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Was curious what the Coffee Room has to say about a formerly divorced woman who is remarried, but HATES her first husband so much it seems like she’s married to 2 men at once — the EX who she hasn’t gotten out of her system and her current husband. She’s like a bigamist living with 2 men.
Despite being remarried for quite a number of years, she still bad-mouths the EX to anyone who gives her the time of day and a platform to stand on. She has done a very good job of “buying” her offspring’s loyalty to her at the expense of the EX and never misses an opportunity to badmouth her EX to their children.
The first husband was and is an honorable, decent, kind, caring, sweet man who literally doesn’t have it in him to hurt a fly, let alone another human being.
Sounds crazy!! But unfortunately very true.
Your opinion??
Obviously a witch. What more is there to say unfortunately?
You obviously don’t know the husband from her perspective. No one can judge either one without knowing what happens or happened behind closed doors.
Serious therapy in order.
very sad that she hasn’t moved on 🙁
B’H I parted extremely amicably with my first husband.
my DH wasn’t as lucky with his 1st wife at the time of their parting, but then they were able to smooth things out.
thankfully, we brought no baggage into our marriage.
you don’t know what goes on behind closed doors…she may have valid complaints…however loshan horah not only hurts those talking it, and those it’s about, but those that hear it…so when she starts talking walk away…
always
You are incredible!
“But unfortunately very true”
Such a broad black & white scenario where she is all evil and he is a total saint is NOT realistic. You are emotionally involved somehow.
Ask yourself some questions:
What is your relationship to this woman? Have you had a similar experience? etc.
However, based on YOUR depiction, I agree that she needs therapy and a shiur or two on lashon hara.
You don’t really know what her life was like, but that aside, she really should be seeing a therapist – should have before she even considered remarrying (and I am NOT generally pro-therapy). The problem could be her! Her poor #2 as well!! He has to listen to this and be measured up to this all the time??
It sounds like you’re the first husband. I don’t know what her experience was like with the first husband (I doubt he was as perfect as you perceive; no one is). She obviously needs to let go, at least for the sake of the children. Whether he was evil or not, the longer she tries to influence the kids to perceive him as such, the more damaged they will be with their perceptions of marriage and the viability of choosing an appropriate spouse. She needs to keep her issues as her own. Unless he is a truly abusive neglectful spouse, the kids would be more enriched to have a relationship with him. If he is a potential source of harm to them, even in his attitude towards life, then she may be justified in working to keep them sheltered and apart from him. only a therapist or mediator could make such an accurate assessment. You’re perception of her is as extreme as her perception of her first husband.
“always
You are incredible!”
i second that!
True to the above comments that we don’t know what it was like living under one roof with husband #1.
Another reason for her attitude is perhaps jealousy, assuming the first husband went on with his life and living a normal life and she is trying to convince people that it’s not what they see.
Lo Aleinu what attitudes have seeped into our frum world from the outside goyish world.
I have a friend who is divorced and she took it upon herself never to speak badly about her ex. I have alot of respect for her.
another friend always badmouths her ex, in front of her kids too unfortunately and it gets them upset. Nobody wants to hear about her ex, I told her in a nice way to go for help/therapy. Important to let it go…go on with life.
From my experience, there are a lot of bad people out there. For s/o like this, the best thing is not to give her an audience. She needs help and unless you’re a mental health prof. you can’t give it to her.
I never was really upset with my ex speaking bad about me, I understood why she was doing it. On the other hand, the people who spoke bad about me to her and convinced her to divorce me, are evil and insane. I’m sure they had/have sick mental reasons why they do/did it and it has nothing to do with me. These people will never have a cure to their sickness!
Sam2, I agree with you, there is something there that never healed. And even though someone seems like a tzaddik to the outside world, as we have all learned lately, that doesn’t mean they are a tzaddik to the one that should be on the top of their priority list. This makes it even more painful and hurtful to that woman because of the hypocrisy involved and because no one believes that this angel, this tazaddik could possibly hurt her in any way. That’s the kicker, that’s the trigger and the stimulus that probably keeps her going, because no one knows him the way she knows him from her perspective and no one validates her and therefore she keeps going on, and on, and on. Who knows, maybe if she got the validation that she needs, she would stop.
I am involved in such a case now. My client’s husband is abusive and she hasn’t said anything through her long marriage. She has just informed both their families and they are all shocked, but because she is who she is they believe her. But if you would go out on the street and ask about this choshuv guy you would get the same reaction as the poster describes about the ex that she knows. No one knows what goes on behind closed door. So although it seems crazy and it is foolish of her to keep it up, you don’t know the pain she carries within. Her current husband might actually understand and have compassion for her.
When someone hates another person to the extent this woman hates her ex, she really only hates herself and is projecting self-hatred onto an easy target. In fact, I am sure that it was her self-hatred that caused her divorce in the first place.
