yippee!!!

That's great! Keep us posted...

OK MB community, I have an important issue where I could really use some advice and direction. Given that I've just begun working with Steve I realize it may seem that I am jumping the gun by looking for a solution to this issue, but as you will see, there are some time sensitive elements to the problem.

Here's the synopsis:

My wife has an older female friend whom she considers to be part of her family. She considers this woman to be her surrogate mother. The woman lives in another state. Over the past 19 years we have spent an enormous amount of time visiting this woman and her husband and normally vacation to see them every year. The woman is the one who introduced my FWW to the 19 year old POS with whom my wife had an EA. Wife's "friend" is the one who invited him over, encouraged them to play and hang out together while my FWW was vacationing alone at as a guest in her home.

On D-Day I only knew small parts of the story and immediately called this "friend" to get more info and to communicate that my W and her child, neighbor pet were having an A. She was adamant that there was no way the two were having an affair and was very defensive of the POS. As more details unfolded, "friend" told me things like "How can you blame a 19 year old kid for being attracted to (my W)?" In another conversation, she was irate with me on the phone and told me to never use the word "affair" around her, because she knows what an affair is (she WAS the other woman her husband broke up his family to marry) and that because my W didn't actually have sex with the POS, it was NOT an affair.

Following D-Day, my wife spent HOURS on the phone with her "friend" every day. Over the next six months, my wife vilified and slandered me to this woman. Naturally the woman now hates me and blames me for causing my FWW to be so emotionally broken that it's no wonder my W had such a melt down.

I know for a fact that the "friend" continued to feed my FWW news and updates about the POS after my W had agreed to no contact -- which kept him fresh in her mind.

Here's what threw me over the top on my decision to want this woman out of our lives in a very permanent way. In July 2011, my wife wrote a desperate love letter to the POSOM to thank him profusely for being such a wonderful catalyst in her life. The letter was full of bait intended to lure him back to her (...dream of me in your arms tonight. etc.). FWW conspired with her "friend" to deliver this letter to the POS. FWW mailed the letter to her "friend" who in turn hand delivered it to the POS. Incidentally, my FWW does not know that I know anything about this letter, or that her "friend" conspired to deliver it.

Here's where it gets more complicated. FWW's father was slowly dying while all this was going on. FIL bought into FWW's slanderous reinvention of our 18 year marriage and became very supportive of my W's decision to divorce. As a result, FIL changed his estate plan (his will) to protect the money that he planned to leave to FWW. His intent was to leave her a war chest to pay for her divorce expenses and to give her a head start in her new life. So FIL changed his will to leave FWW�s share of his estate to FWW�s �friend� in another state � her dear, sweet, trusted friend and surrogate mother� The game plan, as I understand it, was to have the �friend� gift the money back to FWW both directly, and via gifts to my children (By the way, it will be a cold day in H before I allow that to happen).

So here we are. FIL has just passed away. It may be weeks, months before FIL�s house is sold and money intended for my WFF is actually sent to the �friend.�

So what do I want? I want this woman out of our lives forever. In my mind, she was a clear enabler of not just an affair, but an especially despicable relationship between my FWW and a 19 year old child. I want to be clear that I don�t want the money in any way. It is ammunition for a potential custody battle over my children should my wife decide not to recommit to our marriage and to pursue her own selfish desire for �happiness.� I want my wife to agree, at some point in the future, to never contact these �friends� ever again. I don�t want to visit them again or see them again. I don�t want them to ever contact my children in any way. I am absolutely opposed to having her �friend� create a trust fund, or do anything with that money that involves my children. But if I were to tell her this right now, if I were to make this a condition of remaining married (at this stage of the repair process), I fear that FWW would give me the finger and walk out. At best, I believe that taking a hard line on eliminating this woman from our lives would cause a serious setback in our marriage recovery.

How do I cut this woman out of our lives without damaging the progress that I�ve invested 14 months of my life to achieve?

At what stage of the process will it be appropriate to deal with these issues?

This needs to be put aside for now. This is a matter for the policy of joint agreement and until your marriage is in a better position, you can't possibly tackle this tough issue. It would cause damage to try and untangle this mess right now. This goes on the back burner for now.

How tragic that this person is in your lives. What a poisonous person.

Normally if someone is an enemy to the marriage and has schemed/helped the affair, they are cut out of their lives when they are restoring their marriage. The money is a secondary issue which I see as a consequence for your wife slandering you to her father and the woman friend. Melody suggests this isn't the time for that to be an issue, but at some point it will have to be addressed!

for sure!!

Extremely frustrating, but I respect your advice.

So are you saying that the POJA is the solution to friends and family members who have shown themselves to be toxic to the marriage?

