Trust Yourself if You’ve Been Gaslighted!

I watched a wonderful documentary yesterday called Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa. It’s about the Nepalese woman who submitted Mt. Everest ten times. Really inspiring. But not only because she accomplished an unimaginable feat and survived on Everest but also because she survived a violently abusive alcoholic husband who brought her from Nepal to Connecticut, illiterate and not speaking English, where she was 100% in his power.

At one point in the film, her teenage daughter commented to her sister that their father, who had died of cancer by that time, had told her once that he’d never hurt the girls in any way. The daughter said, “What about all those times he pulled our hair and hit us? Was I imagining it?” And I thought, BINGO! That’s the perfect example of gaslighting. When a person’s reality is challenged so that she questions her own lived experience. “Am I crazy or did it really happen?”

For many women in our community, the one question they ask themselves when their husband leaves is, “Am I crazy?” Why does this come up over and over? Because, on running away, so many husbands attack their wives with a distorted reality, different from what really took place. He might say something like, “I hated that trip we took to Florida” when in reality, he seemed to be having a great time. Or he could say (like my ex-husband did), “I never liked this house” when, in reality, he loved it and said the only way he would leave it is feet first (an actual quote).

Or, he could say even more baffling things like, “I never really loved you”, when he’d been a loving husband for 27 years.

Words have tremendous power, particularly when you’ve trusted the person who is saying those words for decades. He couldn’t be lying - that doesn’t make any sense - so the next possible explanation is for you to question yourself. Did I mis-read what was actually going on in my own life? Was I blind to the reality? Did I have my head in the proverbial sand?

Or . . . there’s a third explanation, have I been gaslighted? Is my husband saying whatever he wants to undermine my version of our relationship so that he can have an excuse for “having” to leave? Is he banking on my trusting his word, as I always have, so that I would question myself before questioning him?

BINGO! That's it!

As hard as it is to understand, your ex is re-writing history to suit his new narrative.

When my husband left and I was dumbfounded to understand how he now viewed our joint life in such different hues than he had when we were married, I called up Mike, a friend of ours who is a history professor, and asked him what to believe. Mike said, “believe your lived experience. You have to believe yourself.”

For so many women, that takes courage. Believing yourself in the face of someone else’s adamant denial of your reality requires grit. You would need to accept that his denial of what really happened is in the service of supporting his story. He doesn’t really care about the truth.

So, in the end, the Everest climber’s daughters were abused by their father regardless of what he said and you need to know that your version of your story is real. Be a strong mountain climber, like Lhakpa Sherpa, and trust yourself.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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It’s Time to Dial Down Your Ex’s Power Over You

We were having such an interesting discussion tonight in our meeting of my online Hearts & Minds Divorce Recovery Group and I wanted to share it with you. We were talking about how much power our ex-husbands have to hurt us, even long after he leaves. For example, I remember sitting with my daughter in a cafe several months after my ex ran away when I glimpsed him coming in the door. I got so upset; it was almost unbearable. Just seeing him from across a room had that much power to totally screw me up? Why?

We were discussing this in the group when a new thought struck me. You were traumatized in the initial early days when it was revealed, in whatever way it happened to you, that the marriage was over. You were shocked. You had a huge adjustment to make in the blink of an eye - to integrate the fact that the man you loved and trusted for all those years had betrayed you.

Plus, in the early days, he might have said horrible things to you, blaming you and putting you down. The depth of the hurt comes from the fact that he shifted from the person you trusted with all your heart to an angry stranger.

At that time, he had all the power. Unbeknownst to you, in most cases, he was having an affair and had been planning his departure for some time. He may even have been shifting funds and organizing your finances to benefit him. 

He also had all the power in that he made the decision to leave and there was nothing you could do about it. All the pleading in the world wouldn’t budge him. By the time you heard about it, it was a fait accompli.

But now, some time later, maybe even years later, it still feels like he has the same power to hurt you although he could never hurt you like he did in the initial revelation. Now you know not to trust him and that he can manipulate you - you know he no longer has your best interest at heart.

Often the meanness he demonstrated in the early days when he was breaking the relationship is not so much in evidence as time goes on. Particularly, after the divorce is finalized, his actual power to hurt you may be much diminished. Yet, the fear remains. Is it time to let that go?

