Yeah what Mike said :what: dealing with same problem here,
hard to sit here and read stuff like this,[/QUOTE]
Not an easy thing to explain. But if you look back at TINTIN's post, he says "it was like I was hypnotized." I understand what he means. There is probably a psychological treatise about it somewhere, but I will call it "reality transference." By this I mean that when your body is transferred to a greatly different environment, a place unlike that from whence you came, different sounds, sights, smells, different people and different rules and attitudes towards life, then your sense of reality is transferred along with your body. Your new environment becomes a new reality, and the old reality of the life you came from seems like the unreal world. It is new reality versus old reality, and the new reality dominates the mind because it is there, 24/7, imposing upon your mind its own agenda. You react to the things that are happening around you and the people around you as if there is no other reality.
At the end of my 2nd tour, when I walked down Rat-U-Thit(Main St.), I felt like it was my hometown, the sights, sounds, shops, everything seemed so familiar, so normal, yet so exciting and wonderful. The tears welled up in my eyes as I thought about it. It was hard for me to comprehend that the next day it would all be gone. My sense of reality was fully transferred to that world. The people I had befriended were all Thais on that trip, and they seemed like the people closest to me, who understood me the most, in spite of the fact that they barely spoke English, and I spoke almost no Thai. The transition back to life in America after 2 months there was gruelling. If it had been entirely up to me, I would not have returned to US. Upon arriving back in America, it was America that seemed strange and foreign to me.
Some people are more susceptible to this phenomenon than others. To some, they never lose the sense that this is just a holiday, and they stay firmly rooted in the reality from which they came, looking at everything as curious, foreign, exotic, and not of their world. When they return home, it is with the feeling of "Home Sweet Home," nice vacation, but so good to be back home. But to those who are susceptible, they quickly become absorbed in, and see themselves as part of the world in which they find themselves in LOS. Look for a thread from a month or two ago that MikeGB started called "Life-changing experiences." He and some others explain how their lives were completely changed and have never been the same after a trip to LOS.
To those of us who have experienced what I am talking about, the transition back to Western society is very difficult. The longer the time spent there and the more trips, the harder it is to fully transition back to our homelands. The regular BMs who come here everyday, come here largely because it is a refuge from our daily lives. We feel fullly alive when in LOS. In Falangland, we go to work, do our jobs, blend in, and seem like normal guys who enjoy their vacations. But we are really misfits, because we've never been 100% successful in re-entering our own society. We think a lot about LOS, but can't talk to our friends and familly about it, because they think we are really weird and obssessed if we do, so we learn not to.
This forum is like a therapy group for those of us who suffer the Post-LOS Blues, which we recover from to the extent that we can function well, but in our hearts, it is the knowledge that we will go back to LOS that keeps us going.
Your husband is probably one of those who is very susceptible to the phenomenon of "reality transference," which I described. That explains how he could fall in love with someone else. Because at the time it happened, his reality was the world in which he found himself. She was part of the present "real world." You were part of some other, distant, seemingly unreal, past world. It is your task to make sure what has happened to us doesn't happen to your husband.
mg: Good luck!! :thumbsup: