In a chapter(10)of the above title in his book, "The Love Trauma Syndrome", Dr Richard Rosse advises against a choice of a certain type of lover or spouse; which choice, if already made, it strikes me could account for the severe infidelity scenarios that many on these Boards have found themselves in. Manic tendencies appear to me also to be commonplace amongst (particularly female)betrayers and their lovers that I have known.

Here is Dr Rosse's advice, which he supports with a particularly painful example of a 40 year-old married woman who has taken an apparently extremely attractive and unusually potent lover in his twenties.

One of the surprising points which emerged on my reading of the case described, is that a coolly calculating exterior can be exhibited by a "mature" female betrayer in the full throes of a frenetic affair with a youth from whom she feels she is drawing and being rejuvenated by the very Elixir of Life.

All this while her husband---who it appears she has cruelly over-informed concerning her infidelity---is suffering extremely from acute love-loss trauma and gross sexual humiliation. A manic Trip indeed.


Rosse cautions


"......you need to be careful with whom you become romantically involved if you want to decrease your likelihood of being a victim of the Love Trauma Syndrome. One person to be on the lookout for is the man or woman with manic or hypomanic tendencies. On the surface, such individuals appear to be very attractive partners, and are often quite charismatic. They exude enthusiasm and vitality.

Manic and hypomanic people usually are focused on having fun, and they are usually successful at achieving this goal. They avidly seek out experiences, and are unintimidated when they approach opportunities for pleasure. These people typically "feel good" all or much of the time, and are effective at making others around them also feel good. But such people are more likely to make you a victim of their poorly considered choices. They often choose what they feel will give them the most immediate pleasure, happiness, "fun," without concern for the longterm consequences of their actions.

The mechanisms in the brain that support feeling good also heighten appetitive interests and pursuits that is, appetites for food, for sex, or for other rewarding activities. People with manic or hypomanic tendencies often have an increased interest in sex, and their libido can be quite high. In fact, they do have more sex. The sex they have is wilder and more uninhibited. If you are their partner, they might not want to have sex with only you. Their charisma makes them quite attractive to a variety of mates. People with satyristic tendencies typically have some form of manic or hypomanic condition.

These people may become unfaithful to their partners, or they may stop going to work to pursue activities that they find more pleasurable (e.g., golf, going to the beach, having sex with whomever they want and can). Manics and hypomanics often ignore the painful consequences of their actions. They might ruin their marriages by impulsively becoming romantically involved with others. By the time they realize what has happened, irreversible damage has been done to their relationships.

An example of a person who inflicted a Love Trauma Syndrome on her husband is given by a woman who came to my office asking me to help her "deal" with her husband.

She was a well-dressed, stiffly attractive 40-year-old who described her situation matter-of-factly and without emotion. She told me that she was one of the most successful real estate agents in the area and that recently she had taken on a boyfriend over 10 years her junior much to the chagrin of her husband. Her husband, she explained, "had blown the whole thing out of proportion," and was in an "annoying, hysterical dither." She complained that he was keeping her up at night "with his endless whining." "It's a good thing I only need a few hours of sleep," she said. She wanted me to "set him straight." "Do you think you could calm him down for me, 'Dr. Rosse?" she asked. When I did speak with him, it was obvious he was in the throes of a full-blown Acute Love Trauma Syndrome.

She admitted that she did not like seeing her husband "so unhappy," but otherwise she denied distress. She smiled when she spoke of her boyfriend, and described enjoying the affair. "I feel like I'm twenty again," she told me. At one point she even told me about her boyfriend's copious amounts of ejaculate. "I've never seen anything like it," she told me in awe. "Maybe you need to check him out," she laughed.

There was no hesitancy in the way she addressed me and she looked me straight in the eye, rarely averting her gaze. She even showed me a picture of her and her handsome lover taken outside a local restaurant. They both had wide smiles and very bright white teeth".


The coldness of heart and openly defiant stance of the betrayer in this example I found shocking. But recently I have come to realise that similiar coldness and in-your-face defiance was manifest in my wife for a long time before she began the affair which destroyed our marriage. Somewhat paradoxically, her coldness and defiance greatly increased with the burgeoning of the sexual pleasure she took in her highly inventive lover; himself an extraordinarily manic personality and a constant turner of heads in public on that account as much as for for his other off-beat, dubiously attractive attributes.