Could you be open to the possibility that you can dial down his power, even a tiny bit, so that anything he does now is not going to upset you so much? Would you allow yourself to make a buffer so that anything he does no longer hurts to the same extent? After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

I think that, over time, you’re still reacting to him with the same fear you felt in the early days when you didn’t know what to expect. Now you know the measure of the man and even if he’s frustrating, difficult or even mean, it won’t come as a surprise. The shock value is over.

My wish for you is that you turn down his power to upset you so that rather than getting wounded or outraged, you can say, “There he goes again - I know his tricks and ways!” My wish is that you will be able to remember that the thing he did to hurt you today, won’t hurt so much in three days. You will be able to recover quicker until the point that it only upsets you marginally and then, only for 20 minutes until you shake it off.

His power to hurt you to the extent that he did in the beginning, is gone. You’ll never again be shocked and have to adjust to the new vision of your beloved husband - you now know that you can’t trust him.

So again, could you be open to the possibility that you can dial down his power, even a tiny bit, so that anything he does now doesn’t upset you so much? Would you allow yourself to do that? When?

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Why did it hurt so bad when your husband left?

In the study that I conducted before writing Runaway Husbands, I asked women whose husbands left out-of-the-blue what the moment felt like when he told her it was over and here are their actual words:

• It was like someone had stuck a knife in my stomach and turned it

• I felt like someone had stepped on my chest and emptied my lungs of air

• I felt like someone punched me in the gut

• I felt crushed, steamrollered, and then I felt as if I was falling off a cliff

• If he had ripped my arm out, it wouldn’t have hurt as much

• I felt like I had stepped on a landmine

• I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks

• I had a strange physical sensation - like my brain had been shot with a stun gun

If we pay close attention to the words describing what it felt like, we understand why it hurts so much - being left in a cold, uncaring way when you had no idea that it was even remotely possible, feels like a physical assault.

In the weeks and months after the husband leaves, the wife obsesses, replaying that moment over and over in an effort to understand how someone who had loved her so much could so casually, but callously hurt her. The fact that she experienced the rupture of the marriage as a physical assault leaves her with pain in her body that she can’t think away because it’s not rational. It touches her on a gut level at some primal place inside.

What factors go into the depth of the pain?

1. Rejection - her husband has decided that she is not what he wants and he’s discarding her, often for someone else. He’s made an assessment of her, the wife he knows so well, and he doesn’t want her anymore.

2. Betrayal - he didn’t let her in on his growing discontent about the marriage. He deprived her of any sense of agency in her own life, making a unilateral decision and then springing it on her when there was nothing she could do about it. He broke the bone deep trust she had built with him.

3. Destruction of her vision of her future - her plans for her future, which she may have been carefully constructing her whole life, are destroyed like a house that’s been hit with a wrecking ball and she’s left unable to envision what her life is going to be like.

Attachment Injury

However, the animal cry we heard in the women’s statements above come from a deeper place, the place of attachment injury. The bond that is built within a long term marriage is more complex than just love - it’s attachment. Imperceptibly, day after day within a marriage, we are melding our identity with our partner, who we turn to in a fundamental way for support and safety like we may have done with our parents in childhood.

If we were lucky enough to have had dedicated, caring parents, we replicate in our intimate relationship the seamless sense of protection we experienced growing up. For many people, there was zero possibility that one day their mother would turn her back and walk away saying, “I don’t care about you anymore.” So when the husband does just that, it’s equally unthinkable.

For those women who grew up in an unstable or unsafe childhood home and then with great courage and hope, allowed themselves to open up and trust their husband and then he leaves, it’s even more damaging. It confirms the fear that people are not safe and not to be trusted, which is a hard way to maneuver through life.

While you’re recovering from the sudden loss of a spouse, you need to recognize that it’s not just a process of thinking and thinking and then eventually figuring out how someone who once loved you could hurt you, so that you can heal and move on. There is a concurrent process going on of soothing the emotional wound of the loss of attachment. That requires that you work towards accepting the fact that your suffering is normal and that having been attached is a good thing. It means you had the courage to let someone into your heart.

As the pain starts to diminish, and it will, you’ll find that you can feel safe and protected even without that other person because you can learn to love and protect yourself. Once you know you can protect yourself, it will be safer for you to attach to someone else because if that person leaves, you now know you will never lose the one you need the most - yourself.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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How Can I Trust Again?

