in and maybe learn something about yourself
in the process. Dear Therapists is for informational purposes only,
does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute
for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the
(00:51):
advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other qualified
health provider with any questions you may have regarding a
medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to
let I help media use it in potter and full
and we may edit it for length and of clarity.
Hey Guy, Hi, LORI, so I want to read you
this week's letter dear therapists. I'm a thirty two year
(01:15):
old father to two young daughters who realized too late
that I was not fundamentally in love with my wife.
We started dating in college, and our naive te led
us to marry young. We both got along by not
rocking the boat and decided to have kids. Well we
had our first daughter, Fatherhood engulfed me and I had
never been a part of something so important. However, I
didn't feel at all connected to my wife. I love
(01:38):
my daughter, but I felt like I was alone in
this endeavor. Two years ago, my existence was lit a
fire by another woman, a coworker, to make it more complicated,
and as we continued to seek out time to interact,
we started sharing ourselves with each other in a way
that we had never done with our spouses. Our existence
was made complete by each other and we couldn't go
(01:58):
back to what it was for Fairly recently, we both
broke down and ended our marriages in a storm of shock, tears, anger, hatred,
and sadness. My wife couldn't understand because she never really
understood me. We acknowledged our marriage felt broken, but she
expected us to try to fix it because of the
commitment we had made. I am now locked in a
(02:19):
bitter custody battle as a fight for my right to
continue to be the father to my daughters. I am
sympathetic to the position I put my ex wife in,
but I can't imagine that the cost of my fatherhood
has to be staying in a marriage that I know
was not going to give me the fulfilling existence that
I can now have with this other woman. My life
is over as I knew it. The world around me
(02:40):
doesn't seem to accept my decision. My friends have abandoned me,
my coworkers think I'm a scumbag, and my wife seems
to be trying to poison everyone against me. I didn't
think I was making a selfish decision by doing this,
but the world around me is doing a good job
of convincing me that I am all of the terrible
things they say I am. I guess I just don't
know how to think anymore about myself or the people
(03:02):
around me. Thanks Mike. Wow, So this is a please
tell me I'm not a scumbag letter? And what's interesting
to me In the letters Mike is so articulate about
his perspective and his feelings and his point of view.
You really get a sense of how he feels about things.
It's rich, and then on the other side, you get
(03:26):
very unrich descriptions of what his wife experience is and
even what his girlfriend's experience is. And though he pays
some lip service to yes, my wife expected this or
felt this, you don't get a sense that he really
understands what his wife experiences or perhaps what his girlfriends
(03:50):
is currently either right, you said, it was like a
please tell me I'm not a scumbag letter to me,
it's I need to get out of jail letter to
where he's portraying his existence as if he was in
jail this whole time, and I understand the experience of
feeling trapped to feeling like you're unfulfilled, but he doesn't
(04:11):
take any responsibility for why he might have felt that
way because of some role that he might have had
in this. And so it's kind of like I was
in jail when I was married to my wife, and
then this new woman. We complete each other, and yet
he's more miserable than exactly they both left their marriages.
He doesn't really tell us was it hard for her?
(04:33):
I don't hear both of us are going through this
and we're really struggling with this. It's I'm going through
this and your wife has now been left for this
other woman. It's humiliating. You didn't have any interest in
trying to see what went wrong in your marriage because
she said, I want to try to fix it. Maybe
you don't want to, but but could you at least
(04:54):
have those conversations so that there's some kind of different
ending to that marriage. Which he wants us to assuage
his guilt and say, no, you're not selfish, rather than
him wanting to look inside and say, is there a
piece of me that is selfish? And if we can
get him to see that piece of himself, maybe he'll
(05:16):
have more compassion for the people around him. There's another
aspect to this that I wanted to point out, and
that there's a lot of passivity that comes through the
whole flavor of the letter is like, all this stuff
happened to me. We are all human, We can all
make mistakes. He fell in love. That part happens. But
what concerns me in these situations is that by not
(05:39):
taking responsibility, you're feeling like a victim. Right he wants
to abdicate his responsibility by having us say no, no, no, no,
what you did that was perfectly fine. And it's not
so much what he did, it's the way in which
he did it. Yes, And I wonder whether he feels
guilt or he just feels the negative perception of the
(05:59):
people around him, because what we know from guilt, the
research is often shows that it really prevents people from
enjoying life and sometimes even causes them to self punish.
It's called a dobby effect, based on the elf in
the Harry Potter books that you know used to smack
his head against the wall and go bad Dobe and
(06:19):
and so there's this real phenomena that when you actually
feel guilty and you're not dealing with it, you can
somehow unconsciously take away the pleasure and enjoyment that you
might have from life. You're listening to Deal Therapists from
my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a quick break.
(06:54):
This is dear Therapists. Thanks for listening. Well, let's see
what he has to say. Absolutely, let's do like very
good to meet you. So, first of all, tell us
a little bit about where things stand right now in
terms of your kids, how they're doing, whether you're seeing them, yeah, um,
(07:17):
so how they're doing. I was like, I think, if
nothing else, I felt like me and my accident done
a pretty good job of kind of shielding them from
some of this drama. Just like not let them be
a part of any of the drama's going down, and
try not to let them see many a lot of
my negative motions throughout the last couple of months. How
old are the girls young? Um? Just over three and
(07:39):
one and a half. What has your time been like
with the girls since you guys split up? First split,
we went through the mediation process, and then after we
had filed that mediation agreement ready for our court date,
some pretty nasty rumors got to my ex and it
sent her off a deep end. Were the rumors no, no, no,
(08:01):
no no. There are aspects to the story where I mean,
I did leave my wife for another woman, but the
rumors that were about where as nasty as can be
and kind of like set the timeline very differently than
what reality was. Me and my girlfriend now we worked together,
so that created some serious drama that's at work. Were
(08:22):
you able to clear up the rumors with your ex
wife to this day? Just she understand that what she
heard is not accurate, not that I know of. We
really haven't had a good I would call a productive
conversation for a year, Like the last one really was
about a year ago. I was around it was around
this time last year that, UM, things kind of blew up.
(08:46):
What was your communication like with your wife when you
were married? Um, very surface level. I would say, one
of the issues is that we didn't share a whole
lot of emotions with each other. Do you know why
you didn't share your emotions with your wife when you
were married? I guess I would say they didn't really
feel safe. Like the handful of times I went trying
(09:09):
to go a little deeper, it didn't feel like it
was supportive place to bring them up. I thought. I
just was always worried about how it's going to change
how she thought of me. So like a couple of
times I brought up what were some of my darker things? Um,
it was like almost like pushed aside, like don't burden
me with that kind of thing? Which he used those
(09:30):
words or what how did you get the impression? But
it was met with a lot of just kind of
like no, I would say, silence, but not necessarily like
intentionally negative silence, more just like she didn't know what
to say to me silence, And what about the actual relationship?
Were you able to talk with her about your dissatisfactions
with it or the fact that it wasn't what you
(09:51):
wanted it to be. Have you made efforts in that regard?
I would? I can think of like two or three
times a few years ago were like I was telling
her what was bothering me? And she snapped and said,
stop telling me what I'm doing wrong? Remember, like being
taken aback, but thinking like that's not what I was
(10:13):
doing necessarily. But it definitely felt like she didn't want
to have that conversation about like how we could be
doing differently. So I tried once or twice. I wouldn't
say I tried very hard. It felt easier just to
like live the circus level life that we had been
kind of like living and making dinner, not saying much,
put on a show, going to bed, without much conversation.
(10:34):
It wasn't particularly negative, it just wasn't super positive. What
do you think would have happened if you had said
to her, I'm not saying that you're doing something wrong.
I want to talk about something that's going on with us.
I don't know at this point. It only behind sight.
But well, the reason it's not hindsight is that you're
going into a new relationship and there's something to be
(10:58):
learned about what didn't in another relationship. At least you're
part of it. Yeah, okay, I hear that, And I'm
just wondering, you know, why do you think you did
not pursue it given how desperately alone and unhappy you felt.
One of the things I've really been struggling with. I
(11:18):
didn't necessarily know what I didn't have until I had
it with somebody else. So like my existence wasn't super
negative in a certain way. Like it wasn't like I
went home every day miserable of trying to avoid my wife.
I didn't have a partnership that I've always felt like
should have been there. So when I found it somewhere else,
it was like, oh man, this is it was a
(11:38):
so eye opening. It felt like I fell in love
with someone else, and that's why I fell out of
love with my wife. And I do struggle with wondering
what could have happened if I had tried harder or
tried differently. It's definitely something I like get pretty down
to myself about wondering what I could have done differently
to make the situation better for me and my ex
(11:59):
rather than just finding it somewhere else. Are the other
areas in your life in which you kind of feel
unsatisfied but you really struggle to know how to make
things better or to take the initiative because you seem
to say, Okay, I settled. Do you do that in
other areas of your life? Yeah, I guess so. So
(12:20):
like in my career, I am a classroom teacher. I
don't have aspirations to do much more with it. I
don't want to be administrator, I don't want to be
a principle. So it's not like I'm not unsatisfied, but
I'm also not striving to do anything more with it.