Can anyone else here identify a significant or major role of such mania in their spouse's affair ?

I cannot say I have had the experience you describe here but I think that most A behaviour is "mad" in the sense of being hurtful, insensitive/ uncaring, calculating, deceitful, deluded etc and generally disconnected from the idea most of have to live with our fellow humans in a happy way.

I wonder also about why this behaviour emerges. There are many posts relating to this on HH in one aspect or another. I was just talking in the last hour to someone here (our local builder) who is oddly quite profound in his conversation - You know, one of those people who thinks very deeply and says very profound things to explain almost any everyday phenomenon. Anyway he made the point that most people today find that they are simply not contented with their lives and this leads to unhappiness and unhappy making behaviour. I know that saying something like that sounds so high level as to almost be bland. But then I reflected and thought, "Yes he is right and I see this all around." Affairs are clearly so destructive in their outcomes that the people who embark on them must already be unhappy in their lives before they start I am thinking.
So, in the case you describe above, I can see the manic personality type as already being desperately unhappy as shown by their manic behaviour in other aspects of their life.
I can see how unhappiness in any area of our lives can lead to an A and it is not down to the issues within a relationship/ marriage that are so often blamed by those who don't understand what we do here. I suppose blaming your partner etc is often done simply because the A itself means someone else becomes involved.
Perhaps what I am saying is not saying anything new when I think about it. After all, we know here at HH, and the experts say, that As are often nothing to do wiht the BS and are just down to some other cause of unhappiness with the WS that allows them to fall into the trap of an A.

I think I may have drifted off your track here Miles. But keep posting such thought provokers please as your postings help.
May you be happy,
Jerry

And all of us here, including betraying spouses, would be well-advised to stay firmly focused on it.

Need I say more ? Except that Richard Rosse's book is a compassionate but necessarily relentless focusser of love-trauma victims attention on Reality, irresistible examples of which he supplies on every page.

But I just caution---in the following way---certain contributors to these Boards:

"If you have any, particularly openly-expressed, important reservations about the factual or clinical or therapeutic points made by Dr Rosse in his book, PLEASE---in the cause of good advising and sharing on these Boards, if not your own healing---take the time to exhibit some objectivity and humility, and READ the whole book; not simply my quotes and paraphrasings from it".

Your personal, attentive reading of such an important work, whichever way you judge it thereafter, could turn out to be the most important step that you as a betrayed spouse take in the crucial task of "getting real", and thereby getting healed.

Despite our individual prides in the uniqueness of our own "realities" following betrayal by a misguided, malicious, manic or frankly "mad" spouse, the OPERATIVE realities in the dark abyss of the Love Trauma Syndrome are amazingly similar between one case and another; and are, every one of them, beneficially amenable to fairly simple identification, focussing upon, and completely understandable therapeutic initiatives.

That is Dr Rosse's principal point.

He is very well acquainted with the sometimes lethal failure of reality-testing amongst the betrayed; in the form of suicide. The incidence of suicide amongst contributors and desperate visitors to these Boards is, perhaps thankfully, a significant Unknown to such of us as are surviving in our struggles to stay at least physically alive and to help, in any way we advisedly can, other casualties of marital infidelity.

And be sure of it, not only from his experience and on his testimony, the love-loss trauma syndrome that he has identified and writes about so authoritatively has a significant mortality; not only from suicide, but also the accident-proneness and potentially very serious damage to the sufferer's immune system which are both recognised concommitants of the syndrome.

I agree w/Jerry..I think...sometime I have a hard time grasping what ya'll are saying...but if I read the posts correctly, I believe most if not all WS have these type qualities, maybe some exhibit them more than others.

