"Ministering" To Those In Triangles/Affairs...

That's some heavy stuff. I like being a friend and providing gentle guidance, but when talk of suicide starts up, I like to defer to the professionals. Good for you for requesting some space.

Hi codep,

Yes that is very manipulative behavior, to threaten suicide. When people do that you just have to ask them to call a suicide helpline or 911.

And take care of you in this case....as it's kind of you to help others, but if you are both treading water and someone keeps pulling you down, you have to let go and take care of yourself first. She's not helping her recovery by attaching on to you.

That is a tough situation though......

This is true, but it is more complicated than this. Threatening suicide is a cry for help. Do not call 911 unless you are prepared to get a 51/50 (taken into custody for 72 hours). When someone threatens suicide I read between the lines and try to help them help themselves. I have tried to die two times and thank God someone helped me. I threaten suicide to get my son's attention, but only when I really mean it in that moment. My partner killed herself. She called me the night before and begged me to come get her. She was in a nursery home. I told her I would see her tomorrow, but she took her life that night.

So, as I like to say all the time, let us not generalize about things. Everything is complicated.

Sandra, the love of my life . . .

Hi midnightcry,


Thank you for your comment. You are right about it. However, for whatever reason, it is all good and we became close now. She's even very thankful that because of the information I have shared with her, she has gained freedom from this married man, happy with her God, and learning to love herself.


In fact, she wants nothing now except to become strong, confident, and healthy. She plans to avoid dating until she becomes ready and meet someone who shares her values and is worthy of her. She wants to make things right for herself; she is going to divorce her husband, continuing NC with this married man, building up her self-esteem, and growing in her relationship with her HP God. These are all her decisions and plans. I am just mentoring, encouraging, and supporting her. I am really happy for her progress.

There is no attempt to invalidate your work Susan, your work is a blessing to all who sought treatment for love addiction and love avoidance. This thread is a bit misleading as in, ministering to others, leading a person to salvation, showing the person the scripture for relationship behavior. This is not the treatment for Love Addiction. Working with another who is interested in recovering from Love Addiction I pull out Your Book and Pia Mellody's Book. This is the treatment book, these are my solution books. If you want help to overcome love addiction I'm willing to work with you. I do not care if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior. The suicide thing is grey. If you are a professional counselor you have many tools to work with to help people. Your rock bottom recovery person has basic recovery tools; positive affirmation, gratitude statements etc. When someone tells me they want to commit suicide I ask them to call for help, I give them the number. This is complicated, let's be good to one another.

Triangles/affairs originated thousands of years ago. Way before the grandmothers of the grandmothers of the present authors of love addiction books were even born. Treatments are continuously being made through intensive research studies and experiments. There is no one treatment that can diagnose it all. Mind you, I am in the wellness industry for a very, very long time and I am fully certified to speak with authority.


The other one who is having a triangle relationship, I just informed about the normal recovery tools, but all she said is "I know" and continued her affair with a married man. Whereas this woman whom I was prompted by my HP God to share salvation, (which is actually first time for me to do so) has repented; made a 180 degrees change, doing NC, cease from dating to learn more about herself, build her self-esteem and values, and working now to make things right in all other areas of her life. In fact up to this hour, she keeps thanking God and me for sharing the Good News of salvation to her. She said I was the only one whom she heard sharing this and was so happy to receive this free, eternal gift.


This is another case of "to each his own". You don't know this person. You haven't met her. I am the one who met her and got to know her personally. So you could not speak for her or on her behalf at all. And what matters is she has truly changed. A changed life cannot lie. (My former Avoidant ex from heavy addiction became a Pastor now effectively ministering to those in severe addiction. Someone who had stolen money from her employer long time ago, as her wayward ex-husband had instructed, and was raped by her father for many years, became a great modern day leader - no other than Joyce Meyer).



At the end of the day, neither I, nor this woman, are accountable to you. Each is accountable for his/her own action. Therefore, it is not anyone else's business to mind other people's way of sharing his/her recovery with other people.

Through this woman I'm learning "emotional intimacy". How to freely love and express one's emotion. She is a warm person and has a transparent and teachable heart. She is not afraid to show her vulnerabilities with me. She is what she is. Very simple person. Whereas I calculate almost every move I take/make. I study, review, analyze nearly every detail. And I am not as emotional as so-called an "average woman". But we are both passionate and appreciative individuals.


What a progress for me...I used to dislike it when someone is expressing her emotions to me. It used to make me feel uncomfortable. But now I welcome it and let it be. I am even grateful for the opportunity to get this close to another person like her. It feels great!

We are becoming great friends. And now I understood why others could get tempted with a married woman like her. (Though it does not justify its wrongness.) Because she loves passionately. She is a very affectionate woman. In fact, if I am not careful and did not place a firm boundary between us, it would be easy for both of us to get attached emotionally.


So boundary is really important, along with constant reality check. There must be a healthy, clear direction on where a friendship or relationship should go or should not.

Havefaith, you are absolutely right. Thanks for sharing it.

I thought of sharing this blog here since it is within the topic...(Please read at your own risk because it might trigger something in you. Please PM me if it does. I will delete it for you. Your recovery is more important.)