Every time I’ve gotten together with abandoned wives for a workshop or retreat since I wrote Runaway Husbands in 2010, the same question comes up: “I’d like to be in a new relationship but how can I ever trust again?”

Almost all of the women in the Runaway Husbands community have been betrayed. They didn’t know that their loving husband was thinking of leaving. They trusted him with all their hearts. They never dreamed that he would have an affair. They felt secure.

But then, one day, out of the clear blue sky, boom! “I can’t do this anymore. It’s over!” What?!?

So how can a woman who couldn’t read the signs in her marriage (because often, there aren’t any) trust that the same thing won’t happen again with another man who may also seem loving and devoted? How can she protect herself from the devastation she went through with her runaway husband?

A crucial question. Some women are not interested in having a subsequent relationship and, of course, that’s fine! But many women in our community would love to have a companion; someone to go out with on the weekend, someone to share life with, someone to love them and for them to love (people need to give love as well as receive), someone with whom to have some delightful sex. 

They want to be in a couple but to get there, they have to open their hearts with no guarantee that this new man can be trusted. It means taking a leap of faith, but also, recognizing that this relationship is inherently very different from your last one.

Most probably, you were very idealistic when you married your runaway husband. You imagined your lifetime future, building together all the lovely parts of home and family. You likely married in your twenties or thirties and the years ahead were spread in front of you like the smorgasbord table at a Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant. You had expectations! Your husband having an affair and leaving you was not one of them.

But now, you’re older and you’ve been through this experience and you know, right from the get-go, that husbands can leave. You’re wiser. You’ll listen carefully when any new man tells you how his previous marriage ended, paying particular attention to how he talks about his ex-wife. Is he mean and diminishing of her? Did he end the marriage? Was there an affair? Good information to know.

Unless you’re still in your thirties or early forties, you probably are not looking to start a family with a new husband. You may already have done that and are at the next stage of your life. The bond you will develop in a new relationship is of a different quality. You’re an independent woman now who can survive on your own. You won’t need to merge your identity with someone in the same way that you did in your first marriage.

You’re actually not as vulnerable as you think you are. You will never again be hurt at the same magnitude as you were when your husband left because you know it’s possible. And you’ve worked on yourself to be comfortable in your own skin. If you meet someone, don’t rush to fall in love. Get to know him gradually. He’s not the man of your dreams - he’s just a man.

You really have two choices. You can close up shop and not risk any new relationship which means that you will be safe but also may miss out on the pleasure of having someone in your life. Or, you can open your heart wisely, taking a chance with no assurances but being willing to expand your life to admit someone else.

Last year at the Sedona Retreat (the yearly divorce recovery retreat I hold in Sedona, Arizona), we spent an afternoon with the Shaman Joseph White Wolf who told us about when he first got to know his wife who had been married before. She traced a big square in the air and told him that she had a map of her life with all the pieces in place in this square, just like she liked them. Her family, her home, her work, her friends - she liked the life she had constructed for herself. Then she said, “Now I see your little nose poking up into the corner of my map. I’ll let you come inside but you need to know, I’m not changing any of it for you. So you’re welcome to come into my life but you have to be a plus because my life is good just as it already is.”

And that is my wish for you. I hope you will be open to trust again, accepting the fact that not all men are dishonest, slowly getting to know someone - no big dreams or expectations. And if his nose is poking up into your life, choose wisely if you will let him in.

Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Does How It Ended Negate the Marriage that Went Before?

We had such a profound discussion at the last session of the Hearts & Minds Divorce Recovery Group about how much the women devoted to their marriages during all those years and the fact that their husband, in the end, walked away from it all as if it had no value to him. They were questioning, how do I think about all those years of being together? Was it real? Does how he left mean that it was all meaningless?

Members of the group talked about how much they’d invested, fully expecting to be together with their husband till death do them part. They gave wholeheartedly - was it under false pretenses?

One woman said that she felt she’d been robbed. She can’t “cash in” to take advantage of everything she’d contributed. Cashing in means enjoying later years together, travelling, spending time with family together, creating a home, feeling that life’s value grew and grew and that it reached a comfortable point at which she could sit back with him and enjoy the glow.

Another woman said that she felt that all those years of her life with her husband had been tainted. She wants to wipe it all out - it’s too painful to think about.