I think that in a certain way, that's kind of
how I've thought about the marriage. At first. Something about
the tooth seemed similar to me, like where I just
(12:42):
sudently found myself going with what I had rather than
thinking about how I wanted to change it. And do
you do that in other relationships and friendships except what
there is and go with it rather than change it.
I guess. So will you say all your friends have
turned the games? Yeah, I might have lost lots of friendships.
Like my best man in my wedding send September. We
(13:02):
spent a few months not talking. We got back in touch.
We were just talking about random stuff like communist ress, soccer,
and throughout some of my more negative times of feeling
very down and feeling just like really depressed about not
having a custody of my kids. He just wasn't a
supportive even though he was willing to talk about soccer
(13:23):
with me, he wasn't a supportive person. He didn't he
didn't try to care about how I was feeling or
why I was feeling it. It definitely felt like he
thought it was more like, well, you made your decisions,
so live with them kind of thing. And even though
he was willing to be my friend, I think I'm
choosing not to be a part of that friendship more
than anything. But have you said to him, for example, like, dude,
(13:44):
you with my best man, we didn't need to deal
something it right now? Did you talk to him about
the friendship and fightful it? I just tried to start
a few conversations and each one was met with um
some derision on his part of like white, can't you
just let it go? And I said, like, you're my
best friend. I've never been in a doctor place that
I am right now, and it wasn't met with compassion
(14:06):
that I would have thought the friendship would have carried
with it. You know what strikes me about that friendship
and also your first marriage when you were feeling really
unhappy and unsatisfied, is that I think what the other
people didn't hear was I understand where you're coming from too,
And so with your friend, he probably had a lot
(14:29):
of feelings, maybe based on rumor or maybe based on
what actually happened earlier in our conversation, you said, I
feel a lot of guilt around how I handled things.
And I don't know if you've ever really said that
to your wife about I understand that I didn't handle
certain things really well, but maybe you didn't feel like
(14:50):
there was space for that or that it would be
met with more blame. But I don't know that your
that your ex heard that, and I don't know that
your friends have heard that either. It sounds like you
were saying to your friend, I'm in a really dark place.
I'm really struggling, And I think what your friend might
have been hearing was I left my wife, I left
my kids and with the love of my life, and
(15:11):
I'm a victim, right And maybe that isn't the place
that your friend could meet you. Maybe your friend could
meet you in a place of I know this is
really complicated. I know that you might not have a
lot of sympathy from me right now. I know that
I did a lot of things wrong and I didn't
handle them well, and and I can understand why you
(15:36):
might have the feelings that you have about me. And
at the same time, maybe we could have a more
nuanced conversation about how complicated the situation was. And here's
what I'm willing to take responsibility for. And also here's
where I'm struggling. I think that might be part of
the reason that people aren't able to have the compassion
(15:56):
for you that you do deserve. Interesting, so that definitely
sits well. Something I realized is that, like, uh, unless
like perspective taking is not my natural instinct. So I
do know that, and I think I don't think I
tried hard enough to figure out where he was. I
(16:17):
have apologized or tried to apologize more than once to
my ex and really tried to be as sincere as
possible at different times, just like, I'm so sorry for
this and for what happened, and for what this brought
to your life as well. But so there's a butt
there already. I'm so sorry that I ruined your life.
But right so, I think you hit it on the
(16:38):
head right there when you said perspective taking is a
little bit of a challenge for you. I wonder right
now you could tell us the story of what happened
solely from the perspective of what your ex wife's experience
might have been and what it might still be without
making you a terrible person. Where the actions and then
(17:00):
there's who the person is. And I think that sometimes
what gets in the way perspective taking for people is
when they feel like if they take the other person's perspective,
it's going to make them seem like they are inherently
a bad person, as opposed to I did some things
that were bad. So could you tell us the story
from your ex wife's perspective, tell us what the marriage
(17:23):
was like for her. Just before you do, Mike, just
one thing to keep in mind. This is a real
exercise for you because perspective taking is something you can improve,
and so it's difficult, but you actually have to put
yourself in her shoes and imagine it, and then from
that place, try and describe what you're seeing and feeling.
(17:44):
Start with first person, her first person. So I got
married to Mike. Okay, So I got married to Mike
after whirlwind courtship in college. He was my first ever boyfriend,
(18:05):
the first relationship I had really had outside of my family.
What did you love about him? It's okay to cry.
Um Uh, Mike's not sure how to answer that, but
Mike's going to try. I. Um, let's give your your
(18:26):
exit name. What's her name, Elizabeth? Okay, so we're talking
to Elizabeth. Elizabeth. What did you love about Mike? He
was fun. He was different than other people who had
been around and surrounded myself with. Had more of a
more whimsy, more of a way to bring humor to
(18:46):
the situation. He loved me, was very committed and into me,
and gave me a lot of attention, kind of like
made the relationship seemed to be the most important thing
in either of our lives. You said it was a
whirlwind courtship. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I
mean the first night we hung out together. I can
(19:08):
remember just like feeling so free and just like walked
down the middle of the street on the way back
for the bars with him. I had been talking to
my friend while at the bar and and she knew
I liked Mike. So when I got in to the
apartment after he kissed me good night, it was like
a really special thing and it's very exciting, just like
(19:31):
from kind of that point on the next night we
hung out and pretty much most nights after that. How
did Mike propose? Um? Stupidly? You gotta He proposed in
the park a lot of coals when we were buying
a vacuum for our first apartment. Did you have a ring?
He did have a ring. It was a family ring.
(19:53):
Mike doesn't find a whole lot of value in expensive
jewelry and really appreciated not having This been a full
paychecks on something, But there was a family ring that
I knew with meaningful to me. It was meaningful to
my mom, so he thought it would be meaningful to me.
Did you find the proposal romantic or did you feel
like it feel like it wasn't really thought out. I
(20:14):
was really excited on hind site. As I thought more
about it in the story, I think I would have
rather would have liked a better story to tell. But
but in the moment it was it felt very him.
Did you say that to Mike that there might be
an opportunity for him too improve on that you mean
(20:38):
to prop a birthday make a romantic I never did,
though I would have thought that he would have taken
away that from other things I had said and other
things I showed out value. What were some of the
things you communicated to him that would have maybe helped
him to see that you liked a little more thought
(21:00):
to go into some of these romantic gestures. I'm not
sure I could have said much. He's pretty stubborn and
opinions he has. How did you try to communicate to him?
I wouldn't say I tried super hard, but but Mike's
very perceptive. He thinks and took away from just other
(21:20):
things I that he knew I would have valued, just
you know, talking finally about other people's stories of romanticism.
And yes, Mike probably thought I valued that. So looking
back now, when did you feel first even if you
didn't realize it at the time that Mike was beginning
(21:42):
to drift emotionally away from you. It wasn't very long
after our first daughter was born. I could tell how
much he was into being a father and how connected
he was to our daughter. And I could tell it
didn't trans late to me in the same way that
(22:02):
there wasn't a connection between us because of her, that
it almost felt like it was separate. And I guess
I'll pause in a way and to say, like, that's
what I feel happened. So we want to stop you there.
I'll tell you why, because we really want to keep
you in her perspective, and I think that any time
you leave her perspective, you're going to lose the important
(22:24):
part of this exercise. Okay, Elizabeth, When you were pregnant,
how connected did you guys feel? Were you both really
excited about having a child together. What was the pregnancy
like for you? Yeah, we were very excited. He made
Every Sunday, we took pictures and he made a stop
(22:44):
motion video of my value getting larger, and then we
set above a crane to come down from the balcony
and he wrote a song and sang a song to
video and so every Sunday would take these you know,
have a many pictures to create the time lapse, and
(23:05):
so it was something we were both very excited about.
So it sounds like at that stage you were still
thinking that you were included in that in some way,
and yet then after your daughter was born, you start
to realize that actually it's more directed towards her and
not towards you. What did that feel like? That must
(23:27):
have been painful. Probably, I think it was easy to
not look it directly in the face because of how
my just my own excitement and taking care of a
young child put a lot of my energy into that
and put a lot of pressure on myself to do
everything right as a mother, and I think that took
away some of my attention to my feelings about my
(23:51):
relationship with Mike. And yet there must have been moments
where where you felt it. Yeah, yeah, there were there were, yeah.
