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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When His Eyes Turn Cold

My husband left me the day I returned from twenty-three days on the road for a book tour for my first book. I had driven all alone from Boston to Atlanta, across the midwest and then from San Francisco to San Diego, giving readings at bookstores in towns along the way, on the move, day after day after day. It was rough.

When it was over, I took the red eye back from San Diego. My husband picked me up at the airport and I fell in his arms in relief. I remember the softness of his brown leather jacket caressing my cheek as I hugged him tight; secure in his love, I was so happy to see him.

He dropped me off at home and went to work. When he walked in the door that evening, my world as I knew it shattered. He had an odd expression on his face and muttered, “It’s over”. I was mystified. He repeated, “It’s over and I’m leaving you right now for another woman.”

I stared at his face and was shocked to realize that I didn’t recognize it. It was as if his familiar features had rearranged themselves and hardened. The light had gone out of his eyes and instead, they had turned cold. Later, I sat on the bed crying hysterically as he threw his stuff from the closet into plastic bags. He seemed unfazed. He really seemed not to care.

Where had the man I had known gone? The one who grabbed my hand whenever we were walking down the street. The one who showered me with love and affection. Who had written me a card on our anniversary a few months earlier that read, “You are my rock, you are my life!”

That was more than a decade ago and since then, I have dedicated my life to helping women who are going through the same trauma that I experienced. I guide them from ground zero through their painful obsessing, numbness and grief, till they can reach the other side of this nightmare and rebuild their lives.

Although there are many aspects to wife abandonment, the primary one which every woman struggles with is understanding how someone who cared for her so profoundly could just stop loving. How could that light go out of his eye? How could he disconnect so completely? It is very troubling and scary because if someone you felt so close to can turn against you so categorically, how can you trust anyone? It redefines the nature of all relationships and leaves you alone, not only in the physical sense, but also existentially. And that is why Wife Abandonment Syndrome is so devastating.

When I was studying psychology, I learned of an experiment by psychologist Dr. Edward Tronick, director of UMass Boston's Infant-Parent Mental Health Program, called the Still Face Experiment. In the experiment, a mother warmly interacts with her one-year-old baby girl and the baby responds delightedly. Then the mother assumes a still face and no matter what the baby does to engage her, the mother doesn’t respond. The baby becomes more and more agitated, screeching, arching her back and reaching for her mother wildly.

Watching it now moves me profoundly because that baby is us. Our loss of our sense of safety and the security of knowing what to expect from a person we depend on completely who then stops responding and gives us a still face stirs a panic inside. The world temporarily stops making sense.

During those early months post-abandonment, women obsess endlessly about how this could have happened. How could he change and not care? The primary task of recovery is to answer that question for herself. She needs to understand the flaw in the personality of her particular husband that permitted him to have been attached for so long and then so cavalierly detach from her and typically jump to another as if she and the affair partner were interchangeable. He focuses on getting his needs of the moment met without regard for the damage done.

I understand that sometimes marriages fall apart for all sorts of reasons and can accept that men or women feel the need to leave. The unique aspect of Wife Abandonment Syndrome however is that in leaving, the husband turns against his wife with disregard for her distress. His eyes turn cold.

The task then for the wife in recovery is for her to be able to detach eventually but because she doesn’t possess that same internal flaw, for her it is not so easy. Moving on, she will need to find the courage to accept that many other people are capable of making secure lasting attachments even if her husband was not.

Click here to watch the Still Face Experiment and please share with us your own experience of your husband’s eyes turning cold 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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Consumed by anger long after the marriage ends

After my husband left, the anger took a long time to come. During the first months, I was hurt, sick and stunned. Anger was nowhere in sight. But later, when the hurt started to subside, the anger filtered in and stuck around for a long time.

Many women tell me that they hate feeling so angry all the time but they can't help themselves. They seek revenge and wish they could make their ex-husbands suffer what they’ve been suffering. They dream up schemes to hurt the guy and the other woman and some even follow through with those plans, but no matter what they do, it never hits the mark. The ex never suffers what you want him to suffer and anyhow, it doesn’t make the anger go away.

I was thinking about how to help those women who can’t get out of anger’s grasp - after all, it’s not a nice feeling - when I happened to read an article in Harper’s Magazine called “Facing the Furies” by Rebecca Solnit and was struck by much of what she wrote.

Solnit referenced the philosopher Martha Nussbaum when she wrote, “The urge to exact revenge derives from our desire for ‘cosmic balance,’ as well as from our attempts to overcome helplessness through displays of power. By this logic, revenge rights the scales, despite doing nothing to restore what was lost or repair what was damaged.”

We long to restore cosmic balance. That rang true to me. We are indignant and outraged that a wrong has been done but helpless to set it right. The world doesn’t seem in balance and the continuing anger is a response to that.

Solnit later writes, “Anger generally arises from a sense of having been wronged.” The world is not the way it should be - OUR world is not the way it should be - and since we can’t correct that, we are left with just the tarry residue of bad feeling in the form of anger.

Interestingly, the author goes on to discuss why anger is so hard to dissolve. “Fury is a renewable resource: though the initial anger may be fleeting, it can be revived and strengthened by telling and retelling yourself the story of the insult or injustice, even over a lifetime.”

By retelling ourselves and others the story of the injustice, we are seeking validation. We need to remind ourselves and need to hear from others, “Yes! You didn’t deserve that! What he did was wrong, wrong, wrong!” It helps us feel a little bit better but keeping the story alive also keeps us trapped. It fuels the unending anger that will turn us bitter.

So how do we break free once and for all from that cycle of retelling ourselves and others the story of the injustice? It comes from finally really knowing that what he did was wrong. Even if you weren’t a perfect wife, he could have left with more kindness and respect. It comes from really knowing that you didn’t deserve to be “kicked to the curb.”

Once you have integrated that truth and really know it deep inside, you won’t have to keep reassuring yourself that it was not your fault and you will no longer need others to do the same. Then it gets easier to open your grasp and let it all go.

Stop replaying all the sordid events in your mind. Stop telling the story to anyone who will listen. Start thinking about your future life and expand the periods of time in which he doesn’t even cross your mind. Fight for that and you’ll watch the anger dribble away. Become a fighter for your happiness and don’t let him turn you into an angry person.

Is anger still a factor in your life? How do you deal with it? Share your thoughts in the comments 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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