Another, an engineer, gave a metaphorical explanation of covert narcissism. She suggested that it’s like a bridge that has a latent defect. Let’s say that the bridge can support the daily traffic but it has a weak joint that no one knows about. One day, an extra car is on the bridge and that weak joint gives out.

Our husbands are like that bridge. They’re fine to a point, but there’s a weak joint in their makeup that means that once they feel it’s all too much, they just give up. You don’t know there’s a problem because it only becomes visible after the whole thing cracks.

I was thinking about how, in all the years I’ve worked in this field, most women in the Runaway Husbands community describe their marriages in very positive terms. It’s very rare for someone to say, “Aw, it wasn’t that good”. After the husband leaves, we tend to highlight the good things that happened. It’s called a Positivity Bias. Here’s the definition: Positivity bias may denote three phenomena: a tendency for people to report positive views of reality; a tendency to hold positive expectations, views, and memories; and a tendency to favor positive information in reasoning.

Does our perception require us to view the marriage in glowing terms? A lot of women blame themselves. Yes, you weren’t perfect, but he wasn’t perfect, either. I’m sure he was annoying and selfish lots of times.

That evening at the group, as everyone was talking, I was thinking, how can I encourage them to find value in every precious day of our lives? He wasn’t perfect and in the end, his weakness became visible. But I believe that during all those years, when the bridge was holding up, it was real. He loved you and it was genuine. It was your real life.

Don’t let the fact that it ended in betrayal make you harden your heart to those years of your life. You had good times, but you also had bad times. And it all adds up to experience.

If your husband leaving can contribute to you struggling to become a more positive person, to strengthen your appreciation of your life just as it is, so you can love life, no matter what is happening, then you can chalk it up to experience. 

Don’t think of it like an investment you make in the bank that you can lose when the market tanks. That’s the wrong metaphor. Think of it rather like an investment you made in yourself and in your own life that no one can ever take away from you and learn to love life again.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Another Father's Day Without My Dad

I received this email from Tiffany Scott, the adult daughter of one of the moms in the Runaway Husbands community. I was so moved by it that I asked her if I could publish it. She wrote back and gave me the green light, but asked that I not publish it anonymously. She felt that after years of hiding, she now wanted to claim her story and share it with you under her name. You can read her blog at www.GoodDadGoneDad.com.

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I was returning from a business trip and called my mom, as usual, during my commute home.  What I expected to be an uneventful call, would instead begin the chain of events that ultimately became the most devastating difficulty of my life. She told me that my dad said he decided he was going to divorce her.

My parents divorcing was unfathomable to me. My parents led the marriage ministry at my church, and had done so for nearly 20 years. Growing up, they were notoriously flirtatious. My dad’s playful nature and affection for my mom was regularly on display. They’d stroll through the mall food court (where my sister and I worked as teenagers) with his hand in the back pocket of my mom’s jeans prompting us to roll our eyes and murmur “ewww gross” as they passed. Even at home, he’d glide over to my mom as she stood over the kitchen sink washing dishes after a nightly family dinner, wrap his arms around her and initiate a dance, sometimes silly and funny, sometimes slow and romantic.

My dad showed his love for my sister and I, too. He was an involved father: coaching our sports teams, teaching us about his outdoors hobbies, using lunch breaks to attend school talent shows, concerts and assemblies.  When my sister and I moved away after college, our visits home began with his usual silliness like him picking me up at the airport in a suit and chauffeur’s cap holding a sign with only my last name scrawled on it as though he was working for a private car service or meeting me at his front door of the house doing a short choreographed dance, more than a decade before TikTok, chanting that he was so happy because I was back home. The visits always ended with long hugs, smiles, and an invitation to move back home anytime because he missed us so much.

My dad and I spoke weekly. He spoke with my sister daily who bonded with her on their shared love of our hometown sports teams. Neither of us would have ever, ever, ever guessed that he would ghost us.

In the middle of the morning, my dad went to the elementary school where my mom worked to tell her that he had just moved out of the home they shared for 29 years. A day later he sent my sister and I a text to tell us he left and ask us not to contact him because he would contact us in a few weeks.  A year and a half later, he called announcing he was ready to “put this in the past”. He called for two days straight. Despite me reaching out and his impeccable reputation for expeditiously returning calls, we haven’t spoken since. It will be 3 years in September.