I believe that the ex-husband’s only crime was not having enough self-respect to avoid becoming a victim of bullying.
This woman is a typical bully, her ex is a typical victim.
“As for help/therapy–my experience is that there are people who strive for improvement and others who are shallow, in denial, and are so full of themselves that there is no room in their lives for anything but themselves and the drama they create. They wallow in their mire and emit toxicity like a contagious disease. Those types almost never seek help–how unfortunate that sometimes the people who need therapy the most are the ones who are oblivious to it or think they are above it.”
This is an old story. That’s why they say “denial” isn’t just the name of a river in Egypt!
Obviously you are a friend and supporter of the ex-husband and therefore are a biased reporter. So what exactly are you looking to gain from bringing this story to the CR? Do you believe people will recognize the characters in your story? In that case this would be loshon horah and motzi shem rah on this woman.
Are you looking for advice how to approach her? Did the ex-husband ask you to get involved somehow and get advice how to stop it? What exactly is the point of this thread? You are relating a very sad story, with children involved, and judging the people involved even though you were not a fly on the wall when they were married and know the full ins and outs of that situation. You are assuming that you know everything while peering in through the windows seeing what you choose to see and making a judgment call. Maybe this man learned from his mistakes and is treating his second wife completely differently that he treated his first. This too happens. Maybe he went for therapy and he now understands what HE did wrong. Did you ever think of that? That he learned what NOT to do a second time around? Are you a fly on the wall of his new home? How privy are you to his personal life and what he does on a daily basis?
Are you getting my point here? You really don’t know the whole truth about any of this. You only know what you think you see. And you may also be 100% right. But if you are not here with the purpose of helping either one of them because you were asked to, what is the purpose of this thread? I am asking this as a coach.
I think aries has a point and that is that you dont know everything and its not an attack on you per se but on the fact that you think you know everything and there is no way that you do. even if its your sister or brother and they told you every single thing that went on, you are still missing the other half of the story.
I think it would be fair to say that if the coin had been reversed, and the OP had been complaining about a vindictive ex-husband, rather than a vindictive ex-wife, that many of the same people beating up on the OP for “not knowing the ex-wife’s side of the story” would NOT have had the same reaction and cried about “not knowing the ex-husband’s side of the story”.
I think the main point that others wanted you to realize that you dont know everything and just because you think he is such a great guy and was a wonderful husband it may not be that way. you have no clue how he may have abused her. you would never know that. it could have also been that he was a wonderful husband but she just made his life miserable and she really is a creep. i believe it can happen. just realize that you dont know everything and if this women has an issue (which she clearly does) then all you can do is show her that you care and think she should speak to someone professional so she can move on in life. are you the new husband?
what does her “new” husband think? why are you getting involved? It sounds like a messy situation and u dont have any control over her. she is obv in need of more help than you can offer.
PMTC, If you took what I said as an attack then it was how you read it and not how I wrote it. I asked you a question and that was what was the purpose of your thread which you didn’t answer. I also said you might be 100% right but neither you nor the rest of us can know that for sure and I am saying that as a coach and as someone with experience in these matters. And no I am NOT too attached to my “Client’s” situation to respond to this thread.
Here in the CR we have heard cases such as Health’s where we understood the wife and the wife’s family to be at fault in the divorce, not that he is badmouthing her in public, but he explained the situation and we offered him support. So we are quite capable of understanding the situation from both sides. Divorce is a very serious issue and not one to take lightly and certainly not one for others to mix into. We all agreed as did you that no one can know the 100% truth of the story, we can only see it from the perspective we choose to view it. You have chosen to view it from the husband’s perspective and offer him your support. You have taken a very negative stand against the ex-wife and her behavior although you have admitted that you don’t know everything.
My question still stands, what is the purpose of this post. Do you want advice as to how to help her calm down? Are you her friend? Do you want advice as to how to help him? If he didn’t ask you for help then I would advise you to seriously stay out of it and let him handle it on his own through his own Rabbonim and attorneys. Are you connected to the children in some way?
Is this a personal issue for you? Do you want advise as to how you can get over this and not let it bother you so much? If that is the case then I can tell you that you can’t control other people only yourself and you can’t change other people other than yourself. This poor woman whether she is crazy or she is hurt is going through her own issues and there is nothing you can do to change what has happened. Unless you are a friend of hers and can validate her feelings and guide her into therapy to let go of the past and leave her baggage behind in order to be able to fully appreciate what she currently has, then there is nothing you can do other than work on yourself to daven for her and let go of the situation.
