When I answer this question for you, I can answer it for 1000 other women who are married to men I call “Chaos Kids”. That’s because this list of 17 things that you are reporting (below) is a description of the famous midlife crisis. So your husband is in a midlife crisis… Are you really surprised? Of course you are! That’s because you knew nothing about his childhood when you married him. You believed that his childhood would have no effect on the rest of his life but you would be absolutely wrong. You, like everyone around you, continue to believe that your childhood has nothing to do with the rest of your life. You believed it was just a memory and that you have complete free choice to do anything you choose and so does your husband. All of this is completely wrong and everyone I talk to refuses to believe it. When I say “everyone”, I’m really talking about the people who are not in pain.

1. How can I meet my husbands need when he is no longer in the home.
2. married for 22 years
3. He said he loved me but didn’t love me anymore.
4. Said he wanted to be friends,
5. he isn’t acting like a friend.
6. he left wouldn’t tell me or the kids where he went.
7. he moved into an apartment but he won’t tell us which one he is living in.
8. He is going to bars during the day and until 2 in the morning.
9. He doesn’t care about anything.
10. He won’t communicate with me or the kids
11. I ask what he’s doing he lies
12. I ask if he would go for coffee and he comes up with a reason not to.
13. How am I supposed to meet his needs if he won’t be the friend he said he wanted to be
14. I love my husband and will do everything to save my marriage.
15. I don’t know the right way to do it.
16. I feel that If i don’t keep contact that he will forget about me and the kids
17. He is acting like we never even existed.

The people who listen to me about Chaos Kids, or people married to them. Why are they in pain? It’s because they married a “Chaos Kid.” What is a chaos kid? It’s a boy or a girl who is raised by a mother and father, or a single mother or father who did not give them the 2 things a child needs most. I call these 2 things “The Kids Standard”. Number 1: “mom and dad, enjoy each other.” Number 2: “mom and dad, make me feel important and valuable.” Your husband most likely got neither of these things. In fact, he most likely had an extremely negative version of a mother and father relationship, a relationship with arguments, blame, tension, perhaps even physical violence. On the 2nd part of the Kids Standard, make me feel important and valuable, he could’ve been put down, criticized, blamed and or loaded down with guilt from one of these adults.

Now you are writing and explaining the result of his childhood to me. You are asking what you can do. But if I told you what to do 8 to 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have listened to me. That’s because you believed you married a normal man. A chaos kid is not normal. What you must do now is understand what your husband is going through by being possessed with this childhood pain.

What makes a chaos kid is a machine. That machine is in his brain and is loaded with instructions on how to re-create the marriage of his parents. I don’t even need to hear his story because I have heard hundreds of them. They are all virtually the same. The Kids Standard is destroyed in his 1st 10 years. Today, as an adult, the machine in his brain is raging at him to re-create the marriage of his parents. The pressure of this machine is so great, he is running far away from you because you are the source of the reminder. You continually remind him that he must stay and suffer like his father or mother did. He wants no part of it and so he is doing highly irresponsible and completely self-centered things.

You must understand that as a child, he wanted the kids standard which means he wanted to be what a kid is supposed to be… Self centered. Children are supposed to be takers their 1st 10 years. They are supposed to be taking from the parents and the parents are supposed to be giving. The parents are supposed to be giving the 2 elements of the Kids Standard. But instead, your husband was given nothing and even worse than nothing, he was given very negative things. Now this machine in his brain that carries all of these terrible instructions is causing him to become the child he never was able to be. He wants to take and he doesn’t want to give. He doesn’t have the emotional security to give anything. Many of these midlife crisis men can’t even keep a job.
You must accept that you have become a single mother. Midlife crisis in both men and women can last 2 to 5 years.

Your question is “What do I do now?”. The answer is 1st that you will need to learn something different than what you have always known. Everything you did has brought you to this spot. Both you and he contributed to where the 2 of you are now, you trying to save the family and him trying to destroy it. You must do something different. For most people in your situation, they start searching the Internet and asking for help and answers. There are plenty of people to help you but not all help same way. There is the conventional world of therapy where you go to an office and talk to a therapist. There is the world of coaching online and on the telephone with organizations such as http://www.pathpartners.com founded by Christine Schaap in 2003. She actually went through a midlife crisis herself and wrote a book to help men understand what they’re wives were going through. She now offers coaching programs to women and men. Michelle Weiner Davis has what she calls “the last resort of technique” which she admits doesn’t work for everyone but it is worth a try. http://www.divorcebusting.com/blog/how-to-prevent-a-divorce-the-last-resort-technique/ . Michelle’s organization also offers personal coaching.

Whether you work with my program, The Environment Changer, http://www.stopyourdivrocein4weeks.com or someone else in the coaching world, you need help now. You need to learn what you never knew and now you have to decide who can help you because you cannot go through this alone and expect everything to be fine. It’s time for you to learn… And we only learn when we are in pain.