Specific We asked one of my cousins who I'm close with,
were the same age if he also felt lonely, because
I was feeling very lonely, and that's that stage in
my life. I guess that was six months after, well
(24:15):
a year after I thought I was born when I
asked my cousin that. How did Mike know that you
asked your cousin about this? I told him after he
told me he wanted to leave me. Mike and I
had a lot of conversation between when he dropped up
bombshell on me and when our ability to communicate broke down.
(24:37):
I tricked myself into feeling like it was actually for
the better that we were separating and that we would
be a better apart. I think he held me back
in a certain way. I think he had he had
a pretty overbearing personality, and I don't think I I
wanted to rock the boat as enough or cared enough
(24:57):
to kind of like a certain my own opinions into
the relationship. But were you not thinking that you were
going to be together forever? I was? I was until
the end. I was once we had kids and then
had another, I thought it was before gone conclusion. How
(25:18):
did you and Mike talk about having a second kid,
given that you were feeling disconnected and you were feeling
like Mike was more invested in your daughter than in you.
Did you want that, Elizabeth? I did. I'm the oldest
of two girls. I me and my sister really close,
so you know, through our whole relationship to kids was
(25:40):
kind of what we thought we were going to have,
So after the first was born, it was almost like
an ongoing, kind of unspoken mostly then spoken thing of well,
when are we going to have another one? The fact
that Mike wanted to have another child must have reassured
you that he was invested in the marriage that you
kid enough about that he wanted to expand the family.
(26:02):
That must have given you some hope. Yeah, I bet
it was easy to feel that way. Did you feel
romantically connected to Mike? What was your intimate life like?
You have different ways of expressing affection for people. I
think how did you express affection for him? The affection
(26:25):
was very much driven by Mike. And when I started
to lessen um, I didn't even notice until it was
nearly gone. And when it was nearly gone? Did you
say anything or did you miss it? I didn't say anything.
Did you miss it? Did you feel hurt? It added
(26:46):
to feelings about meness I had had. You were really
expecting that this was a relationship that would go on,
had its ups and downs. Tell us about when that
bubble bust. Tell us about the Bump Show. I knew
that Mike had something going on. He was drinking more.
(27:06):
There was something very clearly between us that we're kind
of skirting a certain issue of just like general and happiness,
and I was sharing in him my awesome, my generaline
happiness as well. And I when we expressed loneliness and
each other and hold on, Elizabeth, what happened when you
would express your your unhappiness and loneliness to Mike. How
(27:27):
did he respond to you by putting it on the relationship?
What did that look like like? Acting like, yeah, see
kind of thing we are both lonely. Looking back on
it feels easy to see that Mike was kind of
like setting up Mike might have been, Elizabeth. But when
you were sharing yours, When most people do that, what
(27:51):
they hope is for the other person to reach the gap,
is to reach across the gulf. It's usually a request
to get closer. So what you were doing, I was
asking him to get closer. I'm not sure it seemed
like to Mike the best word I was doing. Perhaps not,
(28:15):
but that's what you were doing. We call those making
bids right you were you were making a bid for
some kind of connection. And when you would make a
bid for connection, he would say, this is why the
relationship is doomed. What did that feel like to you?
(28:39):
I don't know. Let me ask the question differently. So
remember that guy with the whirlwind courtship, the guy that
was so fun and he felt so attentive and he
really loved you and you were so excited to marry him.
(29:00):
What did that feel like when the person you love
that much and you're trying to reconnect with won't engage
with you lonely? Probably felt at all, I don't know,
(29:20):
untethered to anything. Elizabeth. You just had two kids, and
you talk to your friends and they tell you, yeah,
it's a rough patch that happens. But the way you think, Elizabeth,
it's like the foundation of it is that we're going
to be together forever. That's how I see my life.
(29:40):
That's how I see my world. And then you expressed
the mic that you need to reconnect again, that you're
feeling alone, and you're sure that he'll say, oh, yeah,
me too, and let's really try and spend more time
on us, or do do something. I He's not making
(30:00):
you feel more loved, He's suddenly making you feel that
foundation that you had crafted your whole life and future around.
It wasn't stable and that's your life. So what was
that like? World changing? Here was not changing. It's collapsing, Elizabeth.
(30:26):
That feels very different than the world changing. It's collapsing
or collapsing, falling apart. What is that like when everything
that you care about is falling apart the worst? Did
(30:47):
Mike see how painful that was for you? I'm not
sure he showed that he cared a whole lot. Wow,
that must been rough. He seems so focused on this
next part of his life that he wanted. So what
(31:09):
was that like? You? You foundation that you've built your
hopes and dreams on his collapsing, and Mike is just
focused on his next move and leaving you with the wreckage. However,
many sennaronyms that mean really, really, really hard, and try
(31:33):
a few. You're a teacher. You have a little coabulary
of science teachers. Your letter to us was so articulate
about your own feelings. Our listeners can't see this, but
I see the tears in your eyes, and I know
that you're feeling something as you go into Elizabeth's experience,
(31:53):
and so I know you have worked it's guilty. It's
guilt I've I've held on. I think you might have
some guilt, and we hear that in your letter. But
I also think that you have something more than that,
which is empathy, and and I think that the reason
that you're feeling the guilt is because you can empathize
with Elizabeth's experience. So this isn't intended to make you
(32:18):
feel more guilty. It's actually intended to make both of
you more at peace and to move forward in a
different way. If you can get out of the I'm
a bad person because Elizabeth feels bad and I can't
tolerate contemplating how bad I made Elizabeth feel, then nothing
will change in terms of what happens in the future.
(32:40):
And I feel most sad in that instance for your daughters. Yeah,
so let's look at how you can understand a little
bit more about that moment for Elizabeth. So, Elizabeth, first
you try to talk to Mike about this gulf that
you're feeling in the marriage and the relationship. And you
love this guy so much you want that connection back,
(33:04):
and he's been very cold and distant and not engaging
and not working as a partner with you on yes,
I feel lonely too, and let's talk about this. That
was not what you got, even though you suspected that
you're both having very similar feelings. And then at some
(33:24):
point you hear this news. Can you tell us how
you got that news? It was just a Thursday night
after Yeah, he actually went to his first therapy appointment
that week. He must have been hopeful then. People are
often hopeful when the husband whose distant goes to therapy.
They think, oh, he'll he'll come back now. It felt
(33:45):
like he can't talk to me about whatever he's going through.
But I'm happy is I want to talk to you
about it? How did the therapy happen for Mike? He
just told me one day, I made a therapy appointment,
and it's it was. He told me he made it
before the birth of our second child. But then the
press appointment it wasn't until months later. So you were
(34:07):
hopeful that he would start to understand more about maybe
what was going on with him m hm, and therefore
be closer come back to you more. Yeah, Thursday night
he comes back and tell us we put our older
daughter to bed, and where's your newborn asleep? Okay? On
(34:28):
a pillow in the in the room where you guys
are having the conversation. You sat down on the couch
and throughout looking at me, he just said, I'm gonna
love with somebody else. I don't think we can be
together anymore. Wow, Well, how did you feel first? But
(34:53):
it's going through your body a lot of physical reaction
to shock. Just I wanted to cry, but I couldn't
really cry. I want to ask a million questions, but
didn't have the didn't know more questions to ask, asked
him who it was, wasn't super surprised about who it was.
(35:18):
And you realized that this was going on while you
were pregnant. Remember in the first pregnancy, how like did
that time lapse and was so invested in the baby?
Was he involved in that way with the second pregnancy
while he was having this other relationship. He's always so
(35:39):
invested in our other daughter. That seems were his focus
was throughout the second pregnancy. But it didn't feel the
same as the first pregnancy. Didn't feel the same connection
between us. So here we are, it's a month you've
just given birth. You have a newborn right there. Your
(36:00):
husband just came back from therapy and you're thinking, Okay,
maybe this is the start of us reconnecting and becoming
a real family again. And he tells you that he's
in love with someone else, and you know who it is,
and it makes sense to you. And in that moment,
what is it you're realizing? Hopeless? How can I do
(36:24):
this for that myself? What is it you feel when
your whole world is just being taken away from you?
It's more than hopeless. Yeah, I'm saying this to Mike. Now,
you're stuck in your head that if you really describe
(36:44):
how she feels, it makes you the bad person who
made her feel that way, and that's stopping you from
connecting to what her experience was. So you have to
be able to allow yourself to go there without feeling
that it deems nice is you because this is her
perspective now, it's not yours. I'm just having trouble describing
(37:06):
what I know would be probably one of the worst
feelings to ever to have. I can't possibly know what
it felt like to be her last spring, but I
do know that she had an incredibly hard time. See
I think you can imagine what it was like to
be her last spring. Having trouble right now that anyway,
(37:30):
So let's just notice that for now, Just notice that
that's a challenge right now, and that's going to be
part of the challenge going forward, where like with your friend,
like with Elizabeth, where if they don't see the entirety
of of who you are, they are only going to
(37:50):
see this demonized version of you, because we see in
this conversation how much empathy you do have for her,
how much you were actually able to what we call mentalize,
which is to get into the emotional space of the
other person. So we know you have that capacity, but
I think because it makes you really uncomfortable to acknowledge
(38:16):
yourself how much you just comfort and hurt and pain
you may have caused other people that you're not able
to own up to that saying I'm sorry, but it
is not what will help you move forward, or Elizabeth
move forward, or your kids eventually makes sense of this
in a way that works well for you guys as
(38:36):
a family. It felt incredibly unfair to be me as Elizabeth.