You assumed that I am too attached to my client’s situation. You might consider giving thought to why you are so attached to this situation. Is this man a friend or relative? Does it hurt you that a good person is being wrongly accused? Well that happens often and it is not within out control to change that. Although if he asked you to get involved and help him make her stop I could advise you on how you could possibly do that. But without his request and without his permission you do not have the right to get involved and you would be meddling and that would be inappropriate.
There are many things that is within my ability to do to help others, but without their request or permission I don’t have the right to do it. I have to hold myself back and stay out of it, and keep my distance up until the time that they “choose” to ask me to be involved. It can be very difficult sometimes because I might be able to clear things up for them easier than they are doing it themselves but it is NOT my place to offer nor to do it. It is up to them to ask for assistance and to ask for my involvement. Up until then I have to remain an outsider to the situation, like a Mother-in-law who knows how to keep her mouth shut. With my client for instance, there was a lot I had to say to her husband, however, I would never call him or email him unless she specifically asked me to speak to him. When I work with at risk kids it is up to them whether or not I speak to their parents. I would never approach a parent unless a child asked me to. The time to get involved is when you are in the middle of the situation or you are asked to get involved. And even when you are in middle of a situation you have to step very lightly and make sure you have permission to get involved or you might make the situation worse.
I know of a similar situation. But before I tell it, I want to ask you what do you mean by cut your losses? If a woman was abused, tortured and has been through mental gehinom, even though she is safely remarried, it is almost impossible to forget the torture she went through. And if telling people what happened to her helps her in some way, let her talk! One does not have to believe the talk. And if you don’t believe it, it is not lashon hora.
As promised here is a current story that is occuring as I type: The ex wife is not a nice person-and never was. And she married very young and led an extremely sheltered life. The man she first married is A Torah leader, beloved and respected by all in his kehilla. She divorced him when she discovered that there wasn’t an aveira that he hadn’t committed-except for murder. Yet. When she started finding things out, he began to physically and mentally torture her to keep her quiet. She found the strength to get out by confiding in a different rabbi who believed her. It took years, but she was able to receive a get. They each remarried, and she is the custodial parent. She is still not a nice person, and still badmouths him, but she is a dedicated mother and it kills her that her ex is viewed by the world as an example of a Torah leader. It does not pay for her to bad mouth him-no one listens because he has convinced everyone that she has mental problems. She can’t seem to control it. It is almost like a talking tic. This woman has spent over ten years in therapy just trying to put herself back together after what he did to her. Her older children have begun to notice things that are not normal about him when they get to visit him, and some of them have chosen to break contact.
Truly the children suffer the most, they hate that their father is a fake,and that their mother does not let the world forget it. Added to that is the frustration that he currently holds a position as a spiritual Torah authority. He is under the protection of a great gadol (whom he has fooled) and chances are that unless he gets really sloppy, no one will ever discover his secret lifestyle.
If you are looking for an opinion, the best that I can give you is to remove yourself from the situation.
aries, I don’t like to get involved but from your many posts in the CR it does seem like you have an obvious bias. Your rapid judgments do tend to lean towards the wife in marital disputes, and towards the parents in familial disputes.
To what degree is having that kind of bias helpful in providing professional advice and to what degree is that bias harmful? I am asking this as someone skeptical of a coach.
I feel for you! It cannot be easy to have to deal with this level of toxicity, but if you have no direct contact with her, how is she able “to stare down at you by a vicious, evil person whose gaze pierces through the innermost part of you and makes you feel vulnerable?” There is a lot more going on than what you are revealing and you are wise to seek private counsel. I want you to understand something-no one in this world can make you feel anything- without your consent. You are the one in control of your emotions. NOt her. Not what she says. Somehow she has successfully “gotten” to you. She can also be successfully “disengaged”. B’HATZLOCHA raba!
Squeak, I am not biased in any way. I try to look at things from different perspectives and show others that it depends on which perspective you are seeing. I am a child advocate, so I do look out for children and I do stick up for them. So I will NOT stand by while children are abused or neglected in any way, shape or form. That I will agree with you about. And I am not afraid to go head to head or toe to toe with any man, in that sense I will agree with you as well. But I don’t favor one gender over the other. I call it as I see it depending on the issue. In most cases I don’t know if the OP or the person I am talking to is male or female. I have supported Health when he needed to vent about his situation and his ex-wife and I supported Escape on the same issue as she vented about her EX as well.
I have met a lot more phony men in the religious world than women, and find that a religious woman is more connected to Hashem because of the private and silent mitzvos Hashem has given women and because of the sensitivity of the nature and makeup of the way he created women.
