Is my husband gaslighting me - saying whatever he wants to undermine my version of our relationship so that he can have an excuse for “having” to leave? Believing yourself in the face of someone else’s adamant denial of your reality requires grit. Trust your lived experience!

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 . . .

Rejection, betrayal and the loss of the dream of your future all figure into why it hurts so bad, but there is an even deeper reason. Attachment injury touches you in a primal place making that sudden loss of attachment feel like a physical assault.

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 . . .

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.

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 . . .

He responded, “It’s over.” That moment marked my descent into the nightmare that I’ve come to call Wife Abandonment Syndrome which is when a man leaves out-of-the-blue from what his wife believed to be a happy stable marriage . . .

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 . . .

It's mystifying when our husbands change from being the loving man we knew for so long into a critical angry stranger. Here's an explanation . . . 

Women in our Runaway Husbands community deal with the Other Woman in a variety of ways. Some see her as an evil temptress who preyed on a vulnerable man. Others see her as a bit player in the drama – it if hadn’t been this particular woman, it would’ve been someone else . . .