It's unfair. I had done everything right up to that point.
I got married, I had a house, I had kids,
I had a husband who I thought loved me, and
here I am thirty years old and I can't even
imagine what my life was gonna look like a month
or now, a year from now, five years from now. Yeah.
(38:58):
And there's the other piece of she loves you, and
there's a heartbreak part of it too. And we're not
saying that Elizabeth didn't have a role in this. Clearly
as we saw she did. You know, she may have
tried in her way to bring things up, but neither
of you knew how to communicate. I think if Elizabeth
was on this call, she would feel this relief of,
(39:21):
oh wow, he can see me. He understands something about
why this was so devastating for me in a way
that you've never expressed to her before. And there's something
as humans where what we really need is I see you,
I hear you, I understand you. Doesn't make it all better,
(39:41):
doesn't change whatever feeling she's going to have, but there's
something that shifts in the dynamic between the two of
you when someone says, oh wow, you get it. This
was how I felt, and you can see that there's
something so healing about that. And the healing, Mike depends
(40:03):
on you getting it right so that she really feels
that you get it, and that could be really useful
to you those as school parents going forward and to you.
Yet I hear you. I just having lived the relationship
now from what it is for the last however many months,
so it's been so negative that we can barely communicate. Um,
I don't know if she's even in a place to
(40:24):
hear from me in that way. So we have some thoughts.
We know this was This was probably a hard conversation.
It really really was. Yeah, And the reason is we
(40:45):
only had this short time with you, and we really
want to help you feel better going forward. And that
doesn't mean that feeling better is going to be us
saying you're not a scumback. But I will say you're
not a scumback, which what you asked in your letter,
But we don't think that's actually going to be that
helpful to you to hear it from us. What we
(41:06):
think is going to be more helpful is if you
can work more on that perspective taking so that people
can see that you understand their experience as well, and
also that you own, without butts, without exceptions, that you
own your part in it. You had reasons for doing
what you did, but in hindsight, I think you can
(41:29):
see that there were also ways that you handled it
that maybe going forward, you wouldn't handle a similar situation.
What it does is it says I'm more aware and
I really feel for you, and whether it matters to
them or not, that you've expressed that to them, and
it's not just a general I'm sorry, but it's what
we were doing earlier. Wow, Now I really see how
(41:52):
this must have felt and how you feel now. Right.
Would like you to write a letter that explains from
Elizabeth's point of view, what her experience was and what
the consequences of your action were from her perspective. But
here's how I want you to do it. I know
(42:13):
perspective taking is difficult for you. I want you to
start by explaining your perspective by saying that you realize
you shouldn't have probably married, that it wasn't as big
a love as it might have been. That you realize
that when you found real love that that wasn't enough.
(42:34):
You kind of knew it and suspected it, but you
realized it later on. So I want you to kind
of set up your side of things in the first part,
and then I want you to write only her part
of things, and then you describe what happened, and you
describe the impact on her, what she must have felt,
(42:54):
what it must have been like, all the stuff we
did in that exercise, and then I want you, when
you're done, to take out that first part so that
it's not part of the letter. It's important for you
to write it because you tend to get blocked with
the perspective taking because you keep wanting to explain your part.
So I want you to start that way, so you
(43:14):
have it all there, but then take it out because
that's not the point of the letter. The point of
the letter is to be able to show her and
perhaps your best man, that you really get it. And
again you worry that they're going to say, see, you
are a scumback. I think it's going to be the opposite.
When you're writing it, you're not making the case that
you're not a scumback, but that you did mishandle things.
(43:38):
Here's your opportunity to show them that you can take
their perspective and that you do own the parts of
it that were yours. Yeah, Mike, it was good to
talk to you, and we really do with you the
best you guys to take care of Mike. We look
forward to hearing that from take care Solari. What do
(43:59):
you think is going to happen? I think he's in
a really tricky place right now, and I think that
the advice that we gave him will serve him more
in the long term than in the short term. I
don't think he's going to actually give these letters to
his ax or to his friend, but he do think
having that perspective taking exercise will help him with how
(44:22):
he negotiates things with his ex wife, how he negotiates
his friendships going forward, how he negotiates his new relationship,
and also how he is as a parent as he
spends more time with his children. I agree. I think
maybe he'll give it to the friend. But we know
his therapist that when we suggest people write letters, really
we're in it for the writing. In other words, what
(44:43):
you gain, you gain in the writing. So I hope
that he gives us a try, and I do think
it will benefit him in the long term if he
can do it. This is dear therapist, and we'll be
back after a short break. I'm going Wich and I'm
(45:07):
Lori Gottlieb and this is, dear therapists. Well, let's listen
to the voicemail. So I wrote two letters this morning,
one to who my best man was and one to
my ex. It's hard to describe the experience. I chose
not to take one part of your advice. I did
not write my own perspective down before writing what I
(45:30):
thought was theirs. I felt this morning that I focused
too much on my own perspective and I was trying
to move beyond it and trying to find THEIRS without
needing to name mine first. Ultimately, I cried a lot
while writing the letter to to my X in the
same way I felt the experience while I was describing it.
(45:53):
I don't want to lose sight of the negative feelings
that I cost her. I just hope that at some
point you can forgive me for those negative feelings, and yeah,
just for the sake of our daughters, if nothing else.
I sent the email to my best friend a lot
shorter as many details, but I didn't want him to
see that I had not been thinking of his perspective
(46:16):
much at all, and I hope you can hear that,
and especially when it comes to the pressure I was
putting on him to feel and think a certain way
about my life as I was just desperately seeking his understanding.
I am super impressed with Mike because what comes across
(46:40):
from his voicemail is this whole idea of perspective taking.
He really took them on board, and I'm hopeful that
he's looking at relationships slightly differently and it's going to
conduct himself differently going forward. Yeah, I was incredibly impressed
with what he did. I think it was really hard
for him, for anybody it would be to come into
this city cuation at the place that he was. We
(47:02):
were very hard on him in that session because we
only had a certain amount of time with him, and
sometimes people aren't able to take in what you're giving
them when you move that quickly, and so in a
therapy session, we would not move that quickly. It would
be weeks of that months right exactly. So it was
really interesting to see that, even though at the end
(47:23):
of that call he seemed a bit deflated, he really
took in what we said, and so much to the
point that he decided not even to include his own
perspective because he realized, I have trouble taking other people's
perspective and now of course, we want him to keep
his perspective. We don't ever want someone to lose their
own perspective. But I think that he was realizing that
(47:47):
the exercise would be easier for him in this instance
if he did it that way. And the one thing
that I want to say, if he's listening to this,
is that he said, I hope that they'll forgive me.
And what I want to say is, Mike, I hope
that you will forgive yourself. But that's the place we
want to get him too, that once he can take
this other perspective, that eventually he will come to a
(48:08):
place of forgiving himself as well, and I think then
he will be able to really move forward. I agree,
And I think that what's lovely to hear is when
we're telling someone that there's an important part of life
that is not appearing on their radar, and then they
respond in a way that indicates that it's now appearing
on their radar. It gives us as therapists, and for Mike,
(48:32):
a lot of hope. That brings us to the end
of our show for this week. Thank you so much
for listening. You can follow us both online. I'm at
Lori Gottlieb dot com and you can follow me on
Twitter at Lori Gottlieb one or on Instagram at Lori
Gottlieb Underscore Author, and I'm at guy Winch dot com.
(48:56):
I'm on Twitter and on Instagram at guy Winch. If
you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
big or small, email us at Lorian Guy at I
heart media dot com. Our executive producers Christopher hasci Otis,
were produced and edited by Mike Johns. Special thanks to
Samuel Bennefield and to our podcast Fairy Godmother Katie Currect
(49:18):
next week. There's no real estate allage that goes location. Location, location,
we'll talk about and that applies in a marriage. I
think I've said many times I never want to live
in Omaha, and I said I'd never want to live
in New York, and we did both. Dear Therapists is
a production of I Heart Radio
Hey, fellow travelers. I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm the author of
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I write the
Dear Therapist advice column for The Atlantic. And I'm Guy Wench.
I wrote Emotional First Aid, and I write the Dear
Guy column for Ted. And this is Dear Therapists. This week,
a man who left his wife for the love of
his life wonders if that makes him a bad person.