It is YOUR opinion that I have rapid judgments and that I am biased. I disagree with you and there are many posters here who will as well. I don’t necessarily enjoy or agree with your posts either. That is fine by me. We don’t have to agree and I don’t have to like what you write. But you don’t have the right to judge my professional ability since you are NOT one of my clients and do not know anyone that I have helped nor do you know how many people I have helped both men and women. And just as YOU are entitled to your opinions whether I agree with them or not so am I whether you like them or agree with them or not. That does not render me biased nor unprofessional. At times I am answering as a coach and I do say so, and at times I am giving my own personal opinion. Since I am not working in a professional arena where I am getting paid for coaching I can switch hats whenever I choose to.
If you are skeptical of coaching, maybe you should go to Refuah.com or KosherKoaching.com or just google Life Coaching and do some research so you understand how coaching works and how we help people reach their goals and cut themselves loose from the baggage that holds them back. I won’t try to explain it to you because I doubt you will accept anything I say or be able to truly understand anything I want to impart to you because of your negative opinion of me.
PMTC, its sounds like it much more complicated than just a scorned woman. You are right to handle it in a private setting.
Wives are at fault at least as often as husbands. And they can be real witches.
aries, I am only not offended by your condescension because I expected it from you. As to your last point, you shouldn’t think that I won’t accept anything you say, or that I have a negative opinion about you, in general. In fact I find your posts to be worth the read and at times excellent.
I understand your defensive reaction, and your need to build yourself back up by expressing dislike of my posts, but I was really only commenting on the one aspect of your posts that I mentioned. Specifically, that I see a bias coming from you in this thread (and in 2 others just today, as well as a general sense from the past). I found this ironic in light of your first reply to the OP accusing him of bias, which is why I commented on it.
We can discuss life coaching in a separate thread if you’d like, but I truly doubt you would want to go head to head, toe to toe, or keyboard to keyboard with me on that subject 🙂 [as I will freely admit a strong bias against, and generally succeed in making my points stick].
“Added to that is the frustration that he currently holds a position as a spiritual Torah authority.”
I’m sure he ain’t the only one. But I can see her frustration and that’s why she won’t stop. Maybe she shouldn’t if she is right about the guy. People have to start doing the Mishna of – Al Tistakel B’kankan, etc. Why do these types have the capability to fool so many people?
How did Chacham Tzvi fool almost his entire generation? We all want heroes. We all want rabbis we can look up to. We are an orphaned generation. When a great speaker comes along with a lot of Torah knowledge we want to believe that he leads a pious existence. If he has the charisma to teach our kids and get them excited about Yiddishkeit, then he becomes super amazing. No one will look at his private sins even if they are heinous because it does not affect the success rate he has with teaching Torah. If he goes out in public and sins in front of everyone, then there will be compelling and blatant reasons to fire him. Until then, it is his ex’s word against his.
PMTCI, Here is how your post read:
“Was curious what the Coffee Room has to say about…
[…]
Sounds crazy!! But unfortunately very true.
Your opinion??”
You asked for opinions and you got them, but didn’t like them and decided you were being attacked. It seems like you were looking for agreement rather than opinions…
I did not get that Aries was condescending in her posts. In my opinion (FWIW) she seems to know what questions to ask. And you never did answer all of them…
And that’s my 0.02…
Well said squeak.
pmtci: The reason why so many reactions you are getting is not to believe the husband was such a tzaddik, is because it’s the cry of every divorced man: “I did nothing wrong!” Of course plenty of times one side is suffering from the other, but by all means, the relationship has so many aspects to it and most likely they both contributed to the demise of the marriage, even if one side more than the other. Blaming one side totally while claiming complete innocence is rarely believed because it’s rarely true. While divorced women most often claim to have been abused, most men claim they did nothing wrong! Both have to take at least some responsibility for the situation.
Squeak, I thought the OP was female. What made you think the OP was male? It is not usual that a male would want to get so involved or even speak so much about it. I absolutely thought I was speaking to a woman and I was advising a woman to stay out of it. Did you notice that I asked “HER” if she was a friend of this scorned wife and if she was trying to help her? Please reread my post. Maybe YOU were too quick to judge me and it is you who is biased here because I was speaking to a female poster and NOT a male poster. One of us has been fooled or misunderstood. Which one is it? At any rate YOU believed that I was speaking to a male and siding with a woman when all the while I thought I was speaking to a woman and was talking about the pain of divorce and not knowing what truly goes on behind closed doors and being careful not to meddle in and cause more pain. In the end the OP and I both agreed that this is NOT the arena to discuss this in and you are the one that has the problem.
emunah613, ouch. I sincerely hope you meant Shabbtai Zvi who fooled so many people. The Chacham Zvi was one of the great poskim of his generation(the late sixteen hundreds) and was the father of Rav Yaakov Emden, a most energetic fighter against anything connected to Shabbtai Zvi.
and you are the one that has the problem.
Aries- calm down! I personally think the OP came here to hear other’s opinions and got some bashing from you for no reason. your post came out a little harsh I must admit. Take a break and relax!
Well said adorable.
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