5 Scandalous Affairs That Changed History

By Sean Braswell


Not being able to keep your hands off someone else’s partner can alter the course of history. But don’t try this at home.
History is filled with great, enduring love stories, from Napoleon and Josephine to Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson. And then there are those somewhat more unseemly courtships. The ones that began in the shadows as steamy affairs or adulterous liaisons, the consummation of which has produced some of the great love children of literary, political, film and music history. Here are some of history’s most consequential trysts:


1. Mary Godwin & Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Sordid Details:

One of the great unions of literary history began in 1814, when the 16-year-old Mary Godwin and the dreamy, but very married, 21-year-old romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met in secret at the grave of Mary’s famous suffragette mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. There, as Mary later recounted, the two touched each other with the “full ardour of love,” an ardor that would eventually leave the aspiring writer pregnant and Shelley estranged from his wife.


The Fallout:

The lovers were married a few years later after Shelley’s pregnant wife drowned herself in Hyde Park, but their tumultuous partnership ended when the poet drowned a few years later. Still, it would produce some literary masterpieces, including Mary’s classic Frankenstein, which she conceived while on holiday in Switzerland with Shelley and Lord Byron in 1816.


2. Catherine the Great & Grigory Potemkin

The Sordid Details:

Every great empress needs a counselor, military strategist, soul mate and boy toy, or, in the case of Grigory Potemkin, one man capable of wearing all of those hats. Catherine the Great first encountered the dashing Potemkin when the young commander (10 years her junior) helped the 33-year-old overthrow her disappointing (in more ways than one) husband, Czar Peter III, in 1762. Their steamy though unadulterous affair, thanks to Peter’s untimely end, was likely consummated in the basement sauna of the Winter Palace.

The Fallout:

The coupling produced a powerful political alliance for decades. Yet even as Potemkin’s role at court expanded, he grew more marginalized in Catherine’s bedroom, increasingly relegated to the third wheel of a ménage à trois or consigned to the role of pimp, acquiring younger male specimens for one of the most powerful women in history.


3. Charles Dickens & Nelly Ternan

The Sordid Details:

Even literary giants are not immune to the midlife crisis. By 1857, the 45-year-old Victorian novelist was at the height of his powers, a literary superstar — who was also married with nine children and living, by all appearances, a virtuous family life. Then he began an adulterous affair with Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, a gifted young actress in his employ who was just a year older than his 17-year-old daughter.

The Fallout:

The affair proved the best and worst of times for the writer. Dickens’s marriage fell apart, but his 13-year relationship with Nelly continued until his death, though his tireless (and successful) efforts to keep his double life a secret may have hastened his demise. Nelly is believed to have inspired the dark secrets characteristic of his later novels and several of their characters, including Estella in Great Expectations.

4. Henry VIII & Anne Boleyn

The Sordid Details:

This historic pairing, portrayed in countless films, books and television shows, has long captured the public imagination, though the precise details of the courtship remain fuzzy. It seems likely that despite years of chaste courtship, Anne and Henry’s sexual relationship had indeed begun before they were wed and the king’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been annulled.

The Fallout:

Henry’s attempt to legitimize his marriage to Anne would famously lead to England’s break from the Roman Catholic Church, while Anne’s brief stint as Henry’s second queen would lead to the birth of the future Elizabeth I and Anne’s ultimate beheading.


5. Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

The Sordid Details:

It seems fitting that the famous Hollywood duo met while playing another famously doomed couple in Cleopatra (1963). Both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married to others at the time but the attraction was epic (Burton once said Taylor’s breasts were “apocalyptic, they would topple empires”) and a ferocious affair ensued.

The Fallout:

The couple’s 10-year “marriage of the century” became the closest thing to reality television in the 1960s, a constant magnet for gossip and hordes of paparazzi. They would divorce in 1974, remarry the following year and divorce again shortly after that.


The list goes on. John Lennon’s peaceful affair with the Japanese artist Yoko Ono not only helped break up the Beatles but his marriage to wife Cynthia as well. Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson’s six-year fling with the married Lady Emma Hamilton, a great beauty with a voluptuous body and shady past, was the scandal of its age. Johnny Cash and June Carter walked the line of their marriages to others until they finally wed each other. Then there’s Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet, or Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow, or perhaps Brangelina …

Update:

This wife's Narcissistic, abusive husband got my phone number and started seeking counsel from me. However, all the things he said to me were fault-finding harsh words against his wife. In between, I kept reminding him that we could not keep focusing on another person like his wife. We don't have the power to change or control someone else's behavior. We can only give correction or suggestion and better yet, set a good example. (But his wife has already greatly improved.) So I suggested to him that perhaps it is either he agrees to get a divorce or be willing to forgive and move on from there. But he still went on and on with his toxic, verbal attacks against her. After being patient with him for a long period, I straightforwardly told him that he cannot continue with his authoritarian, master-slave style with his wife. And that I have to stop our conversation since he is not willing to look at himself inwardly and take his responsibility. He got so mad and threatened his wife all the more. He asked her to totally avoid me. He is checking on her every minute now. He is so immature. He's been treating his wife like a robot or slave. Too bad.


Please to all the wives out there, reading this. You are not less than your husband or any person in the world. Even if you made a mistake, it does not give your husband or partner the right to abuse you in any form. Do not stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship where you don't have peace or a voice. Love yourself enough to protect yourself to leave. You are too precious to stay with a toxic person or in an environment like that.


For those here whose childhood or past have been unpleasant...Know that I had suffered from abuses too when I was a minor. But see now I have been using my "scars" to help many people wherever I go. There is purpose for our sufferings. It is in our power to use them for our good and help others. We can do it.

I am so proud of this woman's significant progress. She is truly keeping distance from her abusive husband...Yes, she made the rightest and best decision of separating from her toxic husband. Now, she is stronger, wiser, and better.

Have faith. what is the name of that book?

thank you

Boundaries -- "Ones that keep us safe but let good people in"

I LOVE that description of boundaries. Thank you...

HaveFaith