If one spouse says "Sorry, I'm not enthusiastic about you having anything to do with this person or that person" the relationship in question must end?

Yup.

Exactamundo! But you aren't going to be able to sell that today. If you tried to negotiate this today, it would result in WWII. Neither of you have the skills necessary to negotiate tough issues today. That is what this program will teach you both.

This whole issue is really bothering me so I feel compelled to add more details and phrase my question a little differently to see if you still feel the same way.

While I personally do not wish to ever see or hear from these "friends" (husband and wife) again, it is not the case that they were strictly friends of my wife. As I mentioned, my wife and I have together spent huge amounts of time with them over the past 18 years. So it can be said that they are (were) my friends too. The toxic woman's husband and I generally got along very well whereas I (and everyone else except my wife) merely tolerated the toxic woman.

It's also entirely possible that the toxic woman's husband doesn't even know about the damage she has caused.

Why must I put off for another day communicating to (former) mutual friends that I personally consider their relationship with my family to now be over for reasons X, Y and Z?

How is the urgency to remove those who contributed to and/or encouraged the affair any any different than the need to remove the OM/AP?

I consider this person to be a serious threat to my marriage. She has the ability to influence my wife and wants our marriage to end. Thanks to my FIL, this woman is now also involved in our legal and financial matters. While I recognize that being clear with my FWW about my position on this woman has the potential to cause damage, inaction on my part may result in damage as well.

As a follow on, I have strongly considered sending a long letter to the husband of the toxic woman to tell him in detail what his wife did and why it means our families cannot remain friends. I would also really like him to know the truth about a long list of things about which he has only heard my FWW's highly-distorted version of the truth.

What do you think? Would a letter of explanation from me to my former friend (the husband) be out of line? It would be up to him to disclose what I have told him to his wife or not. Perhaps this would not be seen as a direct assault on my wife's relationship with her BFF. Perhaps he would even take it upon himself to persuade his wife to leave us alone. He being the only sane one of the two.

Driven,

I was faced with a very similar situation with my FWW. SIL and long-time co-worker of FWW were enablers and major toxic elements to our marriage.

I waited until we were in R before breaching the subject. I think if I would have brought this to the table while FWW was in her fog, before we were in R and without a full buy in to MB by both of us, it would have not been taken well AT ALL. It would have been perceived as controlling.

See, the MB rule of protection and POJA is the key here. Never be the source of the others unhappiness, always protect the marriage and enthusiastically agree on everything.

Once we were in R, the mutual decision to address these toxic people became somewhat easy. I approached my SIL and inquired why she didn�t support my M during FWW�s A. �Didn�t go well and my SIL is now showing her true colors and doing many things that my FWW now sees that she was not a true friend. Same with her co-worker.

I know exactly where you are coming from. Timing is everything in how you approach this. When the time is right, you will have a much easier buy in than you do now.

Your urgency to address this person is overwhelming. I get that. However, you are treading on dangerous waters at this time.

Thanks so much for sharing your similar story. It really helps to hear how others have handled similar circumstances.

May I ask, did you get buy-in from your wife to confront the SIL about why she didn't support and defend your marriage? Did you pose this same question to the toxic coworker and others?

Her buy-in to approach SIL came from the FULL commitment to MB. Do you have SAA? LB�s? FILSIL? They taught us exactly what to do.

When both of you completely adopt MB as your guiding light, you both see that there are 2 kinds of people. 1) Friends of the marriage 2)Toxic elements. MB teaches you how to affair-proof your marriage.

My FWW also requested that I stop hanging around 2 long-time friends as well. Both of these people have always been good friends but she perceived them as threats. She didn�t like a lot of things that they did in their personal lives even though they never tried to influence me in a negative way.

Guess what I did? (and I was the BS) I said �honey, if it is that important to you and you truly want to affair proof our M and you see them as threats then I respect that fully�
Never ask for more than you are willing to give. EP�s go for BOTH of us. We both follow the same rules.

For the co-worker, actually severing ties with her was a non-negotiable requirement for me to consider R. That wasn�t up for discussion.

I was STRONG in my approach to boundaries and my requirements to allow her to earn my love and trust back. She knows that ANY breach to EP�s mean � you are out the door faster than you can say goodbye. Done. Period.

Be strong my man. She will respect you for it. Respect yourself.

One more note. MB doesn't teach tit for tat.

re; her asking me to give up my 2 friends. It wasn't 'well you said we need to cut X out of our lives so YOU are also cutting Y out of YOUR life'.

No not at all. Negotiations must be respectful,both mutually agreed upon and enthusiastic by both.