My H was very cold and unconcerned w/ flaunting her in front of my face, he claims now it was to help cover up and b/c he just didn't care. She also was very flirtatous and in my face w/it, even joking to me about having an A w/ my H. They told each other how perfect they were for each other b/c they were at a prime peak of their sex lives...whcih to me hints or says they are unhappy w/the amount of sex they were having at home. My H let me know often that I didn't satisfy him and that he always needed something more...he would even state in a matter of fact way that if I coudln't please him w/ the frequency he would have to go out and get the extra from someone else...very cold and nasty.

but does that mean the relationship should not be carried further b/c he fits the manic description? What if he appears to have changed? Is this even manic behavior or not just a typical "fog" A? Don't may WS act this way to cover up and justify their actions at the time???

just wondering what your thoughts are on that??

and you have peaked my interest in this book, I will definitly have to buy it today...


JK

Hello Miles,

The quotes from the book are written with, well, too much clinical terminology for the average layman.  What good is a self-help book if it goes over the reader's head? It makes it extremely difficult to extrapulate any helpful information. Which is exactly why I have not run out to buy this book, as interesting as it sounds. Sure, most of us get bits and pieces, but that is of little use if we cannot connect the pieces, or have an overly hard time doing so.  People enjoy reading books and information they understand easily without having to have a doctorates, or to try and guess at what the writer is trying to say.

I am going to be honest. Your posts are also difficult for the average person to understand without having to re-read the post a few times, and carefully at that. If your name is any indication as to your level of education then you are at a huge advantage.  Most of us do not have doctorates.  I would like to state that I do indeed enjoy your posts, and they are quite insightful and full of useful information, but I have difficulty reading them as well many times, lol.

Take care....Carol~

Yes


SWN

Thank you Jane .............Carol~

_______________________________
_______________________________
_______________________________.

And all my own editing!




Yes---take another deep breath Jane----you are right. I am not a writing professional, or a professional writer, or a professor writing; or professing of being a professional writer.

Just a busy doctor who does not have the time to polish his reasonably OK posts the way some of us here, including me/I, might like.

I await the invention of the 25 hour day.

Who should use the extra hour, and how they use it, is a matter individual choice. I would prefer to use it to consult and operate, while expert writers here make good my literary defincienceies; in the cause of which I will be delighted to supply to the best wordsmith here my logon password for the purpose.

Once the correction process is in full swing, other contributors here who are, for whatever reason, having difficulty expressing themselves to the required standard--of, say, punctuation and participlisation--will likely also benefit from studying further professional redos of my hasty offerings.

Sincerely

Miles

I should, perhaps, to the above, add, that impaired concentration, potentially affecting, I suppose, one's writing, is a common symptom in Love Trauma Syndrome in its acute, and chronic, forms.

Miles....I do love your posts ....Carol~

This is not the first time that hard to understand writing styles have been seen on the forum. At times we have seen posters who write with no punctuation or capitalization. At other times people have written without breaking their ideas into paragraphs. While these and other habits make it difficult to understand what a person is writing about, all writing is OK. It's most important that people try to post, rather than write properly. I'm sure everyone does their best to work through posts that are difficult to read.

In many of these cases someone has stepped forward to offer a kind word of encouragement to help someone communicate a little more clearly. I can remember more than one incident where someone was asked to use capitalization and punctuation, simply because it was so hard to read their messages without it.

I'd guess that some are hurt by any suggestion that improvement is needed, while others turn it to improving their posts. It can be argued that this caring but honest comment is more compassionate than ignoring those posts, but it's always somewhat risky to take the chance that offense will be taken. I don't think anyone taking the time to post wants their writings to be ignored. I know that I don’t.

Writing technique is something we all struggle with. I believe it's a lot more common than any of us realize, because I suspect that most people take more time drafting posts than we think. I know that any critical comment I would make directed at poster’s writing is something that I also should take to heart. Many times I've read one of my posts a day or two after writing it and felt embarrassed at the typing mistakes and confusing language.

Of course, the focus of our forum is recovery from infidelity, not writing. As a result, our "focus" on writing style is much secondary to our real purpose. I think the only reason it has received attention here is because better communication would lead to better help for our betrayed.

TomJ

PS: Of course, I had to edit this, because when I came back to it I saw several typo's and poorly worded sentences.

