When Trauma Destroys Everything

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. How does a person who seems to have their whole life together, you know, they can string decades together of consistency, of normalcy, of what appears to be positive mental health. How can they go from that to suddenly blowing it all up? Blowing up their career, ruining their family, leaving their children, leaving their husband. It doesn't make any sense. Well, that's the exact question behind the message that I have received from a follower. We'll call him John. He gives his real name. He says, Ralph, my story is one that I don't hear much from you. So I was curious if you think it's abnormal as I think it is. He says, I swear everything was great with my wife and I up until her dad died. I hear this all the time. He says, as soon as he passed away, he died of a heart attack after living a very unhealthy lifestyle. My wife literally went crazy. She lost a lot of weight, but not in a healthy way. She started drinking too much. She disappeared for days at a time. Later, she left to start a new life with one of the guys that she slept with. One of four that I know of. I'm sure there are more. My wife is an educated woman who makes a great deal of money as a— I will leave off her profession in order to protect her anonymity here. He says she has worked extremely hard her whole life to get to where she is. We have two kids, ages 11 and 9, and they are destroyed by this. They barely see their mom. I just can't believe that a person can hold their life together and succeed at such a high level and then suddenly throw it all away like this. I know you often talk about red flags and childhood baggage. Yes, she had all of that, but she worked really hard on herself. She did the therapy. We talked about her stuff all the time. Now she is acting like she has been literally brainwashed. I don't recognize her at all. This is the scariest thing I have ever endured in my life. That whole part where he says, I don't recognize her anymore, that's what we need to talk about here. All that nastiness that you're going through right now, John, and others that are going through this, that didn't begin with the death of her father. That was the trigger, so to speak, but that wasn't the cause. That's not where all this stuff began. Because major loss in adulthood, like the death of her father, that didn't cause all the trauma that you're seeing, that just removed the lid, so to speak. A lot of people are walking around right now with what we call unresolved childhood wounds or trauma that is bubbling under the surface. They've been carefully managing this trauma, all the emotional impact of this awfulness that they endured as a kid. They're managing it via achievement, hyperachievement, and control, day-to-day routines, And when something big hits, like the death of a parent, all that structure collapses. And from the outside looking in, it all looks very sudden and very random, but it's not at all. John, in his message here, he even acknowledges it. He says that, yeah, she has the childhood baggage. Yeah, she's got the red flags. And to her credit, God bless her, she even did the therapy. But here's what often gets missed in all of this. A lot of these people with this hyperachieving and the childhood trauma and all that stuff, they develop what's called kind of an avoidant form of attachment. It's not because they're cold or they're evil or they don't care. It's because they learned something at a very early age. They learned that my needs as a child overwhelms other people, and therefore I need to learn to take care of myself. I gotta handle things on my own. I can't depend on others to do it. That avoidant attachment teaches people to suppress their needs, to rely on competence instead of connection, by keeping relationships stable, by keeping themselves contained. And therefore, they equate any kind of vulnerability with chaos and being out of control. And this mindset pairs perfectly with this hyper-high levels of achievement that we see in a lot of ladies like this. That hyperachievement naturally gives people distance and a structure and a sense of self-worth without having to rely on other people emotionally. That's huge. And then something breaks that system. When an avoidant high achiever, high-functioning person faces one of these acutely terrible, you know, dramatic moments, emotional moments, their instinct is not to dive in to face it and so forth, but it is to retreat. They pull away. They do not seek help. They don't process it out loud in a healthy way. They don't stay present in the moment. They disappear. They disappear emotionally at first, and then eventually some of them disappear physically. They leave the relationship, or as Mr. John here experienced, they leave the family. Mommy goes bye-bye. When that avoidance meets trauma, what you will often see is emotional shutdown followed by a lot of impulsive, crazy behavior. They will have secret lives instead of shared grief. They will have affairs instead of real vulnerability with their partner. In essence, they will do things to create distance instead of doing like actual real repair, because that real repair, that's the tough stuff. So they seek out the easy stuff like sex with others. That becomes a form of regulation. Novelty, newness, that gives them relief. And disappearing from the family and from the relationship and all that boring, normal, but very vulnerable, yet kind of scary stuff that gives them comfort. From the outside looking in, that looks very selfish because it is, but to them it's a means of survival. High performers do not heal their trauma, they run from it. They stay busy, they stay productive, and they stay impressive to others. That hyper level of achievement that they're experiencing, that they're creating for themselves, that becomes a form of anesthesia to them. You can think of it as that avoidance keeps all those emotions boxed up, and then the hyper-level of achievement that they experience, that keeps the box from being shook. But when something finally cracks that box open, oh shit, all hell breaks loose. And instead of sadness, you get panic. And instead of connection, you get escape. When guys say to me, "It feels like she's a zombie, that she's been taken over by aliens, that she's been brainwashed, like she's acting like a crazy teenager," what you're seeing is the collapse of her identity. Because anytime you endure such a trauma, especially when you're a person like that, it destroys your sense of self. The fact that you have an avoidant form of attachment means that you don't have any real form of connection a baseline, as part of who