When Chaos at Home Turns You Into Someone You Don’t Recognize

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. This story recently came through at dearDSO.com, and it's one that really drives home a hard truth. Chaos in your marriage doesn't just hurt your relationship. It can change you. And often it doesn't just change you for the better. Today I'm going to share this listener's journey of dysfunction, betrayal, and self-destruction, and the lessons every man needs to hear. Dave writes into Dear DSO and says, I have been watching your content for quite some time now, and I thought I'd share my story with you and your audience. I am a 42-year-old male, married for 17 years with 5 children. I work in medicine and I have 2 full-time jobs, yet somehow managed to start up a successful real estate investment business about 10 years ago. My wife, also 42, has recently moved 3 hours away to one of my vacant rentals without securing employment and has taken all 5 children with her. And enrolled them in the schools where she now lives. I was against this idea from the get-go, but she did it anyway. It has been about a month since she left. We have had more than our share of trouble in our marriage leading up to this point. She filed for divorce about 10 years ago, claiming that I was abusive, drunk, reckless, etc. You name it, she accused me of it. After 9 weeks of pure hell and me being about 60 pounds lighter, she decided to not follow through with the divorce. At the time, I was relieved because I was able to reunite with my then 3 children who were under the age of 10 at the time. There was no real effort on my wife's part to reconcile, and everything she did during that time was "all's fair in love and war," quote unquote. After that, I decided to get my body in shape and level up my finances, which led me to starting a business. Fast forward to 3 years later, my wife decides to secretly go on fertility medicine, which resulted in the conception of 2 more children. Recognizing the needs of my growing family, I have been gradually picking up extra work over the last 5 years and have not been able to focus on the business that I created, resulting in stagnation at best. Despite all of the above, something snapped in me when I learned that child number 5 was on the way. I started seeing other people and having multiple sexual encounters, including threesomes with people that I met on different dating apps. This led me to start escorting for a handful of clients. Well, that's a new one. I have mixed feelings about who I used to be compared to the person I have become now. It's like I'm completely unrecognizable to myself. Never in a million years did I ever intend for any of these kind of things to be going on in my marriage. Shifting back to my wife moving away with her children this time, I received a very disturbing email from my eldest daughter who is 17. My daughter describes in detail how my wife verbally and physically assaulted my 13-year-old and asked for me to somehow calm them both down while I'm 3 hours away from them. This isn't the first time that this has happened. My wife has been volatile with me for years. I've spoken with several divorce attorneys about this, and the law doesn't seem to care. Now that my older children are teenagers, she has demonstrated the same volatility towards them. This week I met with yet another attorney and showed him— showed this person the email that my daughter sent and was informed that I might have a decent chance at getting custody, as it's pretty evident that my wife does not seem capable of making good decisions. After all, she is dealing with caring for 5 children, unemployed, and has transportation issues as a result of her totaling 2 vehicles within the last 5 months. It's pretty clear to me what the next step is, and I'm well aware that it is long overdue. I'm not necessarily seeking advice from this entry, as I am also just wanting to share my story with you and to your audience. I hope that my story can serve as a lesson for some of the men out there and that staying with these chaotic women do not make you a better person. If anything, it will most likely morph you into someone that you don't recognize or even particularly like. I am well aware that I have a lot of recovery to do, especially recovering a lot of my lost integrity along the way. Well, that's a different one. In essence, the basis is the same as a lot of messages that I receive from people. One of a lot of chaos and dysfunction, words that he uses in this message, and one that I use often in a lot of my work. Yeah, pretty chaotic situation. You are with, fundamentally, with a person who has a lot of issues, and a lot of issues around coping and regulating emotion and all kinds of things. I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or any kind of -ist of any kind, no therapist, nothing. But I've talked to a lot of people over the past decade decade plus, and this is not that unusual. And your wife has problems. And guess what, my friend? So do you. Number one, the evidence of your problems is you were with a person like this for so long. And number two evidence is that you went down a pretty, um, shady road, I guess you could say. I don't know what the best term here is for this, but, um, you did some not so savory things in the middle of all this with the, the introduction of child number 5 kind of sent you down a spiral, didn't it? I don't know exactly how to identify what caused or what, what it was about child number 5 that caused you to go off the rails like this, but you went to like a hypersexual mode of trying to connect and give validation and everything else. I don't know if there was a part of you that was deep down felt some kind of hyper jealousy, rejection, or whatever by the introduction of child number 5. It was the fact that you had 5 children with a woman who is objectively kind of not well, and this was your very equally not well way of coping with that, dealing with that. I don't know. But, um, you say in the end that you've got a lot of work to do in yourself and recovery and so forth. What I worry about is this, and I know you didn't ask for advice or anything, but hey, here it goes. Um, you have kind of framed this, the entirety of your, uh, unhealthy behavior, you framed it as— whether you intended this or not, this is how I took it— By virtue of the fact that I've been in this unhealthy relationship with this unhealthy person, I am doing unhealthy things. Which it could be argued, my friend, that regardless of who was in her place, some kind of stressful situation is going to come up in life, and you may, regardless of the origin of said stress, may react in this way or in some way equally chaotic and unhealthy. In other words, what you did with the hypersexual let's, you know, say what it is, like cheating kind of behavior and this escorting, which is way out there, my friend. Like, oof, that's, that's tough to read. Um, maybe something like that would have bubbled to the surface later on in life regardless if you had a super healthy partner or not, you know what I mean? So you got some issues to work on and you have some issues to work on in terms of your method of coping and regulating yourself and putting up boundaries around yourself. And not going down these really extreme roads of behavior and stopping yourself before it gets that far. Regardless of who's in place of your wife down the line, assuming there probably will be somebody that takes her place down the line, you need to figure out how to, how to regulate yourself and how to take care of yourself and find out what the origin of this behavior of yours is. Because yeah, that's, that's pretty unusual. That is officially the first time I have ever heard in over a decade of doing this Somebody say, and I started escorting, which for those that don't know what that means, selling his body, I assume, for sexual favors to others for money. Oof, that's pretty out there. Pretty unusual for a dude to do that. That's an industry, as I'm sure you're aware, that is dominated by women. But very interesting story. I posted the text of this submission already on my Dad Starting Over Facebook page, and the general consensus seems to be, Wow, what a dysfunctional dumpster fire of a situation. We feel sorry for those poor little kids, and I would have to agree. We got two people that are having a very difficult time navigating life in a healthy way, and, uh, we got five little kids caught in the mix, caught in the middle of all that. They need somebody that is strong and stable to, uh, take care of them and be the solid footing or ground under their feet, so to speak. You know, when everything feels kind of shaky, they need to know that they can go to somebody that's going to be there for them and be stable and dependable. And that needs to be you, it sounds like. But you need to get on top of your past behavior to make sure that that doesn't come up again and cause even more chaos for those poor kiddos. So take care of yourself and take care of those kids. And as I'm sure you're aware, leave the lady friend alone there. Let her do her thing. Yes, her life is going to implode, and it sounds like you need to work hard with your attorneys to get, um, custody of those children. And I do wish you all the best, and I thank you for sharing your story. And guys, thank you so much for listening, and we will catch you on the next one.