Thank you Jane, Carol and Tom:

All your points are taken by me in good faith, and most of them agreed with. I thank you for not requiring me to add "Loud" to the title of this thread.

In response, may I say again that we are catering, each for one another here, with a selected, traumatised group of people, many of whom because of their various expressive and comprehensive disabilities will not be able to benefit first up from every post I make; or, in fact, from many of the posts of other more deft and American-style writers plying their professionalism here.

It is a fact of life that, even in the pink of emotional and intellectual health, one can read a passage of even quite simple text on a NON-polarising, superficially neutral subject, and not get from it the meaning and /or message that the writer intended to convey.

That difficulty of the reader is not always the fault of the writer. Nor is it the responsibility of a writer to ensure that his writings are perfectly comprehensible and palatable to everyone who might pick them up and read them.

Unfortunately, I do not have the time to produce more than one stylistic version of my postings here. If I did have the time, I could try to.

But I rather feel that "simplified" or more vernacularised versions would not properly convey the facts and my personal opinions that I believe I do presently convey as confirmed by several onlookers (not visitors to these Boards) who I do run some of my arguably more difficult posts past.

So, where does that leave me and my critics ? After the airings above, in a very workable position I think; for the following reasons:

1. The evidence on these Boards confirms, at least to me, that some people, including some of our Moderators, do understand what I am saying, and more often than not the relevance of that to specific cases (including their own) and to subjects we very commonly encounter here.

2. It is also apparent that the well-evidenced process of other contributors interpreting, abstracting from and representing my opinions is, on balance, more often accurate and useful to others than not. When it is not, depending on the level of misunderstanding or offense taken by a contributor, if I have the time I always try to explain further, in a simpler, more personal style. Often I get very revealing and encouraging feedback from such clarifications of mine.

3. I think that the fact that I am an MD, and declare that on these Boards, is actually helpful. In fact I would be surprised if some sufferers here are not drawing considerable comfort and confidence from it; particularly as I endorse the writings of Richard Rosse who also happens to be a self-proclaimed MD, and, in my opinion, an extremely helpful one. Moving on, I am reasonably sure that there have been and still are other MDs moonlighting on these Boards who have not thought it helpful to "come out". But in my case (the comments made on it above being taken into account) I think it is. That said, the "damage" appears to be done, inasmuch as some contributors here--possibly somewhat over-sensitised by their trauma states--feel intimidated and perhaps demeaned by my owning up to one of my helpful qualifications. With respect, I judge the benefit to outweigh the alleged personal slight or perhaps perceived insult.

Finally, on point I think, some of us here will find even Dr Rosse's book, "The Love Trauma Syndrome", difficult to read and to digest and apply. Some of that difficulty is plainly able to be put down to the state of the reader who is often an acutely disabled love-loss trauma sufferer. Dr Rosse himself makes that point in several places in his book.

Other reasons for readers having difficulty taking in and acting upon some of Dr Rose’s expert information and suggestions clearly include conscious or subconscious resistance to, even rejection of, such writers' researches and recommendations; particularly, and rather paradoxically in our cases, therapeutic ones. Possibly it is Dr Rosse’s declared MD that is creating a problem. I don't know. But PhDs I do know are certainly more fashionable these days, especially in the USA. What I also know is that it is human nature to be as DIY as often and as much as possible. That's just fine and dandy but, in my opinion, NOT when one is suffering from love-loss trauma of even moderate degree. That is a time, par excellence, to swallow a little of one's pride and to take expert advice, and to seriously consider acting upon it.

I have believed, and proven for myself, that Dr Rosse’s counsel is very fine indeed, and I have tried to say here, in so many words (including unedited quotes from his book), why I have believed that and why I recommend his approach to fellow sufferers on these Boards.

My sincere thanks go to everyone here, critics and "converts" alike, for you comments and comfort.

Sincerely

Miles

Miles,

I did not mean to criticize you, nor insult you. I don't think anyone else did either. If I have insulted you I apologize. And I am glad that I did not scare you away. Like I have said before, I do enjoy your posts, sincerely.