How can I meet my husbands need when he is no longer in the home. We have been married for 22 years and together almost 23. He said he loved me but didnt love me anymore. Said he wanted to be friends, but he isnt acting like a friend. When he left the first time, he wouldnt even tell me or the kids where he went. Now he has moved into an apartment and we know where the apt. is but he wont tell us which one he is living in. He is now going to bars during the day and until 2 in the morning. He doesnt seem to really care about much of anything. He wont communitcate with me or the kids. When I ask what hes doing or where hes been, he lies or gives vague answers. I ask if he would go for coffee or ice cream and he comes up with a reason not to. How am I supposed to try to meet his needs if he wont be the friend he said he wanted to be and wont let me know where he is. I love my husband and am willing to do everything that has to be done to save my marriage. But at this point I dont know exactly the right way to do it. I feel that If i dont keep up some form of contact that he will go off and just forget all about me and the kids because thats the way hes acting. He is acting like we dont and have never even existed.

I know that this all seems new to you but I hear it all the time. I get e-mails, every day explaining that their husband/wife is acting like a 26-year-old, going to bars, drinking, hanging out with younger people, ignoring the wife and children and doesn’t want anything to do with responsibility. Over, and over, and over again. It’s like he’s suddenly transformed into someone else.

How did this happen? Parents who never solved their own childhood pain, dumped it on their children while these little kids brains were forming. That’s how it happened. That’s how it always happens. If you marry a chaos kid, a kid raised in a painful childhood home, you are going to get exactly what you have.

I could’ve warned you 22 years ago but you would never have believed that your husband’s childhood was going to come for him one of these days. I even have a statistic for you. A man from a chaos childhood cannot stay married more than 26 years before his childhood chaos overtakes him.

You got 22 good years out of him but now the midlife crisis owns him. That means somewhere between 2 and 5 years, if you are willing to live like a single woman, you can wait for all of this chaos to play itself out. Your husband is not in control of himself anymore. The chaos machine from his childhood is now in charge and he clearly is no longer himself. Your consolation? There are millions of women just like you who lost their husband to the midlife crisis just like you did. It’s a problem that was created in childhood and no one wants to admit it was ever there.

But as an alternative, you could become an environment changer and change everything.
Larry

Shelley

The snap line as I define it is a place where all the pain and rejection of a chaos kid’s childhood is heaped on a man in one short timeframe in his adult life. Whether it be man or woman, this pile of emotional pain drives the person to be convinced that the only source of this pain is you, the staying spouse.

Chaos kids have a phenomena where all of the pain that was dished out into their brain in those 1st 10 years, we’ll all be directed at you as the present day source of that pain. This makes absolutely no sense but this is the way it works in chaos kids. The world calls it a midlife crisis and that’s a good term but the snap line is the moment it finally begins.

When the snap line takes place, you are no longer the person he used to love. You are now the cruel parents or parent who poured all of this nasty treatment on him as a little boy. Your husband can no longer separate his childhood from the present-day and remember, this only applies to the intimate relationship. He does not get this weird in his social or work relationships, those are completely separate planets from the intimate relationship.

Your natural response is to ask about how to solve this problem. When you ask how to solve this problem, you are automatically inferring that this problem can be solved in a few weeks with some discussion and understanding on both of your parts. Your question is inferring that it’s something you need to say and some expert can tell you how to say. That would be completely wrong.

Once you enter this world of the chaos kid where his childhood comes for him, you are no longer married. You might be still in the legal arrangement called marriage, but in his heart there is no marriage. The only way I know how to save a chaos kid is for you to become an environment changer. I teach people how to become environment changers in my 8 week course and I try to keep people out of that course whose intuition is not guiding them to it. I don’t want people in this course who are just here to relieve their pain. They will never learn what I’m teaching.

Once the chaos childhood has come for your spouse, you are not in a conventional marriage situation anymore and conventional marriage techniques do not work here. It operates on a whole new set of laws that you don’t want to believe. Everything is upside down and nothing is normal. But you are still going at this like it’s a normal marriage and he is a normal man but there is nothing normal about him. The laws have all changed and you must learn what those laws are. But you may not be ready to learn what it takes to become an environment changer. This is why I created a one hour video that spells all of this out. I made one of these videos for women only and if you have not watched the whole thing I would encourage you to do it because I address many issues there in the woman version of the video. (www.stopyourdivorcein4weeks.com)

Larry

I just sent an e-mail to you regarding the snap line and what it was and how i feel that I may have pushed my husband of 22 years over the line. I would really like to hear more on this snap line. My husband does still talk to me but doesnt want to talk about anything personal. I guess because he knows it will turn into an arguement. I do call him and text him becuase I dont trust him. He did have an emotional affair with a co worker. And I thought that I might have over reacted until he told me that he had feelings for her and he didnt love me anymore and wanted to leave. I dont know what to do at this point. Hes been gone for 5 weeks now and I am hopeing that there is still hope. What does it take to bring your spouse back if they did go past the snap line?