(00:27):
I mean, I did leave my wife for another woman,
but the rumors that were about were as nasty it
can be and set the timeline very differently than what
reality was. Listen in and maybe learn something about yourself
in the process. Dear Therapists is for informational purposes only,
does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute
for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the
(00:51):
advice of your physician, mental health professional, or other qualified
health provider with any questions you may have regarding a
medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to
let I help media use it in potter and full
and we may edit it for length and of clarity.
Hey Guy, Hi, LORI, so I want to read you
this week's letter dear therapists. I'm a thirty two year
(01:15):
old father to two young daughters who realized too late
that I was not fundamentally in love with my wife.
We started dating in college, and our naive te led
us to marry young. We both got along by not
rocking the boat and decided to have kids. Well we
had our first daughter, Fatherhood engulfed me and I had
never been a part of something so important. However, I
didn't feel at all connected to my wife. I love
(01:38):
my daughter, but I felt like I was alone in
this endeavor. Two years ago, my existence was lit a
fire by another woman, a coworker, to make it more complicated,
and as we continued to seek out time to interact,
we started sharing ourselves with each other in a way
that we had never done with our spouses. Our existence
was made complete by each other and we couldn't go
(01:58):
back to what it was for Fairly recently, we both
broke down and ended our marriages in a storm of shock, tears, anger, hatred,
and sadness. My wife couldn't understand because she never really
understood me. We acknowledged our marriage felt broken, but she
expected us to try to fix it because of the
commitment we had made. I am now locked in a
(02:19):
bitter custody battle as a fight for my right to
continue to be the father to my daughters. I am
sympathetic to the position I put my ex wife in,
but I can't imagine that the cost of my fatherhood
has to be staying in a marriage that I know
was not going to give me the fulfilling existence that
I can now have with this other woman. My life
is over as I knew it. The world around me
(02:40):
doesn't seem to accept my decision. My friends have abandoned me,
my coworkers think I'm a scumbag, and my wife seems
to be trying to poison everyone against me. I didn't
think I was making a selfish decision by doing this,
but the world around me is doing a good job
of convincing me that I am all of the terrible
things they say I am. I guess I just don't
know how to think anymore about myself or the people
(03:02):
around me. Thanks Mike. Wow, So this is a please
tell me I'm not a scumbag letter? And what's interesting
to me In the letters Mike is so articulate about
his perspective and his feelings and his point of view.
You really get a sense of how he feels about things.
It's rich, and then on the other side, you get
(03:26):
very unrich descriptions of what his wife experience is and
even what his girlfriend's experience is. And though he pays
some lip service to yes, my wife expected this or
felt this, you don't get a sense that he really
understands what his wife experiences or perhaps what his girlfriends
(03:50):
is currently either right, you said, it was like a
please tell me I'm not a scumbag letter to me,
it's I need to get out of jail letter to
where he's portraying his existence as if he was in
jail this whole time, and I understand the experience of
feeling trapped to feeling like you're unfulfilled, but he doesn't
(04:11):
take any responsibility for why he might have felt that
way because of some role that he might have had
in this. And so it's kind of like I was
in jail when I was married to my wife, and
then this new woman. We complete each other, and yet
he's more miserable than exactly they both left their marriages.
He doesn't really tell us was it hard for her?
(04:33):
I don't hear both of us are going through this
and we're really struggling with this. It's I'm going through
this and your wife has now been left for this
other woman. It's humiliating. You didn't have any interest in
trying to see what went wrong in your marriage because
she said, I want to try to fix it. Maybe
you don't want to, but but could you at least
(04:54):
have those conversations so that there's some kind of different
ending to that marriage. Which he wants us to assuage
his guilt and say, no, you're not selfish, rather than
him wanting to look inside and say, is there a
piece of me that is selfish? And if we can
get him to see that piece of himself, maybe he'll
(05:16):
have more compassion for the people around him. There's another
aspect to this that I wanted to point out, and
that there's a lot of passivity that comes through the
whole flavor of the letter is like, all this stuff
happened to me. We are all human, We can all
make mistakes. He fell in love. That part happens. But
what concerns me in these situations is that by not
(05:39):
taking responsibility, you're feeling like a victim. Right he wants
to abdicate his responsibility by having us say no, no, no, no,
what you did that was perfectly fine. And it's not
so much what he did, it's the way in which
he did it. Yes, And I wonder whether he feels
guilt or he just feels the negative perception of the
(05:59):
people around him, because what we know from guilt, the
research is often shows that it really prevents people from
enjoying life and sometimes even causes them to self punish.
It's called a dobby effect, based on the elf in
the Harry Potter books that you know used to smack
his head against the wall and go bad Dobe and
(06:19):
and so there's this real phenomena that when you actually
feel guilty and you're not dealing with it, you can
somehow unconsciously take away the pleasure and enjoyment that you
might have from life. You're listening to Deal Therapists from
my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a quick break.
(06:54):
This is dear Therapists. Thanks for listening. Well, let's see
what he has to say. Absolutely, let's do like very
good to meet you. So, first of all, tell us
a little bit about where things stand right now in
terms of your kids, how they're doing, whether you're seeing them, yeah, um,
(07:17):
so how they're doing. I was like, I think, if
nothing else, I felt like me and my accident done
a pretty good job of kind of shielding them from
some of this drama. Just like not let them be
a part of any of the drama's going down, and
try not to let them see many a lot of
my negative motions throughout the last couple of months. How
old are the girls young? Um? Just over three and
(07:39):
one and a half. What has your time been like
with the girls since you guys split up? First split,
we went through the mediation process, and then after we
had filed that mediation agreement ready for our court date,
some pretty nasty rumors got to my ex and it
sent her off a deep end. Were the rumors no, no, no,
(08:01):
no no. There are aspects to the story where I mean,
I did leave my wife for another woman, but the
rumors that were about where as nasty as can be
and kind of like set the timeline very differently than
what reality was. Me and my girlfriend now we worked together,
so that created some serious drama that's at work. Were
(08:22):
you able to clear up the rumors with your ex
wife to this day? Just she understand that what she
heard is not accurate, not that I know of. We
really haven't had a good I would call a productive
conversation for a year, Like the last one really was
about a year ago. I was around it was around
this time last year that, UM, things kind of blew up.
(08:46):
What was your communication like with your wife when you
were married? Um, very surface level. I would say, one
of the issues is that we didn't share a whole
lot of emotions with each other. Do you know why
you didn't share your emotions with your wife when you
were married? I guess I would say they didn't really
feel safe. Like the handful of times I went trying
(09:09):
to go a little deeper, it didn't feel like it
was supportive place to bring them up. I thought. I
just was always worried about how it's going to change
how she thought of me. So like a couple of
times I brought up what were some of my darker things? Um,
it was like almost like pushed aside, like don't burden
me with that kind of thing? Which he used those
(09:30):
words or what how did you get the impression? But
it was met with a lot of just kind of
like no, I would say, silence, but not necessarily like
intentionally negative silence, more just like she didn't know what
to say to me silence, And what about the actual relationship?
Were you able to talk with her about your dissatisfactions
with it or the fact that it wasn't what you
(09:51):
wanted it to be. Have you made efforts in that regard?
I would? I can think of like two or three
times a few years ago were like I was telling
her what was bothering me? And she snapped and said,
stop telling me what I'm doing wrong? Remember, like being
taken aback, but thinking like that's not what I was
(10:13):
doing necessarily. But it definitely felt like she didn't want
to have that conversation about like how we could be
doing differently. So I tried once or twice. I wouldn't
say I tried very hard. It felt easier just to
like live the circus level life that we had been
kind of like living and making dinner, not saying much,
put on a show, going to bed, without much conversation.
(10:34):
It wasn't particularly negative, it just wasn't super positive. What
do you think would have happened if you had said
to her, I'm not saying that you're doing something wrong.
I want to talk about something that's going on with us.
I don't know at this point. It only behind sight.
But well, the reason it's not hindsight is that you're
going into a new relationship and there's something to be
(10:58):
learned about what didn't in another relationship. At least you're
part of it. Yeah, okay, I hear that, And I'm
just wondering, you know, why do you think you did
not pursue it given how desperately alone and unhappy you felt.
One of the things I've really been struggling with. I
(11:18):
didn't necessarily know what I didn't have until I had
it with somebody else. So like my existence wasn't super
negative in a certain way. Like it wasn't like I
went home every day miserable of trying to avoid my wife.