Although I am devastated that my dad choses to stay out of my life, my pain was more severe for my mom and the emotional, social, physical, psychological and financial hardships she endured because of my dad’s abandonment. I was relieved to learn that her story is not as unique as it seemed at the time, that there are other runaway husbands who disappear without warning or valid rationale.

Now as I approach another Father’s Day without my dad, I wonder if there are others like my sister and I, adult children of runaway husbands trying to figure out why other divorced dads maintain a relationship with their kids, but our dad chooses to stay absent from us and his grandchildren. Why we find ourselves in a unique place among adult children on Father’s Day.

We are not quite like those who have grown numb to the annual celebration because of decades of disappointment stemming from childhood. Nor can we claim the intense grief and sorrow that I can only imagine comes from a beloved father who has passed away. We are navigating the mix of disappointment and grief by trying to understand why he abandoned us.  We assume the reason is shame. He was a man who flagrantly dismissed parents for walking out on their families. Now he is that parent and Father’s Day will never, never, never be the same again.

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I’m working on providing services to the adult children of dads who left. If you feel your kids may welcome connecting with others who have gone through the same thing or receiving help from me, please email me at vikki@runawayhusbands.com.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Runaway Husbands

The fall of 2006 should have been the happiest time of my life. I had published my first book, My Sister, My Self, about sister relationships and had set out alone on a whirlwind book tour that took me 3,000 miles crisscrossing America. The trip was great but hard - 23 days in the car driving from bookstore to bookstore, eating practically all my meals at the wheel.

By the time I got to my last stop, San Diego, I was so looking forward to coming home to Montreal. I took the red eye back and fell into my darling husband's arms in relief when he picked me up at 8am at the airport. I was so happy to see him! He dropped me off at home and headed to work.

I spent the day getting organized but noticed a long dark hair in the bathtub when I took a shower. I didn’t think anything of it. I also was puzzled later that various dishes in the kitchen were in the wrong place. We’d lived there for years and we always kept the colander under the sink and the spatulas in the pot on the counter but now I had to search for them. Also a bit weird - but, no matter.

When my husband returned that night, I threaded my arm through his and said, “I bought fish” to which he responded, “It’s over.” I thought, weird, but said, “Okay, if you don’t want fish, we can have chicken.” And he said, “It’s over and I’m leaving you. Right now.” And he did. He moved right in with his girlfriend of six years who had been staying in my house while I was away.

That moment marked my descent into the nightmare that I’ve come to call Wife Abandonment Syndrome. Wife Abandonment Syndrome is when a man leaves out-of-the-blue from what his wife believed to be a happy stable marriage. There is typically another woman in the picture. One of the hallmarks is that the husband then turns angrily on the wife, blaming her and dismantling everything she knew as their loving joint history together. He seems to have no regard for his traumatized wife, even if he had been a loving and attentive husband days earlier, as mine had been.

After my husband left, I started researching this phenomenon and was amazed when I realized that it’s pretty common and that the features of how the men leave are almost identical from case to case. I started a study and interviewed women all over the world to whom this had happened. Based on the findings of the study, I wrote the book, Runaway Husbands, and launched the website, runawayhusbands.com. Very quickly we developed an international community of women supporting women through this terrible trauma.

This is not a typical divorce in which the wife may have seen it coming. In Wife Abandonment Syndrome, there are often no signs that the husband is unhappy or thinking of leaving, as was my case. When men leave in this way, their wives feel like they’re crazy and completely alone. When they stumble across our website, Googling in the middle of the night, they’re shocked to learn that it’s a “thing” and deeply comforted to be able to share what they are going through with others.

Recovery is a long and painful process. Initially, the wife is obsessed with understanding her husband’s motivation - how he could morph overnight from a loving husband into a cold and angry stranger? Once she’s been helped to see what was behind his actions, she will become freer to turn her focus from mourning her past to glimpsing her future.

I’m a psychotherapist so my goal in helping women in this situation is to guide them to a point where they can see this crisis as a springboard for change. The first year after wife abandonment is very rough, but with enough support, the wife left behind can start to see possibilities for her life as a single woman and hopefully, be able to flower into embracing her new life.

Over the years, I’ve developed therapeutic resources to provide help both online and face-to-face. The power of being part of a healing community cannot be underestimated - when women get together, they offer each other both strategies and support. We have a Facebook group, newsletter, online meditation group and what we call Healing Circles - where women can meet others locally in their towns to provide support. These exist in cities all over the world.