We all take what we can out of everyone's posts since we are all at different stages of healing and/or trauma. It doesn't matter whether the person who posts or replies is a mother, father, wayward spouse, betrayed spouse, housewife, doctor, artist, writer, or what have you, we are all individuals with different comprehension and writing skills, and we all do the best we can. I know this and meant nothing disrespectful. I too find it comforting that an MD is amongst us and willing to take time from his busy schedule to participate on this board.

I have difficulty on HH from time to time myself. Sometimes people are very honest and blunt about my situation.  At first I was a bit sensitive about it and took offense but, now I know they were only trying to help and were concerned for my well being. I have made many friends here and I am greatful. Please, know that it was with this spirit that I felt I could be honest. Perhaps I over stepped, and if so, again, I do apologize. You have so much to contribute and I hope you will continue to do so.

Take care...Carol~

Miles. You are doing ok. Thank you.
Be happy,
Jerry

I've probably insulted you in the past BUT I have to give you tremendous credit for referring me to Rosse's Book - The Love Trauma Syndrome. I highly recommend it to anyone feeling the relationship-oriented post-traumatic stress that many of us have been through.

I also think that the prevalence of bipolar and bipolar-related illness is greater than statistics may indicate. In 2005 there was a re-evaluation of the symptoms of bipolar disorder at which time the common conception that manic or hypomanic behavior had to be present in order for a diagnosis to be made was discarded. Now it seems to be thought, at least in some circles, that depression accompanied by cycling of any kind, such as SAD or spring/winter mood cycles, may indicate that at least the biology for bipolar disorder is present. If I understand it correctly, it is believed that excessive anxiety can be effectively substituted for hypomania as a symptom.

If you haven't been around someone with this disorder it is hard to convey a sense of how pervasive and surreal life can become, especially with comorbid issues like ADHD, depression and OCD. While psychology is still trying to get a handle on this, many, many families are suffering the effects of mild or moderate mental illness. Raising consciousness about this issue is not a means of excusing bad behavior but rather making people aware of what may lie behind that behavior.

In the context of infidelity, if you have a spouse who has some aspect of mental illness, it is my opinion that the illness must be treated before reconciliation can make much progress.

Thanks again -


SWN

<<In the context of infidelity, if you have a spouse who has some aspect of mental illness, it is my opinion that the illness must be treated before reconciliation can make much progress>>

Exactly!  It doesnt matter what the illness is. Reconciliation is near impossible, which I have found out first hand. I realized about a year after d-day that me and H would never be able to reconcile completely until he gets help for his addictions.  In other words, if the type of thinking doesnt change (ie: addictive thinking, or any compulsive behavior) the behavior that is a result of that thinking can't change.  And if the behavior doesn't change then you cannot move forward, and you "get stuck" and the chances of a repeat A is highly likely.  Lets just say me and H are very stuck!  He is in denial of his addictions and refuses to seek help.  And I have not given up.  I keep fighting, and through IC I keep getting stronger.  Maybe one day we will be able to conquer the addictions together, as a team.  But I know what the statistics are and they are not good. But I have never been one to put a whole lot of stock in stats (although I am realistic). We are all unique creatures and what works for one may not work for another so you keep trying until you find what does work

Take care...Carol~

I think quite often that A behaviour itself is a sure sign of mental ill health.. not quite sure how you define mental ill health but this is what I think.
Be well,
Jerry

Thank you, Team

And Hi SWN ! It's so good to know you are still with us and have been helped by the masterpiece of my earthly hero, RR, and are so obviously overcoming.

Be assured, I have dutifully, strenuously, attempted to change my literary Spots over the last few days, but to no avail. Except that the effort has brought me out in a lumpy pink rash (I can't say say where, even on these Boards).

So right now I'm skimming Dr Rosse's book again to find out if he refers anywhere to experts on MD (Marital Dermopathology),or to what my rash might mean, and whether I'm about to be transformed, by premature ageing as a complication of LTS, from a handsomely spotted leopard into a grey or snowy white one.

Desperately Yours

Miles

Miles,

I would think the snow white leopard is a rare beautiful animal...if there is one...I love the white tigers, and they are very rare. ....

Pat

Mebbe you have the "Don't do anything rash"?


SWN