I didn't have a partnership that I've always felt like
should have been there. So when I found it somewhere else,
it was like, oh man, this is it was a
(11:38):
so eye opening. It felt like I fell in love
with someone else, and that's why I fell out of
love with my wife. And I do struggle with wondering
what could have happened if I had tried harder or
tried differently. It's definitely something I like get pretty down
to myself about wondering what I could have done differently
to make the situation better for me and my ex
(11:59):
rather than just finding it somewhere else. Are the other
areas in your life in which you kind of feel
unsatisfied but you really struggle to know how to make
things better or to take the initiative because you seem
to say, Okay, I settled. Do you do that in
other areas of your life? Yeah, I guess so. So
(12:20):
like in my career, I am a classroom teacher. I
don't have aspirations to do much more with it. I
don't want to be administrator, I don't want to be
a principle. So it's not like I'm not unsatisfied, but
I'm also not striving to do anything more with it.
I think that in a certain way, that's kind of
how I've thought about the marriage. At first. Something about
the tooth seemed similar to me, like where I just
(12:42):
sudently found myself going with what I had rather than
thinking about how I wanted to change it. And do
you do that in other relationships and friendships except what
there is and go with it rather than change it.
I guess. So will you say all your friends have
turned the games? Yeah, I might have lost lots of friendships.
Like my best man in my wedding send September. We
(13:02):
spent a few months not talking. We got back in touch.
We were just talking about random stuff like communist ress, soccer,
and throughout some of my more negative times of feeling
very down and feeling just like really depressed about not
having a custody of my kids. He just wasn't a
supportive even though he was willing to talk about soccer
(13:23):
with me, he wasn't a supportive person. He didn't he
didn't try to care about how I was feeling or
why I was feeling it. It definitely felt like he
thought it was more like, well, you made your decisions,
so live with them kind of thing. And even though
he was willing to be my friend, I think I'm
choosing not to be a part of that friendship more
than anything. But have you said to him, for example, like, dude,
(13:44):
you with my best man, we didn't need to deal
something it right now? Did you talk to him about
the friendship and fightful it? I just tried to start
a few conversations and each one was met with um
some derision on his part of like white, can't you
just let it go? And I said, like, you're my
best friend. I've never been in a doctor place that
I am right now, and it wasn't met with compassion
(14:06):
that I would have thought the friendship would have carried
with it. You know what strikes me about that friendship
and also your first marriage when you were feeling really
unhappy and unsatisfied, is that I think what the other
people didn't hear was I understand where you're coming from too,
And so with your friend, he probably had a lot
(14:29):
of feelings, maybe based on rumor or maybe based on
what actually happened earlier in our conversation, you said, I
feel a lot of guilt around how I handled things.
And I don't know if you've ever really said that
to your wife about I understand that I didn't handle
certain things really well, but maybe you didn't feel like
(14:50):
there was space for that or that it would be
met with more blame. But I don't know that your
that your ex heard that, and I don't know that
your friends have heard that either. It sounds like you
were saying to your friend, I'm in a really dark place.
I'm really struggling, And I think what your friend might
have been hearing was I left my wife, I left
my kids and with the love of my life, and
(15:11):
I'm a victim, right And maybe that isn't the place
that your friend could meet you. Maybe your friend could
meet you in a place of I know this is
really complicated. I know that you might not have a
lot of sympathy from me right now. I know that
I did a lot of things wrong and I didn't
handle them well, and and I can understand why you
(15:36):
might have the feelings that you have about me. And
at the same time, maybe we could have a more
nuanced conversation about how complicated the situation was. And here's
what I'm willing to take responsibility for. And also here's
where I'm struggling. I think that might be part of
the reason that people aren't able to have the compassion
(15:56):
for you that you do deserve. Interesting, so that definitely
sits well. Something I realized is that, like, uh, unless
like perspective taking is not my natural instinct. So I
do know that, and I think I don't think I
tried hard enough to figure out where he was. I
(16:17):
have apologized or tried to apologize more than once to
my ex and really tried to be as sincere as
possible at different times, just like, I'm so sorry for
this and for what happened, and for what this brought
to your life as well. But so there's a butt
there already. I'm so sorry that I ruined your life.
But right so, I think you hit it on the
(16:38):
head right there when you said perspective taking is a
little bit of a challenge for you. I wonder right
now you could tell us the story of what happened
solely from the perspective of what your ex wife's experience
might have been and what it might still be without
making you a terrible person. Where the actions and then
(17:00):
there's who the person is. And I think that sometimes
what gets in the way perspective taking for people is
when they feel like if they take the other person's perspective,
it's going to make them seem like they are inherently
a bad person, as opposed to I did some things
that were bad. So could you tell us the story
from your ex wife's perspective, tell us what the marriage
(17:23):
was like for her. Just before you do, Mike, just
one thing to keep in mind. This is a real
exercise for you because perspective taking is something you can improve,
and so it's difficult, but you actually have to put
yourself in her shoes and imagine it, and then from
that place, try and describe what you're seeing and feeling.
(17:44):
Start with first person, her first person. So I got
married to Mike. Okay, So I got married to Mike
after whirlwind courtship in college. He was my first ever boyfriend,
(18:05):
the first relationship I had really had outside of my family.
What did you love about him? It's okay to cry.
Um Uh, Mike's not sure how to answer that, but
Mike's going to try. I. Um, let's give your your
(18:26):
exit name. What's her name, Elizabeth? Okay, so we're talking
to Elizabeth. Elizabeth. What did you love about Mike? He
was fun. He was different than other people who had
been around and surrounded myself with. Had more of a
more whimsy, more of a way to bring humor to
(18:46):
the situation. He loved me, was very committed and into me,
and gave me a lot of attention, kind of like
made the relationship seemed to be the most important thing
in either of our lives. You said it was a
whirlwind courtship. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I
mean the first night we hung out together. I can
(19:08):
remember just like feeling so free and just like walked
down the middle of the street on the way back
for the bars with him. I had been talking to
my friend while at the bar and and she knew
I liked Mike. So when I got in to the
apartment after he kissed me good night, it was like
a really special thing and it's very exciting, just like
(19:31):
from kind of that point on the next night we
hung out and pretty much most nights after that. How
did Mike propose? Um? Stupidly? You gotta He proposed in
the park a lot of coals when we were buying
a vacuum for our first apartment. Did you have a ring?
He did have a ring. It was a family ring.
(19:53):
Mike doesn't find a whole lot of value in expensive
jewelry and really appreciated not having This been a full
paychecks on something, But there was a family ring that
I knew with meaningful to me. It was meaningful to
my mom, so he thought it would be meaningful to me.
Did you find the proposal romantic or did you feel
like it feel like it wasn't really thought out. I
(20:14):
was really excited on hind site. As I thought more
about it in the story, I think I would have
rather would have liked a better story to tell. But
but in the moment it was it felt very him.
Did you say that to Mike that there might be
an opportunity for him too improve on that you mean
(20:38):
to prop a birthday make a romantic I never did,
though I would have thought that he would have taken
away that from other things I had said and other
things I showed out value. What were some of the
things you communicated to him that would have maybe helped
him to see that you liked a little more thought
(21:00):
to go into some of these romantic gestures. I'm not
sure I could have said much. He's pretty stubborn and
opinions he has. How did you try to communicate to him?
I wouldn't say I tried super hard, but but Mike's
very perceptive. He thinks and took away from just other
(21:20):
things I that he knew I would have valued, just
you know, talking finally about other people's stories of romanticism.
And yes, Mike probably thought I valued that. So looking
back now, when did you feel first even if you
didn't realize it at the time that Mike was beginning
(21:42):
to drift emotionally away from you. It wasn't very long
after our first daughter was born. I could tell how
much he was into being a father and how connected
he was to our daughter. And I could tell it
didn't trans late to me in the same way that
(22:02):
there wasn't a connection between us because of her, that
it almost felt like it was separate. And I guess
I'll pause in a way and to say, like, that's
what I feel happened. So we want to stop you there.
I'll tell you why, because we really want to keep
you in her perspective, and I think that any time
you leave her perspective, you're going to lose the important
(22:24):
part of this exercise. Okay, Elizabeth, When you were pregnant,
how connected did you guys feel? Were you both really
excited about having a child together. What was the pregnancy
like for you? Yeah, we were very excited. He made
Every Sunday, we took pictures and he made a stop
(22:44):
motion video of my value getting larger, and then we
set above a crane to come down from the balcony
and he wrote a song and sang a song to
video and so every Sunday would take these you know,
have a many pictures to create the time lapse, and
(23:05):
so it was something we were both very excited about.
So it sounds like at that stage you were still
thinking that you were included in that in some way,
and yet then after your daughter was born, you start
to realize that actually it's more directed towards her and
not towards you. What did that feel like? That must
(23:27):
have been painful. Probably, I think it was easy to
not look it directly in the face because of how
my just my own excitement and taking care of a
young child put a lot of my energy into that
and put a lot of pressure on myself to do
everything right as a mother, and I think that took
away some of my attention to my feelings about my
(23:51):
relationship with Mike. And yet there must have been moments
where where you felt it. Yeah, yeah, there were there were, yeah.