you are. If you have an avoidant form of attachment, that means that your identity was never rooted in connection with others. Therefore, when the structure dismantles, when the whole structure collapses, you, you have nothing to grab onto. No connection with others, no sense of safety there, no sense of community, so to speak. So what those people often do is they'll reach out for new people and new beliefs new way of seeing the world, a new perspective on everything. And with all those things, they're basically looking for something that says, this is the reason that I feel this way. It is not unusual for guys in this situation to tell me that this woman is taking on, like, personality traits that she never had before. She's— she now has interests in things that she used to flat out hate. Like, she's just done a complete 180. This woman is a new human being. And yes, it is, because the old person that you knew was based on suppression, boxing everything in, and it was based on performing for others, hyperachievement. All right, it sounds like I'm making excuses for all this shitty behavior. I wanna make it perfectly clear, these are not excuses. Trying to understand the root cause of something doesn't mean excusing it. It doesn't mean, "Hey dude, you should be patient. Just wait until she goes through her midlife crisis and comes back and welcome her with open arms." Learning about her avoidance and past trauma and everything does not excuse her behavior in any way, shape, or form. Nothing justifies the betrayal that you experience. Nothing justifies her leaving the kids, for God's sakes. Nothing erases her accountability as an adult human being. Your pain as a dude experiencing this still matters, and the pain of your kids, frankly, that matters even more. And the whole Mr. Nice Guy blaming yourself for all this stuff, all that does is just lead to a dead end. That's getting you nowhere in life. You cannot love your way out of this. You can't fix this, dude. Just don't even bother. She is a very broken human being that has some stuff that she needs to figure out, and you do not need to be around for it. But it does help you to understand where she's coming from. So frankly, you can learn more about your boundaries and where your responsibilities begin and end, and so you don't do this all over again with the next woman, because the chances are you're the type of guy who actually attracts this type of person to you, and you're attracted to them. So you need to be aware of it so you don't do this all over again. And yes, I see guys doing it all over again. Oh, I don't know, thousands of times. Because you, dude, you have your own issues too. Otherwise you probably wouldn't have been in a relationship with a woman like this and endured a relationship like this. I know a lot of you say, "Dude, she was perfectly fine up until then." But with just a little bit of, you know, genuine recollection about how the events transpired in their marriage, usually about after 10 minutes of talking to the guy, we will uncover the fact that, oh no, this woman has had issues from day one. He, like most nice guys in his position, just dutifully ignored red flag after red flag after red flag. And it got him exactly where he is now, with a wife who has imploded, or exploded rather. And the damage from her explosion has ruined a lot of lives, unfortunately. And eventually a lot of guys work on themselves and become a more secure version of themselves. And they start realizing exactly what it is they're looking for in a long-term mate, in a life partner, in a spouse, in a girlfriend or whatever it may be. And what you're looking for is somebody who is what we call kind of an integrated person. And the integration, so to speak, doesn't necessarily mean insight into their own situation, but rather emotional capacity. An integrated person can feel emotion and fear without running from it. They can stay present under emotional stress. They can ask for support instead of escaping. They can experience desire without it blowing up their life. And they can tolerate vulnerability, which is a very normal human thing, without emotionally collapsing. They still hurt. They still struggle. Again, Welcome to being a human being, but they do not implode. Trauma to an integrated person can be felt, it can be contained, and it can be communicated and shared. That is the difference between grief and self-destruction. So what do we learn from all this? Functioning as your spouse has done, your high-achieving spouse has done all these years, is not a form of healing. Success is not a resolution. And just having insight and recognizing your problem, like it sounds like John's wife did, that's not resolution. That's not real integration. And what further confuses all this is that avoidant tendency stuff, it kind of looks like strength until it doesn't. What I'm about to say is very important for all you guys listening, all you anxious dudes out there. You cannot build a life with somebody, a stable life with somebody, whose trauma is unintegrated, whose attachment system defaults to distance. This is precisely why patterns in life matter more than just empty promises. That's not to make you a very overly cynical and negative person, but that is to make you a realistic person who sees things clearly. Guys, if this hits close to home for you, and I know it does for a lot of you, you are not alone. You have lived through something that is very disorienting. A lot of people just do not understand it, and it ruins a lot of lives. This is in part why I wrote the book "Rebuild," and you can learn more at readrebuild.com. The book helps men to orient themselves in their life after a giant chaotic event like this. It allows you to understand and to rebuild without repeating all the same mistakes. That is huge. And this is why our support community, the Brotherhood, the Help for Men Brotherhood, and you can learn more at helpformen.com/join. That's why it exists. It's not to trash your ex. It's not to, you know, help you stay bitter and cynical, but it's to give you a place to be with other men who can relate to exactly what it is that you're going through because they've been there and done that, or they're going through it themselves., and their wisdom can help you move through this with clarity instead of confusion and further chaos. So for you guys going through this and you say, I do not recognize my wife anymore, this is nuts, you are not crazy. You just finally saw behind the mask of a very broken individual, I'm sorry to say. Thank you so very much for watching, guys. I do appreciate it. Give me a like, give me a subscribe. We'll catch you on the next one.