I’m able to work personally with women through online therapy groups where we can see and hear each other, just as if we were in the same room. We meet together in yearly retreats in Montreal and Sedona, Arizona and for those that need more support, private Skype therapy sessions are available. Our community is powerful, with active participants in Australia and New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Nigeria and Ghana, Britain, Europe, Canada and the US.

I know how powerfully women suffer and grieve following Wife Abandonment Syndrome. I’ve been there. But I also know that this trauma can also be used for what is called post traumatic growth, in which women are forced to strengthen themselves so they can manage their thoughts and emotions and develop a profound new understanding of their lives. Although they can’t see it when they’re in the midst of it, they’re not always going to feel this badly.

Let me know your response to this post in the comments below. Did it touch you?

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Don't Blame Yourself if You Didn't See it Coming

I’m at the Sedona Retreat and in our workshop yesterday some women were saying that they feel badly that they didn’t see the signs that their husband was thinking of leaving. When they look back, they can recognize the ways in which he was acting differently. He may have been disappearing for periods of time, left a clue in the form of a receipt for lingerie or mentioning some woman at work too often. He may have been avoiding closeness or even being just plain irritable.

In Runaway Husbands, I talk about the hair in the bathtub. When I returned from being on the road for my 23 day book tour, I took a shower and noticed a long dark hair in the bathtub. Now what is a more clear sign that another woman has taken a shower in my bathroom than a hair in the bathtub?!? But it didn’t register. Why?

Because my relationship with my husband was one of blanket trust. It was inconceivable to me that he was having an affair (let alone in my bed). It was completely beyond any expectation that I could have had of his behavior while I was away.

We humans depend on the fact that things continue in the same pattern that we expect. The sun always rises in the east and if, one morning, it seems to be rising in the west, we would assume that we’re reading it wrong. Our expectation that the sun will rise in the east is so powerful that information to the contrary is close to impossible to integrate into our thinking.

When something happens that doesn’t fit the pattern, we don’t let it penetrate. That new odd piece of information just skitters off our brains and we reject it. It takes time for us to be able to let it in, particularly when doing so threatens our sense of security.

We have a primitive need to  always protect our sense of security. So if you blame yourself for not seeing it coming, don’t. You were only being human.

Do you blame yourself for not having seen the signs? Share your thoughts below.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – How He Morphs into an Angry Stranger

We were talking tonight in the Hearts & Minds Recovery Group about how mystifying it is when our husbands change from being the loving man we knew for so long into a critical angry stranger. We were saying that we could all remember those turning point moments right after we learned that our husband was leaving when we were hit with the bizarre terms of our new reality – when he said things and behaved in ways that, in his former incarnation, he would never have done.

For example, my own husband was always very loving, and I was 100% secure that he was protective and wanted the best for me. The night he left, he had told me about his long affair. I referred to his girlfriend in some negative way and he said, “Don’t talk about her like that!” That shocked me. He was protecting her (this stranger) instead of me. It demonstrated that his allegiance had shifted and he was now relating to her like he had related to me for twenty-one years – like a caring, protective husband. That was one of the early moments that indicated to me how radically he’d changed.

In our group tonight, we spent a long time discussing how that happens – how did the old husband (a known quantity) suddenly shape shift into this alien. As we were talking, I had an epiphany that I wanted to share. It focuses on the turning point moment, the rupture, during which he changed. Up until that moment, he was keeping his options open by acting like he had always done. He had not declared that the marriage was over and the potential to remain was still possible.

He had to have had some ambivalence about walking away from his life as he knew it and because runaway husbands by definition are conflict avoiders, he may still have not gotten the courage to take the leap. But once his intention to leave is out in the open, he no longer has to keep up a façade. He has nothing to lose and he is now free to make visible what he had been keeping secret for so long – his rejection of the marriage and the transfer of his loyalty to the other woman, if one is in the picture.

After he has blurted out his intention, he no longer has to keep his options open – that door has closed behind him. It must be a huge relief for him to be able to give up the fiction that he is devoted to you alone. His resentment of the stress that he felt to keep you in the dark erupts (irrationally) in anger towards you. He had all this pressure inside which is now released along with the need to keep acting like he’s someone he’s not.