Specific We asked one of my cousins who I'm close with,
were the same age if he also felt lonely, because
I was feeling very lonely, and that's that stage in
my life. I guess that was six months after, well
(24:15):
a year after I thought I was born when I
asked my cousin that. How did Mike know that you
asked your cousin about this? I told him after he
told me he wanted to leave me. Mike and I
had a lot of conversation between when he dropped up
bombshell on me and when our ability to communicate broke down.
(24:37):
I tricked myself into feeling like it was actually for
the better that we were separating and that we would
be a better apart. I think he held me back
in a certain way. I think he had he had
a pretty overbearing personality, and I don't think I I
wanted to rock the boat as enough or cared enough
(24:57):
to kind of like a certain my own opinions into
the relationship. But were you not thinking that you were
going to be together forever? I was? I was until
the end. I was once we had kids and then
had another, I thought it was before gone conclusion. How
(25:18):
did you and Mike talk about having a second kid,
given that you were feeling disconnected and you were feeling
like Mike was more invested in your daughter than in you.
Did you want that, Elizabeth? I did. I'm the oldest
of two girls. I me and my sister really close,
so you know, through our whole relationship to kids was
(25:40):
kind of what we thought we were going to have,
So after the first was born, it was almost like
an ongoing, kind of unspoken mostly then spoken thing of well,
when are we going to have another one? The fact
that Mike wanted to have another child must have reassured
you that he was invested in the marriage that you
kid enough about that he wanted to expand the family.
(26:02):
That must have given you some hope. Yeah, I bet
it was easy to feel that way. Did you feel
romantically connected to Mike? What was your intimate life like?
You have different ways of expressing affection for people. I
think how did you express affection for him? The affection
(26:25):
was very much driven by Mike. And when I started
to lessen um, I didn't even notice until it was
nearly gone. And when it was nearly gone? Did you
say anything or did you miss it? I didn't say anything.
Did you miss it? Did you feel hurt? It added
(26:46):
to feelings about meness I had had. You were really
expecting that this was a relationship that would go on,
had its ups and downs. Tell us about when that
bubble bust. Tell us about the Bump Show. I knew
that Mike had something going on. He was drinking more.
(27:06):
There was something very clearly between us that we're kind
of skirting a certain issue of just like general and happiness,
and I was sharing in him my awesome, my generaline
happiness as well. And I when we expressed loneliness and
each other and hold on, Elizabeth, what happened when you
would express your your unhappiness and loneliness to Mike. How
(27:27):
did he respond to you by putting it on the relationship?
What did that look like like? Acting like, yeah, see
kind of thing we are both lonely. Looking back on
it feels easy to see that Mike was kind of
like setting up Mike might have been, Elizabeth. But when
you were sharing yours, When most people do that, what
(27:51):
they hope is for the other person to reach the gap,
is to reach across the gulf. It's usually a request
to get closer. So what you were doing, I was
asking him to get closer. I'm not sure it seemed
like to Mike the best word I was doing. Perhaps not,
(28:15):
but that's what you were doing. We call those making
bids right you were you were making a bid for
some kind of connection. And when you would make a
bid for connection, he would say, this is why the
relationship is doomed. What did that feel like to you?
(28:39):
I don't know. Let me ask the question differently. So
remember that guy with the whirlwind courtship, the guy that
was so fun and he felt so attentive and he
really loved you and you were so excited to marry him.
(29:00):
What did that feel like when the person you love
that much and you're trying to reconnect with won't engage
with you lonely? Probably felt at all, I don't know,
(29:20):
untethered to anything. Elizabeth. You just had two kids, and
you talk to your friends and they tell you, yeah,
it's a rough patch that happens. But the way you think, Elizabeth,
it's like the foundation of it is that we're going
to be together forever. That's how I see my life.
(29:40):
That's how I see my world. And then you expressed
the mic that you need to reconnect again, that you're
feeling alone, and you're sure that he'll say, oh, yeah,
me too, and let's really try and spend more time
on us, or do do something. I He's not making
(30:00):
you feel more loved, He's suddenly making you feel that
foundation that you had crafted your whole life and future around.
It wasn't stable and that's your life. So what was
that like? World changing? Here was not changing. It's collapsing, Elizabeth.
(30:26):
That feels very different than the world changing. It's collapsing
or collapsing, falling apart. What is that like when everything
that you care about is falling apart the worst? Did
(30:47):
Mike see how painful that was for you? I'm not
sure he showed that he cared a whole lot. Wow,
that must been rough. He seems so focused on this
next part of his life that he wanted. So what
(31:09):
was that like? You? You foundation that you've built your
hopes and dreams on his collapsing, and Mike is just
focused on his next move and leaving you with the wreckage. However,
many sennaronyms that mean really, really, really hard, and try
(31:33):
a few. You're a teacher. You have a little coabulary
of science teachers. Your letter to us was so articulate
about your own feelings. Our listeners can't see this, but
I see the tears in your eyes, and I know
that you're feeling something as you go into Elizabeth's experience,
(31:53):
and so I know you have worked it's guilty. It's
guilt I've I've held on. I think you might have
some guilt, and we hear that in your letter. But
I also think that you have something more than that,
which is empathy, and and I think that the reason
that you're feeling the guilt is because you can empathize
with Elizabeth's experience. So this isn't intended to make you
(32:18):
feel more guilty. It's actually intended to make both of
you more at peace and to move forward in a
different way. If you can get out of the I'm
a bad person because Elizabeth feels bad and I can't
tolerate contemplating how bad I made Elizabeth feel, then nothing
will change in terms of what happens in the future.
(32:40):
And I feel most sad in that instance for your daughters. Yeah,
so let's look at how you can understand a little
bit more about that moment for Elizabeth. So, Elizabeth, first
you try to talk to Mike about this gulf that
you're feeling in the marriage and the relationship. And you
love this guy so much you want that connection back,
(33:04):
and he's been very cold and distant and not engaging
and not working as a partner with you on yes,
I feel lonely too, and let's talk about this. That
was not what you got, even though you suspected that
you're both having very similar feelings. And then at some
(33:24):
point you hear this news. Can you tell us how
you got that news? It was just a Thursday night
after Yeah, he actually went to his first therapy appointment
that week. He must have been hopeful then. People are
often hopeful when the husband whose distant goes to therapy.
They think, oh, he'll he'll come back now. It felt
(33:45):
like he can't talk to me about whatever he's going through.
But I'm happy is I want to talk to you
about it? How did the therapy happen for Mike? He
just told me one day, I made a therapy appointment,
and it's it was. He told me he made it
before the birth of our second child. But then the
press appointment it wasn't until months later. So you were
(34:07):
hopeful that he would start to understand more about maybe
what was going on with him m hm, and therefore
be closer come back to you more. Yeah, Thursday night
he comes back and tell us we put our older
daughter to bed, and where's your newborn asleep? Okay? On
(34:28):
a pillow in the in the room where you guys
are having the conversation. You sat down on the couch
and throughout looking at me, he just said, I'm gonna
love with somebody else. I don't think we can be
together anymore. Wow, Well, how did you feel first? But
(34:53):
it's going through your body a lot of physical reaction
to shock. Just I wanted to cry, but I couldn't
really cry. I want to ask a million questions, but
didn't have the didn't know more questions to ask, asked
him who it was, wasn't super surprised about who it was.
(35:18):
And you realized that this was going on while you
were pregnant. Remember in the first pregnancy, how like did
that time lapse and was so invested in the baby?
Was he involved in that way with the second pregnancy
while he was having this other relationship. He's always so
(35:39):
invested in our other daughter. That seems were his focus
was throughout the second pregnancy. But it didn't feel the
same as the first pregnancy. Didn't feel the same connection
between us. So here we are, it's a month you've
just given birth. You have a newborn right there. Your
(36:00):
husband just came back from therapy and you're thinking, Okay,
maybe this is the start of us reconnecting and becoming
a real family again. And he tells you that he's
in love with someone else, and you know who it is,
and it makes sense to you. And in that moment,
what is it you're realizing? Hopeless? How can I do
(36:24):
this for that myself? What is it you feel when
your whole world is just being taken away from you?
