Midlife Crisis Spouse Must Love Self

When he is stuck and wandering the earth, you must keep going.

When it happened to me, I struggled to get out of bed each and every day. My kids wouldn’t bother me and let me be alone. But I know they knew I had to get back on with my life.

So I did.

Although I was consumed with 2 billion thoughts per second on what HE was doing and where HE was and who HE was with, the truth is, none of that was in my control. I could obsess about all of that, every moment of every day but I also knew THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO.

Nothing.

That sucked. I was a fixed. I could fix anything. Except spiders on the ceiling. And at the moment, the fixer of that was gone too. UGH. Many spiders in our home grew big ass families during this time. (In the end 3 years later the bug company Terminex solved that problem – but that’s another story)

But what I realized was I did have control over ME. ME. ME. Oh, and the dog. He can’t do anything without me.

So as hard as it was I really had to make myself stop thinking. Stop the wheel from obsessing so that I could focus on ME. I had to get better. I had to remember this was my life and that I was in control of what I wanted.

What did I want? My husband home. So I can’t get that? What now?

I wanted to be happy. Where did my happiness go.

I wrote down all the things that made me happy and FORCED myself to do them. There I was doing things that made me happy looking and feeling like hell.

But there were moments when I didn’t think about him. I was free from my thoughts when I was out having fun with my kids or friends. So I kept going…kept doing the fun things.

Truth is being healthy and happy is all about how you feel about yourself. If you like yourself, you can make it though hard times faster than if you struggle with self-love.

Research shows being kind to your own self helps resiliancy after any major crises. A study published in Psychological Science, found that newly divorced people who spoke compassionately toward themselves adjusted significantly better in the next 10 months than those who spoke more harshly. With self-compassion outperforming self-esteem and even optimism as a predictor of good coping.

The other part to that is, you can’t really love others if you don’t love you first. This is the hard part for those with MLC, they are facing so much adversity, in life and the way they talk to themselves, that they dive quick into finding anything that makes them feel better on the outside cause they feel horrid on the inside.

So what do you do?
1) meditate.
2) do things you like to do (FORCE youself) and if you don’t know what you like to do – do ANYTHING – tag along with others going and doing.
3) Be of service. Church. Homeless. Talk to old lonely people (the minute you realize there are others WORSE than you, that you can help (because you have control over you) you WILL start to feel better.
4) call me. Helping wives though this uncertain hell is what I do.