It was a rough morning. First argument like that in a month or more. While FWW's dad was dying over the past six weeks, progress on our marriage had pretty much stopped. We have had very little time or opportunity to talk about much of anything but her dad and occasional emergency logistics. So there had been a lot of things building up I think.

What set her off was that she had once AGAIN gone off and made plans (in this case involving our children) without talking with me about it first. I'm figuring out this is a huge LB for me. As is usually the case, she didn't even bother to tell me. I find out *after*, which makes me really mad as this same bad movie has played out a thousand times. I guess MB would call this Independent Behavior? The polar opposite of teamwork in any case.

I wanted to sit down to coordinate our schedules, the kids activities etc... because it all has impact to both my work and hers (we are both self employed and school is out for the summer). She resorted to the extremely defensive, argumentative, pessimistic, venomous behavior she has displayed since D-day (off and on, mostly on).

The remotest objection by me to any independent behavior by her sets her off instantly. So for 15 months I have faced the same dilemma: say nothing and let her do whatever the hell she wants, or say something (no matter how gentle my approach) and set off a hand grenade. When her actions involve my children, it is really, really hard for me to bite my tongue.

At one point she broke down in tears and said she just can't do this. She also told me she thought I was crazy (oh the irony) which I have to admit was really hurtful. In her mind, her negative behaviors, her intensely negative responses to me are all 100% my fault. It's maddening.

She's like a powder keg waiting to explode. Attempting to talk with her about anything important or serious causes her walls to go up within seconds and all bets are off.

I get SO SO tempted in times like that to say "fine, if that's the way you are going to behave, if you aren't willing to even try to be civil, if you're not willing to really work on our marriage -- there's the door." But I stop myself knowing that such an exchange could very quickly devolve into a situation where it really would be over in a permanent way.

Partly I'm just venting by writing this. I'm also trying to follow BlackHawk's example of posting descriptions of her behaviors day to day. Maybe others will be able to help me figure out how to deal with her in a way that will help me turn this around. Thank you for listening...

Today was an important day I think... Almost two weeks ago I had my first phone consultation with Steve and he gave me my first assignment. What he asked me to do was seemingly simple, but turned out to be difficult to accomplish, for a variety of reasons. My task was to tell FWW that I had spoken to Steve and ask her, "Do you agree that the best possible scenario for you, FWW, is to be truly in love with the father of your children?"

Mind you, my FWW's FIL passed away a couple weeks ago (just after I spoke to Steve), so I have been trying to be as supportive and loving as I can be under the circumstances. The challenge is that she wants to avoid like the plague ANY conversation about our marriage, working on our marriage, day-to-day challenges, issues, etc. Merely suggesting that I would like for us to find a time to talk is a sure ticket to an icy cold shutdown by her.

After a pretty good drinks and a movie date last night, I was finally able to get her to sit down this afternoon to talk for 45 minutes.

As I predicted, no matter how calmly and cheerfully I start the conversation, she turns to ice, ready to strike back with a barrage of DJ's and pessimism. But I got through it and told her about MB's, Steve, Dr. Harley's books etc. and finally asked my question. Her answer was essentially "That would be a "good" outcome, I don't know that it's the only outcome, but it's a good one, sure."

While I'm pretty happy about her answer, the general sentiment I picked up from her was in line with what she has convinced herself since D-day. I feel like she still believes she could be WAY happier somewhere else with some other guy.

The other milestone is that I got her to commit to reading both books (LB and HNHN) by Friday. This because I seriously want her opinion on this whole MB concept and whether or not she thinks it might work for us.

Also asked her to agree to talk to Steve after reading the books. She told me she wasn't willing to make a decision on that yet.

Progress anyway, and it didn't turn into a huge fight at least.

Here's a question about an issue that did come up. Ever since our experience with the deplorable marriage counselor we saw right after D-day, the "M" word has been in her vocabulary non-stop. Everything I do, according to her, is "Manipulation." Here's today's example. Hopeful that I would be able to persuade FWW to read LB, I ordered two copies of the book, one for me, one for her. I like to highlight my books and if I read a book first, she is convinced everything I highlighted was directly intended to communicate a message to HER. So I ordered two copies at the same time I ordered one for myself. When I mentioned tonight that I had already purchased a copy of LB just for her, she immediately accused me of "manipulation." Went on about how I always have an agenda... What do you think? Was it manipulative of me to order a copy of a book for her that I was hopeful she would read? Or is this remnants of wayward fog?

She is in the fog. I wouldn't argue with her. Just say, I am sorry you feel that way.

Agree please read these.

Female wayard fog disassembled and decoded
Wayward fog disassembeled and decoded

She actually started reading the LB book!