It's more than hopeless. Yeah, I'm saying this to Mike. Now,
you're stuck in your head that if you really describe
(36:44):
how she feels, it makes you the bad person who
made her feel that way, and that's stopping you from
connecting to what her experience was. So you have to
be able to allow yourself to go there without feeling
that it deems nice is you because this is her
perspective now, it's not yours. I'm just having trouble describing
(37:06):
what I know would be probably one of the worst
feelings to ever to have. I can't possibly know what
it felt like to be her last spring, but I
do know that she had an incredibly hard time. See
I think you can imagine what it was like to
be her last spring. Having trouble right now that anyway,
(37:30):
So let's just notice that for now, Just notice that
that's a challenge right now, and that's going to be
part of the challenge going forward, where like with your friend,
like with Elizabeth, where if they don't see the entirety
of of who you are, they are only going to
(37:50):
see this demonized version of you, because we see in
this conversation how much empathy you do have for her,
how much you were actually able to what we call mentalize,
which is to get into the emotional space of the
other person. So we know you have that capacity, but
I think because it makes you really uncomfortable to acknowledge
(38:16):
yourself how much you just comfort and hurt and pain
you may have caused other people that you're not able
to own up to that saying I'm sorry, but it
is not what will help you move forward, or Elizabeth
move forward, or your kids eventually makes sense of this
in a way that works well for you guys as
(38:36):
a family. It felt incredibly unfair to be me as Elizabeth.
It's unfair. I had done everything right up to that point.
I got married, I had a house, I had kids,
I had a husband who I thought loved me, and
here I am thirty years old and I can't even
imagine what my life was gonna look like a month
or now, a year from now, five years from now. Yeah.
(38:58):
And there's the other piece of she loves you, and
there's a heartbreak part of it too. And we're not
saying that Elizabeth didn't have a role in this. Clearly
as we saw she did. You know, she may have
tried in her way to bring things up, but neither
of you knew how to communicate. I think if Elizabeth
was on this call, she would feel this relief of,
(39:21):
oh wow, he can see me. He understands something about
why this was so devastating for me in a way
that you've never expressed to her before. And there's something
as humans where what we really need is I see you,
I hear you, I understand you. Doesn't make it all better,
(39:41):
doesn't change whatever feeling she's going to have, but there's
something that shifts in the dynamic between the two of
you when someone says, oh wow, you get it. This
was how I felt, and you can see that there's
something so healing about that. And the healing, Mike depends
(40:03):
on you getting it right so that she really feels
that you get it, and that could be really useful
to you those as school parents going forward and to you.
Yet I hear you. I just having lived the relationship
now from what it is for the last however many months,
so it's been so negative that we can barely communicate. Um,
I don't know if she's even in a place to
(40:24):
hear from me in that way. So we have some thoughts.
We know this was This was probably a hard conversation.
It really really was. Yeah, And the reason is we
(40:45):
only had this short time with you, and we really
want to help you feel better going forward. And that
doesn't mean that feeling better is going to be us
saying you're not a scumback. But I will say you're
not a scumback, which what you asked in your letter,
But we don't think that's actually going to be that
helpful to you to hear it from us. What we
(41:06):
think is going to be more helpful is if you
can work more on that perspective taking so that people
can see that you understand their experience as well, and
also that you own, without butts, without exceptions, that you
own your part in it. You had reasons for doing
what you did, but in hindsight, I think you can
(41:29):
see that there were also ways that you handled it
that maybe going forward, you wouldn't handle a similar situation.
What it does is it says I'm more aware and
I really feel for you, and whether it matters to
them or not, that you've expressed that to them, and
it's not just a general I'm sorry, but it's what
we were doing earlier. Wow, Now I really see how
(41:52):
this must have felt and how you feel now. Right.
Would like you to write a letter that explains from
Elizabeth's point of view, what her experience was and what
the consequences of your action were from her perspective. But
here's how I want you to do it. I know
(42:13):
perspective taking is difficult for you. I want you to
start by explaining your perspective by saying that you realize
you shouldn't have probably married, that it wasn't as big
a love as it might have been. That you realize
that when you found real love that that wasn't enough.
(42:34):
You kind of knew it and suspected it, but you
realized it later on. So I want you to kind
of set up your side of things in the first part,
and then I want you to write only her part
of things, and then you describe what happened, and you
describe the impact on her, what she must have felt,
(42:54):
what it must have been like, all the stuff we
did in that exercise, and then I want you, when
you're done, to take out that first part so that
it's not part of the letter. It's important for you
to write it because you tend to get blocked with
the perspective taking because you keep wanting to explain your part.
So I want you to start that way, so you
(43:14):
have it all there, but then take it out because
that's not the point of the letter. The point of
the letter is to be able to show her and
perhaps your best man, that you really get it. And
again you worry that they're going to say, see, you
are a scumback. I think it's going to be the opposite.
When you're writing it, you're not making the case that
you're not a scumback, but that you did mishandle things.
(43:38):
Here's your opportunity to show them that you can take
their perspective and that you do own the parts of
it that were yours. Yeah, Mike, it was good to
talk to you, and we really do with you the
best you guys to take care of Mike. We look
forward to hearing that from take care Solari. What do
(43:59):
you think is going to happen? I think he's in
a really tricky place right now, and I think that
the advice that we gave him will serve him more
in the long term than in the short term. I
don't think he's going to actually give these letters to
his ax or to his friend, but he do think
having that perspective taking exercise will help him with how
(44:22):
he negotiates things with his ex wife, how he negotiates
his friendships going forward, how he negotiates his new relationship,
and also how he is as a parent as he
spends more time with his children. I agree. I think
maybe he'll give it to the friend. But we know
his therapist that when we suggest people write letters, really
we're in it for the writing. In other words, what
(44:43):
you gain, you gain in the writing. So I hope
that he gives us a try, and I do think
it will benefit him in the long term if he
can do it. This is dear therapist, and we'll be
back after a short break. I'm going Wich and I'm
(45:07):
Lori Gottlieb and this is, dear therapists. Well, let's listen
to the voicemail. So I wrote two letters this morning,
one to who my best man was and one to
my ex. It's hard to describe the experience. I chose
not to take one part of your advice. I did
not write my own perspective down before writing what I
(45:30):
thought was theirs. I felt this morning that I focused
too much on my own perspective and I was trying
to move beyond it and trying to find THEIRS without
needing to name mine first. Ultimately, I cried a lot
while writing the letter to to my X in the
same way I felt the experience while I was describing it.
(45:53):
I don't want to lose sight of the negative feelings
that I cost her. I just hope that at some
point you can forgive me for those negative feelings, and yeah,
just for the sake of our daughters, if nothing else.
I sent the email to my best friend a lot
shorter as many details, but I didn't want him to
see that I had not been thinking of his perspective
(46:16):
much at all, and I hope you can hear that,
and especially when it comes to the pressure I was
putting on him to feel and think a certain way
about my life as I was just desperately seeking his understanding.
I am super impressed with Mike because what comes across
(46:40):
from his voicemail is this whole idea of perspective taking.
He really took them on board, and I'm hopeful that
he's looking at relationships slightly differently and it's going to
conduct himself differently going forward. Yeah, I was incredibly impressed
with what he did. I think it was really hard
for him, for anybody it would be to come into
this city cuation at the place that he was. We
(47:02):
were very hard on him in that session because we
only had a certain amount of time with him, and
sometimes people aren't able to take in what you're giving
them when you move that quickly, and so in a
therapy session, we would not move that quickly. It would
be weeks of that months right exactly. So it was
really interesting to see that, even though at the end
(47:23):
of that call he seemed a bit deflated, he really
took in what we said, and so much to the
point that he decided not even to include his own
perspective because he realized, I have trouble taking other people's
perspective and now of course, we want him to keep
his perspective. We don't ever want someone to lose their
own perspective. But I think that he was realizing that
(47:47):
the exercise would be easier for him in this instance
if he did it that way. And the one thing
that I want to say, if he's listening to this,
is that he said, I hope that they'll forgive me.
And what I want to say is, Mike, I hope
that you will forgive yourself. But that's the place we
want to get him too, that once he can take
this other perspective, that eventually he will come to a
(48:08):
place of forgiving himself as well, and I think then
he will be able to really move forward. I agree,
And I think that what's lovely to hear is when
we're telling someone that there's an important part of life
that is not appearing on their radar, and then they
respond in a way that indicates that it's now appearing
on their radar. It gives us as therapists, and for Mike,
(48:32):
a lot of hope. That brings us to the end
of our show for this week. Thank you so much
for listening. You can follow us both online. I'm at
Lori Gottlieb dot com and you can follow me on
Twitter at Lori Gottlieb one or on Instagram at Lori
Gottlieb Underscore Author, and I'm at guy Winch dot com.
(48:56):
I'm on Twitter and on Instagram at guy Winch. If
you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
big or small, email us at Lorian Guy at I
heart media dot com. Our executive producers Christopher hasci Otis,
were produced and edited by Mike Johns. Special thanks to
Samuel Bennefield and to our podcast Fairy Godmother Katie Currect
(49:18):
next week. There's no real estate allage that goes location. Location, location,
we'll talk about and that applies in a marriage. I
think I've said many times I never want to live
in Omaha, and I said I'd never want to live
in New York, and we did both. Dear Therapists is
a production of I Heart Radio
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