He resents you for putting him in the position of having to hide and lead a double life (okay – I said it’s not rational!) and that resentment can finally find expression. The guy who loved and protected you is free to morph into an angry stranger when it’s no longer in his interest to keep connected to you just in case he chickens out and doesn’t leave.

He has crossed the bridge from his old life to his new one at that moment of rupture and the landscape is completely different from his point of view. He’s no longer bound by the expectations of his life that existed a few moments earlier.

I hope this helps you understand a little bit more how your husband changed so radically out-of-the-blue. Please add to the conversation by posting your comment below.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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The Other Woman

Almost all of us who have experienced Wife Abandonment Syndrome have to come to terms with the fact that there was another woman involved. Unlike the variety of sexual encounters that some men have with other women (on-line in chat rooms, one night stands on business trips, massages with “happy endings”, strip clubs and paid sex, to name a few), most men who run away do so because they are involved with a real flesh and blood woman. They are often having an affair in the classical sense, one that involves secrecy and sex, but also emotional involvement.

Women in our Runaway Husbands community deal with this female intruder in a variety of ways. Some see her as an evil temptress who preyed on a vulnerable man who would never have strayed were he not lured into it. Others see her as a bit player in the drama – it if hadn’t been this particular woman, it would’ve been someone else.

Who the other woman actually is varies from case to case, but the typical one is someone he met at work or knew from high school or is his person trainer – someone you don’t actually know (that was my case). In the atypical and truly awful case, she’s a friend (either yours or a friend of the family) or your daughter’s babysitter or swim coach.

During those months just after your marriage ended when you’re out of your mind, you may become obsessed with her. She’s a huge threat (why did he choose her over you?) and you desperately need to understand her allure. You hate her and blame her and probably want to hurt her somehow. If she’s married, you may be tempted to or actually do contact her husband to screw up her life like yours has been.

Here’s a quote from an abandoned wife on this topic: “I used to spend countless hours wondering how the OW, knowing we had a large loving family, could help push the relationship. I realize now that she didn't think anything. They are so caught up in each other that it justifies their behavior. And who knows what the former husbands have told her. He can tell her anything. She probably thinks she is rescuing him.”

In the early days, you will want to pump your husband for details, needing to know how it happened, where and when they met and how often they saw each other. And then, you probably want to know more – does he love her, what did they do sexually, what are his plans with her (sub-text, will she replace you in his life?) But it’s a double-edged sword because each piece of information pierces your heart and then gets lodged in your brain. The more you know, the worse you feel. Knowing details hurts you more and makes you feel even more betrayed.

You probably can’t help yourself and refer to her as whore or bitch, even if you’re not typically the type of women who talks like that. It helps a tiny bit to lessen the pain. One shocking moment I experienced in the every early days was when I referred to my husband’s girlfriend as a whore and he said, “Don’t talk about her like that. I love her.” OUF! That was rough. I realized the hard way that he was more allied with her than he was with me.

Some wives actually meet with the other woman and regret it. One told me “She just gave me boat loads of more crap to be distressed about.”

A typical question people ask me even now, eleven years after my husband left, is “Are they still together” and frankly, I don’t know. I’m very self disciplined and won’t allow myself to ask the friends we have in common – I don’t want to put them in an uncomfortable position. And as much as I might be interested, I don’t really care. I wrestled the other woman to the ground in my mind early on so she dropped off as an integral part of my drama. This was between my husband and me – she was unimportant.

So what advice do I have for you about the other woman?

1)    Hang on to your dignity and stop using dirty words to refer to her. It feels good for the moment but brings you down in some psychic way (if even to yourself).

2)    Stop asking about the details of the affair. He may be tempted to tell you!

3)    Recognize that most runaway husbands have told the other woman that the marriage is virtually over and his wife knows it. He lies to you and he lies to her too.

4)    Self discipline – as soon as you can manage it, stop checking her Facebook page, stop asking everyone about her, stop stalking her. It makes you look bad and feel badly.

5)    Don’t try to meet with the other woman. There’s nothing good that will come of it.

6)    Turn down the volume on her importance in your life. Unless she was a friend, this is really about you and him.

7)    And be kind to yourself! As a matter of fact, give yourself a hug right now!

I know you have your own story about the role of the Other Woman in your life. Add your comments below!

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